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Are you a Texas optimist, pessimist, or realist?

Eric Nahlinby:Eric Nahlin•11/17/22
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Kelvin Banks (Will Gallagher/Inside Texas)

Within this thriving community there are three distinct personalities: optimists, pessimists, and realists. The O’s and P’s usually spend their time talking past each other, leaving the R’s stranded in the middle like a child of divorcing parents.

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Both O’s and P’s will tell you they’re R’s, but more often than not that’s not the case. We know this because of how consistent they are in their commentary. The same people are the same way day in and day out and it’s just not realistic that things are always good or always bad.

The standard O loves the appeal to authority — do you know more than Mack Charlie Tom Sark? Despite all his years of Texas fandom he never quite connects the dots to understand coaches are fallible, so much so they’re frequently fired. But still, it’s not okay to question the coaches.

Of course the good side of the standard O is they understand running a program is a process that requires patience. They’re typically more understanding of bumps in the road.

With their head sometimes buried in the sand they can be annoying, but they’re not nearly as miserable as the standard P so often is.

When they’re at their worst, the P could stand for something else. Texas is never going to win again, everything is terrible, why can’t we have nice things, did you see what Coach X is doing at Team Y, etc. They’re every bit the broken record the O’s are, they just play a more melancholy tune. Imagine if Johnny Cash ever covered a Nine Inch Nails song. That would Hurt.

But at their best they catch on to poor staff hires, negative trends, or repeated subpar coaching decisions early in a tenure. The P’s did learn from the failures of coaches past and unfortunately they’re on a bit of a “winning streak” when it comes to being right.

There is something to collective wisdom being more accurate than a small consensus of experts (especially if those experts are biased in any way). We’ve seen this play out multiple times, often with coordinator hires. Perhaps that’s why the P’s were so sure Pete Kwiatkowski needed to be fired after last year. Hopefully PK is the start of their “losing streak.”

A driving problem behind the adversarial communication between the two factions is the O’s are looking at the macro while the P’s are engulfed by the micro. The O’s see player development, the P’s see individual player errors. The O’s see an improving team, the P’s aren’t seeing it fast enough. The O’s see the quality in numbers of recruits being put in place, the P’s often have immediate expectations. The O’s see Sark put 31 points on the board in the first half, the P’s remember the 3 point second half.

It’s all understandable. If you look solely at this season you’ll find both sides are often correct given what they focus on, but it would do both some good to also look at the flip side.

The forgotten R’s tend to process as much information as they can — both the good and bad of the micro and macro outlooks — and average it all together. Of course the R’s are often slow to acknowledge the O’s or P’s might be right, but at least when you have their outlook you can have some disappointment regarding the present but also excitement over the future.

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