Texas’s awful season has Longhorns fabricating that they can steal A&M’s Schlossnagle

For some reason, Texas fans think they can steal Texas A&M baseball’s coach. They couldn’t be more wrong.

As you likely already know, this year’s Texas A&M baseball team is one of the best in the nation. They have held the #1 ranking—quite deservedly so—for the past few weeks, and seem to only be getting better with each passing game.

Their in-state rivals, the Texas Longhorns, are quite a different story. Despite winning this past weekend’s series against the Oklahoma Sooners, the Longhorns have been in a tailspin for most of the year—one that has had many Texas fans calling for David Pierce’s job.

These calls have come with the usual bluster we expect from those in burnt orange—you know, the kind that they proclaim with a sort of self-satisfied smugness of something that just ever so clearly is, unaware that their suffocatingly obnoxious manner is evoking eye-rolls at a rate that would make their all-time win percentage vs. Rice seem meager. This program expects national championships, we’re staples in Omaha, that kind of thing. Their last title was nearly 20 years ago, by the way.

Said grandstanding aside, the Longhorns, as patient and constant a fanbase as ever, have already begun assembling wishlists to replace their sitting head coach. Chief among the prospects in the book of many Texas fans was current Aggie head coach Jim Schlossnagle.

This seems to be a dream based on two notions. First, Schlossnagle and Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte worked together at TCU. Second, the whiny insistence that Texas should be able to do anything and get anyone by simple virtue of that desire’s existence. This latter factor has never been problematic in the past, of course—certainly not something that promised Nick Saban and delivered Charlie Strong, for example!

I say this with the understanding that it is less likely that Texas fans will listen than they cease bringing up their all-time win percentage (read: a practical impossibility), but that won’t be happening. Why not? Well, for one thing, the Texas A&M baseball job is currently better than the Texas job.

The Aggies commit as many resources to baseball as any school in the country—both institutionally and via NIL. Baseball is second only to football in College Station, which simply isn’t the case at most schools. The Aggies understand the commitment necessary here, while schools like Texas don’t. 

One of the things about working at a place that leans on a winning tradition like a crutch is that you are expected to perform by virtue of the tradition alone—after all, so many others did it, so why can’t you? When things change, then—and we live in an ever-changing landscape of collegiate athletics—and the mantra is “adapt or die,” you find an athletic department intransigently refusing to do the former and inevitably bound for the latter.

There are many reasons that Schloss won’t be leaving College Station; there are even more why he won’t be leaving College Station for Austin, of all places. He’s getting the renovations to Olsen that he wants. He has full support in his pursuit of top transfers and commitment to the program’s excellence in general. If I had to look into my crystal ball, I’d say that he’s in Maroon and White until he retires. Texas will have to look elsewhere to try to keep up with Texas A&M baseball.