Steve Sarkisian vs. Rodney Terry on How to Handle Texas Hate
It appears that Chris Del Conte needs to have a sit-down meeting of the minds with his two highest-profile coaches and get some things ironed out because their approach to handling the “Horns Down” gestures couldn’t differ more if they tried.
On Wednesday night, UCF went into Austin and overcame a 15-point deficit to take down Rodney Terry and the Texas Longhorns, 77-71. The loss drops Texas to 1-3 in Big 12 play and has the Longhorns on the verge of a meltdown with six straight games against ranked opponents coming up.
Meanwhile, the Knights couldn’t have been more elated after improving to 2-2 in conference play, with wins over Kansas and Texas to this point.
During their celebration on the court, several UCF players threw the “Horns Down” gesture, and rightly so. They’d just beaten the Longhorns on their own court and earned the right to celebrate the win. Coach Terry wasn’t having it though. He not only told UCF players, “Don’t do that sh*t,” but he also went on a tirade about it in the postgame press conference.
“I’m a big believer in you win the right way, you lose the right way…. You carry yourself the right way,” Terry said. “You don’t go through the handshake line, or prior to getting to the handshake line, and have about six or seven guys putting the horns down. We don’t do that.”
“When you do those kinds of things it looks very classless and it also looks like you were just hoping to win,” Terry continued. “We never go into games trying to hope to win. We go into games expecting to win, so we don’t act like that. We expect to win. We don’t jump up and down, act like we won a national championship. We sure don’t step on anyone’s home court deal and act crazy and try to show them up in any way. We don’t do that.”
It’s an incredibly soft look from the head coach, and will only serve to make things worse against opposing fan bases and teams.
Meanwhile, Texas head football coach Steve Sarkisian is taking a much different approach to how it should be handled. Instead of becoming a major headline for trying to coach another team’s players, Sarkisian just says that he and his team “embrace the hate.”
“There’s a lot of places that you go and opposing fans aren’t happy that we show up,” Sarkisian said in 2022. “It is what it is. We’re the University of Texas. Nobody likes us. That’s okay. We embrace the hate. We’ll be ready to rock and roll Saturday at 2:30.”
Perhaps he should take a page from Sarkisian’s book and just embrace the hate. After all, you are Texas, right?
Texas will host No. 9 Baylor on Saturday before heading to Norman to take on No. 15 Oklahoma on Tuessday.
