If Mack Brown loses to Oklahoma…so…fucking…what. Every year Oklahoma beats them in a new and painful way. 2000 and 2003: agonizing shotgun executions. 2002: a standard woulda-coulda-shoulda game. 2004 and 2001: defensive humiliations, including the infamous Jackie Chan safety blitz by Roy Williams on Chris Simms that may have ruined Simms as a player forever.

(We mean it–we think that single play broke him. We’ll say that at the risk of his daddy calling us out on national television to defend him, which seems to happen more often than dignity would allow. Chris Simms will forever be stuck in the moment where Williams swipes his arm and sends him crashing to the turf of his own endzone in humiliation. The only way Simms can ever redeem himself is a.) Get sent to prison, b.) Get Roy Williams out of the league and into a corrections department gig, and c.) Burn Williams for a game winning TD pass in the last seconds of a guards/inmates game orchestrated by a sadistic prison warden. Until then he’s as good as pencil shavings to any team or coach.)

Reduced a man to pencil shavings in one play.

Yet Texas gets everything it wants from Mack Brown, save a victory over a rival program that’s been as good as any over the past five years. Texas since 2001 under Mack Brown? Boggle the eyes:

2001: 11-2
2002: 11-2
2003: 10-3
2004: 11-1

Most fans would sell their grandmother’s dentures for records like that. Is that the mark of a mediocre coach? Their facilities are palatial. They recruit like madmen. They routinely beat everyone else in conference and win their bowls and out-of-conference games, making a particularly prominent punching bag out of the Big Ten lately with the shootout win over Michigan last year and following it up by edging out the Evil Sweatervest at home this year.

They’ve established poll buoyancy–a loss never seems to drop them too far away from the top ten, and they bob to the top of every preseason poll–and their recruits routinely morph into highly touted NFL draft picks. Oh, and Mack Brown has made every major Texas high school coach think he’s their boyfriend by bringing them flowers and making goo-goo eyes at them while his coaches plunder the powerhouses for prime recruits.

Mack: persuasive and charming in ways we can’t possibly understand.

Tom Osborne lost five in a row to Oklahoma at one point. Spurrier’s record against Bowden was dismal–he never even won a game in Tallahassee. He did tie one, though, which was somehow so much worse than simply losing. (Feel the flames of rage lick your eyeballs, Stranko, as you recall every agonizing instant of the ‘94 Choke at Doak. We remember it all, too, since we were the ones laughing as you goaded to the FSU fans by doing the chop with your band shoe in hand, cleverly referencing the “Free Shoes University” incident. Got the whole Gator band doing it, too, if we recall correctly.) No one suggested these two step down because of the long single-opponent losing streaks, just as no one suggests that Zook should have stayed because “well, he was 2-1 against Georgia.”

It’s a hack trick to suggest he resign for not beating Bob Stoops. Normally, we’re all in favor of this kind of hackery–hell, we love Stewart Mandel, and there’s not a cheap shot he won’t usually take. But Texas being good is good for college football, if only because it keeps Bevo on the field and off the slaughterhouse floor. The coach responsible for their success is Grandma Brown. It would be engaging in Jim Romery to suggest he resign, and that internet job is already taken.