It will take me a couple of days because I'm compiling data. So far, it justifies my hunch.
Here's what I'm NOT saying: Texas equals Ole Miss. No, it's not THAT close. However - despite some really big mouths and some really deep pockets, Texas isn't in the Alabama grouping of teams (and that's even if you subtract the recent dynasty years). They're above Ole Miss, yes.
But they ain't nowhere near as far above Ole Miss as pundits, fans, analysts, or especially Longhorn fans WANT TO BELIEVE they are.
Both schools had their best days in all-white football in the 1960s.
Both schools have had problems with perception regarding some symbols (for lack of a better word).
I'm only considering the time frame of 1990-2020. Everyone with a brain will admit Texas was substantially superior to Ole Miss in every way between 1963 and 1989. The problem with both schools is they THINK the calendar never changed or their perception among other fans ever changed, and god help us when we're told who gets the job at Texas and what he can do.
But why don't any of them ever do it?
Seriously - take away the 2005-2007 time frame when Texas had Vince Young/Early Colt while Ole Miss had Ed Orgeron, and the distance is substantially narrower. (Remember - in 2008, Ole Miss beat the national champions AND manhandled with relative ease the same team that beat Texas and cost them a title shot with Florida where they would probably have fared even worse than Oklahoma did).
Johnny Vaught left Ole Miss for the final time at the end of the 1973 season, and Darrell Royal left Texas after the 1976 season. Ole Miss - excluding Joe Lee Dunn, who was an interim for the 1994 season when Billy Brewer got canned in the mid-summer, too late to grab anyone but an assistant - has had 10 head coaches since then and has a reputation as a team that used to be good.
But Texas is on their seventh in 3 fewer years. Extrapolate for the average time between the additional 3 years and they'd be close to 8. Eight coaches versus ten.....one being a supposed power, the other being a perennial doormat.
then bear in mind some other points:
1) Ole Miss has played in a substantially tougher conference than Texas has almost every single year the last three decades
2) there were more people (over 3 million) in the DFW metroplex in 1990 than in the entire state of Mississippi (2.55 million)
3) Ole Miss has to share that small area with the surrounding states (AL, TN, AR, LA) and two other programs. Yeah, Texas has to share theirs with maybe 7-8 other big schools......but the STATE of Texas has grown from 17 to 29.5 million, while the state of MS still has yet to top 3 million. Texas in terms of people is almost TEN TIMES the size of Mississippi, just as it was about 8 times that size in 1990.
I don't think it's reasonable to demand Texas be TEN TIMES as good as Ole Miss based on this.....but shouldn't I be able to expect the Horns would be probably at least TWICE AS GOOD as the Black Bear/Land Shark/Rebs? They have better equipment, more money for everything (and by gawd they will TELL ya), play in an easier conference (that they've made easier by getting Nebraska and Colorado to move out), and they've had a bunch of Heisman finalists as the best player in the country. And yet they're STILL closer to Ole Miss than they are to Oklahoma when it comes down to reality.
I'm not even going just yet. But let me put it this way: there's every reason to believe that if you took the Ole Miss culture and gave them the Texas advantages, they'd at least be more along the lines of, say, LSU. (Amazing how many people forget that in the last 50 years, Texas has ONE.....ONE.....national championship. LSU, with nowhere near those advantages not only has three - they won them with THREE different coaches and made the finals another time).
There is zero doubt that in the last 20 years, LSU is a better overall program than Texas in every single way imaginable. Add another ten, it gets closer because LSU was mostly awful in the 90s.
Texas has all this money and yet they have the same number of titles as:
BYU
Colorado
Georgia Tech
Pitt
Georgia
Washington
....in that same time frame. And it's not like they've put a bunch of teams on the field that came "oh so close" by losing the title game. Anybody know how many times besides 2005 that Texas even had a legitimate shot at the national title since 1971? Four times maybe - 1977, 1983, 2001 maybe, and 2009. FOUR CONTENDERS in 50 years.
That's more than Ole Miss, yeah. But it's not THAT MUCH MORE than Ole Miss, certainly not enough given the advantages to say they're a bunch better.
I'm tired from work, and my son is auditioning (again!) for an appearance on "The Voice" tomorrow.
More in a day or so.