2013 Texas Basketball Season Testing Longhorn Fans’ General Apathy

Austin –The Texas Longhorn basketball program has had a difficult season to date. Although the young team boasts substantial potential, Rick Barnes’ squad has struggled through considerable growing pains, with a narrow 60-58 loss to West Virginia and a 72-58 pistol whipping by the Pokes being the most recent results. The team is now 10-13 overall and 2-8 in Big 12 play. We hope you enjoyed the visit to Austin to check out UT, Mr. Randle.

It appears that the difficult season has also been hard on fans. "Basketball season? I know. I was like clinging to the Super Bowl because after that, SportsCenter suuuucks until Spring Training. Hang on, I’m getting a text," commented Steven Miller, a marketing major at UT.

Miller’s apparent ignorance that the Texas Longhorns even play basketball is a familiar phenomenon to UT fans. In fact, for years now, Texas fans have been able to assume they would get respectable results from the team, without having to actually watch any of it. But as the losses have piled up this season, fans are finding it difficult to maintain their indifference.

"Yeah, I’m not really sure what the problem is. Free throws? That’s the thing Barnes doesn’t coach, right? Why am I the one having to try to fix this?" asked senior Robert Wilson. I check twitter for updates from the 2014 football recruits, but this bad news about basketball keeps popping up. Should we offer tons of money to get that coach from Duke? Has anyone tried that? Look, I don’t know what we should do, but I want to go back to being good enough to be forgettable."

It seems high expectations for success paired with total detachment from actually watching games are not just confined to the student body. Texas fans throughout Austin are struggling to remain loftily indifferent this season "I’ve been a basketball season ticket holder for years," stated local business owner, Jeff Thompson, whose seats are near courtside. "My clients usually really like when I give them tickets. Easy way to hold on to accounts and… hey, can we sit down? I just want to sit and talk. Standing for too long just feels barbaric to me. Anyway, I can’t even give the tickets away this season. What good are they now?"

With eight games left on the conference schedule, Myck Kabongo slated to return on February 13 against Iowa State, and the conference tournament looming in March, there are still opportunities for the Longhorns to redeem their season. Still, the team’s poor results to this point have left some fans wondering if they should have been less apathetic in the past. "You know, I feel like I probably should have followed the good teams we’ve had a bit more. We had some really great players come through here, and I was probably too unaware. Turns out that Kevin Durant kid was good, right?! Ha. Yeah if I had really appreciated that, I think I could have given my seats away to land some even bigger clients. I missed an opportunity there, and I don’t know when I’ll get that chance again" noted Thompson.

For other Longhorn fans, those still committed to feeling superior in all sports while ignoring all but one, this basketball season has been trying. However, if any fans are interested in rekindling the ambivalence of prior seasons, this writer is told a large number of fans will gather at the Erwin Center (that place where they’re going to build the new medical school) on February 13^th, at 7:00 pm and will remain quietly indifferent for at least two hours, except the part where future second round pick Myck Kabongo takes the court for the first time this season, just in time to not have any real affect on our team before going pro.

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