AUSTIN - Nero supposedly fiddled. Napoleon headed for an island, and Phil Jackson probably found a beach, too.
But even as his empire showed scary signs of crumbling over the past year or so, Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds kept showing up for work.
After all, someone had to be there to cash the checks.
But aside from the money that keeps gushing like obscenities in an Augie Garrido motivational speech, there's been little for the Longhorns to celebrate. For the first time since 1997-98 - the department-wide bottoming-out that marked the arrival of Mack Brown, Rick Barnes and Garrido - UT did not seriously contend for Big 12 championships in football, men's basketball or baseball this season.
And after each of those programs spent a significant chunk of the last decade as an unquestioned member of the national elite, each faces serious questions about how soon it can return to prominence.
"This has not been a good year for us, competitively," Dodds said. "But that's going to change."
Easy to notice the falls
Recently, though, all the change has been decidedly for the worse.
From 1998-2009, Brown's teams won 128 games, the most in college football. Over the past two years, the Longhorns are 13-12.
From 2002-08, Barnes' teams made the Sweet 16 five times, tied for the most in college basketball. The Longhorns haven't been back in the four years since.
From 2000-11, Garrido's teams made the College World Series seven times, the most in college baseball. This year, the Longhorns missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in 14 years.
Complacency was the overarching theme of all three downfalls, but there were plenty of details to each slide.
Football was plagued by what Brown categorized "a sense of entitlement" from his players, and by a coaching staff that became stagnant and started missing out on top recruits. That led to a massive overhaul after a 5-7 season in 2010, and even though progress was made last year, the recovery isn't complete.
In basketball, Barnes - although known as a top recruiter - has been hindered by several poorly conceived rosters in a row, and also by an inability to get more out of NBA draft early entrants before they turn pro. Kevin Durant, Avery Bradley, Jordan Hamilton and Cory Joseph are on NBA playoff teams, but none played in a Sweet 16 game at UT.
The baseball issues were more circumstantial. A few key signees never made it to campus because they chose to sign pro contracts, and injuries wrecked the pitching staff.
Still, those are problems many programs face, and in the past UT has been strong enough to withstand them. Not anymore.
Trying to copy Baylor?
Dodds, though, insists he has not lost faith in his coaches. He said all three programs have given him reason to believe they're on the right path and believes results can change in a hurry. He pointed to Baylor and its self-pronounced "Year of the Bear" as an example of how winning can catch on throughout a campus, much as he saw it happen in the middle of the past decade.
After the baseball team won a national championship in 2005, Dodds said, the football players fed off that energy to win their title, and then the basketball team made a strong bid to do the same before being stopped one game short of the Final Four.
"That's a cyclical thing," Dodds said. "I feel good about the chances of it happening again."
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