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Charlie Strong Says He’s Not Fazed By Red McCombs’ Disapproval of His Hiring

Photo by home.cableone.net.

Photo by home.cableone.net.

Charlie Strong, newly minted coach at Texas, has a word or two for billionaire and former pro sports franchise owner Red McCombs, who called hiring the school’s first Black head coach a “kick in the teeth.” And that word, essentially, is “Whatever.”

Strong takes over one of the most prominent programs in the country and has work to do, not worry about McCombs and others’ disenchantment with his hiring.

“There are going to be statements made,” Strong said on the Dan Patrick Show.   “You can’t worry about that. You just move on. You have a job to do. You can’t worry about what people say or think. I’m going to get judged by my work here.”

McCombs had said that the hiring process of Strong was “a bit sideways.” And all this on a San Antonio radio station: “So I don’t know what the big rush was. I was kind of pleased that [Texas athletic director Steve] Patterson already said that he’d like to get it done in the middle of January. That seemed logical to me. I’m a team player, but I think they went about it wrong and made the selection wrong.

“Once you win some football games, you’re going to change a lot of people’s attitudes. You have to win. Everybody wants to win nowadays. There are those expectations anywhere you go. . .  I don’t have any doubt that Charlie is a fine coach. I think he would make a great position coach, maybe a coordinator.

“But I don’t believe [he belongs at] what should be one of the three most powerful university programs in the world right now at UT-Austin. I don’t think it adds up. . . Beyond the fact of what actually happened. We have boosters that have a lot of knowledge about the game. When we decided to go get Mack — from the time we decided to go get Mack to about 30 hours later to have a press conference here and it was done –we had a lot of input before we went after him.”

Strong was asked about McCombs in several appearances Wednesday, and took the politically correct approach.

“I’ll tell you this right now,” Strong said on the Jim Rome Show.  “I’ve been a part of two national championships. I’ve been a part of a lot of conference titles and turned the program around there at Louisville, so one thing I do know, I can coach.”

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