re: Aggies, are you guys concerned at all about Strong at UT?

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That logic is just asinine.

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No it has some merit.

Part of Mack Brown's "control the message" game is that he had high school coaches in the state so under his grip that they all feared if they pissed off Brown then Mack would use his political influence to get them fired. So coaches would push players to Texas to avoid any sort of retaliation. Strong doesn't have that same advantage. Even if he had the ability to build the same political capital, and he doesn't, he now has to contend with coaches like Sumlin and Briles that refuse to be pushed out of the process.

Another place the politics matters is perception. If Strong can't placate the Austin media and boosters, they will be out to find and create PR problems for Texas. Look at the Red McCombs comments or that racist T-Shirt for examples.

In Brown's day, Red would have never been that pissed (he would have placated him on the first phone call) and there would have been a PR event around that T-Shirt where Brown would have controlled the message ("no real Texas fans believe that" or some such BS). Instead we get silence out of Austin which does nothing to contain the story.

Brown changed the Texas job. Unless Strong just kills it out of the gate and wins the Big 12 year one, he will always have to deal with a faction of fans, media people, and boosters who expect him to be the major of Austin. As long as he does a poor job with the politics part of the role, it will keep a bad connotation floating over his time in Austin, which can effect recruit decisions.

It is not all one thing or another, and Strong is a good coach. He could kill it early on and none of this matters. Where it does matter is if he struggles in the first year or two, because he simply isn't talented enough with politics to get the political capital he needs to have a top 5 recruiting class after two down years.