after 11 hours or so to digest everything after my initial post, I am going to back off almost entirely (not entirely but almost entirely) from my assertion that McCombs is a racist or that his statement(s) had racial motivation. I confess that I completely forgot about the John Lucas and Denny Green hires, because it was so long ago. I do need to acknowledge them though. Perhaps he had a personal and/or professional relationship with both men that helped make his decision to hire them, respectively. I am not sure.
what I do know is that when i read the statements he made and when i heard the actual sound, it sounded very much, in fact exactly like what a "good ole boy" would say and the tone he would say it in. the condescending way in which he spoke about Strong had all the earmarks of what said "good ole boy" would say and how he would sound when saying it.
if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is typically a duck. but, there are obviously exceptions. perhaps Mr. McCombs is one of them, and the hires of two black men to coaching positions while McCombs was owner of San Antonio and the Minnesota Vikings, suggests he is the exception, not the rule.
I will not completely buy it yet, but I will say that I will recant about 75-80% of what I said in my initial post and the reactionary feelings i had when i first came to know of this. just because someone has the proverbial black friend, does not mean he is not a racist. and just because someone has a Yag friend, does not mean he is not homophobic. hopefully you get what i'm saying. perhaps he looked at John Lucas and Denny Green differently because it was up close and as i said maybe he knew them professionally and/or personally, and when he saw Charlie Strong he looked at him from afar and immediately judged him. i don't know. as i also said there have been 4 unpopular hires between the tenures of Darrell Royal and the hiring of Strong, and all 4 men were white and I never read anything negative that McCombs had to say about them. i did not follow CFB when 2 of those hires were made, but when searching online i could not find McCombs comments, if they existed, about those hires.
