The thought may have taken a differing amount of time to travel through our minds, but it arrived there quickly: With Steve Patterson out as Texas's athletics director, what does this mean for Charlie Strong?
This tweet from the Austin American-Statesman's Kirk Bohls feels relevant:
Strong is still ankle deep in a major retrenching of Texas football. The burnt orange faithful knows this. His new athletics director, whomever that may be, will as well.
Strong has the support of UT's administration and the fan base That said, he has to reward that faith with victories on the field.
The Longhorns sit at 1-1 and will be touchdown underdogs when California visits on Saturday. Oklahoma State, a road trip to TCU and a date with Oklahoma in Dallas follow after that. A 2-4 mark at the season's midpoint entirely possible, and a 1-5 mark isn't out of the question, either.
The schedule lightens from there - a home date against a similarly rebuilding Kansas State team, back-to-back dates with Iowa State and Kansas - before closing with road trips to West Virginia and Baylor sandwiched around a Thanksgiving night game with Texas Tech.
He needs a third year. The fan base and administration wants to give him a third year. And his new AD isn't likely to want to parachute straight into a complicated coaching search.
Unless the situation on the field is so bad, so obvious, that he doesn't have any other choice.
The most likely scenario will see Strong's new boss take a wait-and-see approach through the 2015 season - if, indeed, he's even hired by that point - and then use the 2016 season as his ultimate measuring stick. And the landscape of Strong's tenure at Texas, muddy as it is right now, should by crystal clear by that point anyway.