Mack Brown suffers another lopsided loss to Oklahoma

It can be said that before winning conference championships, notching double-digit wins and competing for national championships, the first task of Texas' head coach is to beat Oklahoma.

To beat the Sooners. To own the Cotton Bowl. To assert the Longhorns' dominance in one of the great rivalries in college football.

Mack Brown has one national championship, thanks in large part to the arm and legs of the sublime Vince Young. He's won a pair of Big 12 titles, once with Young in 2005 and again behind Colt McCoy in 2009.

He won at least 10 games in every season from 2001 to 2009 and at least nine games in every season from 1998, his first with the program, through 2009.

Yet for all of his accomplishments – returning Texas to the elite slice of college football, most of all – Brown's chief failure has been his inability to beat Oklahoma with consistency.

It's worse than that: Brown's teams in Austin have been trounced by Bob Stoops' Sooners, suffering dreadful loss after one-sided loss, with Saturday's 63-21 defeat just the program's latest Red River embarrassment.

Since 1998, the Longhorns have lost to OU by scores of 63-14 (2000), 65-13 (2003) and 55-17 (2011). Including Saturday's result, Brown has suffered four losses in this series by at least 38 points. The 52-point loss in 2003 remains the Longhorns' low-water mark in the rivalry's history.

Overall, Brown is 6-9 in the Red River Rivalry. He holds a 5-9 mark against Stoops, who took over in Norman in 1999. Since 2000, UT is 4-9 against Stoops and the Sooners.

And the program's last two losses to the Sooners, coming by a combined 80 points, only highlight Texas' recent struggles. UT is now 17-14 since the start of the 2010 season, the program's worst stretch since 1996-97, when it was coached by John Mackovic.

UT's 5-7 finish in 2010 led Brown to completely retool his coaching staff, bringing Manny Diaz over from Mississippi State to run his defense and Bryan Harsin from Boise State to do the same with his offense.

New staff, new schemes, new philosophies, similar results. What's distressing to the Texas fan base is that despite the changes, the Longhorns remain far removed from competing for the Big 12 title, let alone a national title. This is never more evident than when the Longhorns meet the Sooners.

When Brown lost five in a row and six of eight to OU from 2000 to 2008, he, and his supporters could always point to the fact that this was his only flaw: Brown still won 10 or more games, still won conference championships and, most of all, won that national championship.

But with his continued failures against OU exacerbated by his team's up-and-down ride since the start of the 2010 season, Brown has never faced a more serious challenge to his standing as Texas' head coach.

He can't beat Oklahoma – over the last two seasons, Brown's teams haven't sniffed Oklahoma. Brown can't win the Big 12. (His team, now 1-2 in league play, has no shot in 2012.) Brown's Longhorns have improved since 2010, but a tremendous amount of work remains to be done before UT can be considered a national championship contender.

So… if you can't beat Oklahoma, can't win the Big 12 and can't compete for national titles, should you be the head coach at Texas?