He could be a complete moron for all I know. He's a "journalist" afterall. The bar is set quite low.
That said, is the article I linked getting facts wrong? If so, please clarify.
Come on, Huckleberry. You're an intelligent, educated man. Don't pretend you've read something that isn't there. Where in that article does it draw a documented correlation between Texas/Tom Herman and the rule?
It's not journalism. It's an opinion piece that basically opines that if horns down is a penalty, then horns up should be a penalty too.
After whining about how horns up is "disrespectful and hurtful," and "deeply disrespectful" he has the incredible absence of self-awareness to talk about "snowflakes."
Nowhere in that article does Egel explicitly say that the Big 12 imposed the rule because Tom Herman asked Bob Bowlsby to do so.
Nowhere in any of the articles Engle links (one of which was a Burnt Orange Nation article that called penalties for horns down "ridiculous") does it explicitly say that the Big 12 imposed the rule because Tom Herman asked Bob Bowlsby to do so.
Engel does his best to imply it with statements like, "The person in the middle of this crisis? My Tommy Boy."
But he doesn't back it up with any facts. He just talks about Herman taunting the Missouri quarterback, and how Herman is a hypocrite.
If you're writing an article about how Herman is so upset about horns down, don't you think most intelligent writers would maybe add something... like... oh I don't know... a quote by Herman perhaps, complaining about horns down.
Would you like to know what Tom Herman really said about horns down, when somebody actually asked him about it? He said, "we're used to it."
https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-Football-Tom-Herman-weighs-in-on-Oklahoma-Sooners-Lincoln-Riley-Horns-down-controversy-Big-12-championship-125595502/Granted he said a lot of stuff about handling ourselves with class and how people have always disrespected Texas and granted comments like that can be laughed at by detractors. Heck, I even find them ironically amusing and I'm a Texas fan.
But to jump from that to calling him a snowflake and saying with (undocumented) authority that he (as Mac Engel contends or the Texas fan base, like you first asserted, Huckleberry) is the reason the Big 12 calls those penalties is a leap of wishful thinking, unsupported by any evidence.
Especially unsupported by anything in that crap article.