Great programs on hard times.

If Thursday's eleventh hour contract resolution between Mike Leach and Texas Tech is bad news for anyone, it's Texas A&M: The Aggies are 1-7 against the Cap'n since 2001, with four of the last five losses coming by at least three scores despite A&M's consistent recruiting advantage. In fact, though, as I pointed out last summer at my old digs, Tech's emergence under Leach -- and now Oklahoma State's under Les Miles and Mike Gundy -- is only one of the big shifts undermining the Aggies since the old Southwest Conference folded in 1995. The real burden is sharing a division (not to mention recruiting grounds) with Texas and Oklahoma with those programs humming at or near their historic peaks this decade. To the extent that A&M has been a "great" program at all, it was only when their historical overlords were both enduring relative dark ages -- the Aggies owned the nineties with four straight SWC titles from 1991-94 and a Big 12 championship in 1998.

That was Mack Brown's first year at Texas; Bob Stoops took over at Oklahoma the next year and Leach at Tech the year after that, and A&M's fate in the new alignment was all but sealed:

The troubling part for the Aggies is that this isn't that unusual, historically: Between 1945 and 1985, the Longhorns and Sooners, playing in different conferences, were two of the four winningest teams in the country; A&M ranked 86th over that span, a couple dozen games below .500. The desert the Aggies have been struggling through for the last decade? Over the long term, that's normal.

It's still much harder to say that it's acceptable, but fin retrospect, the 4-8 swoon in Mike Sherman's debut isn't that surprising: Rivals ranled Dennis Franchione's last two recruiting classes sixth and eighth in the conference, respectively, behind Texas Tech in the first case (hello, Michael Crabtree) and behind Oklahoma State on both counts. Fran's best signees haven't panned out, either, especially on defense: Of the relatively few four-star defenders Franchione brought to College Station between 2005 and 2007, only linebacker Von Miller and DB Jordan Pugh have really played, and not with much distinction. Marquis Carpenter, Paul Freeney, Jodie Richardson, Vincent Williams, Anthony Lewis, Jarius Neal and Derrick Stephens should have been the heart of this fall's roster; instead they've been almost completely MIA, and half of them are off the team. No wonder the defense finished last or next to last in every major category in the conference last year (in the Big 12, that's saying something): The veteran talent was out to lunch.

There's no flipside here: The offense lost its only playmaker, Mike Goodson, whose touches and productivity kept decreasing until he finally left the team in December, leaving the sum of short-term hopes in the hands of yesterday's next big thing, erratic-but-growing quarterback Jerrod Johnson, and today's next big thing, the unfortunately named Christine Michael, universally rated as one of the top four or five incoming running backs in the country. One of them needs to become a star who can inject the Sherman with some sense of momentum. Otherwise, this is just a team hoping not to get waxed by Baylor again.