I don't know about competing big donors. Tom Hicks and Don Evans were on the board of regents. Hicks was the chairman. They were going to be the most important decision makers regarding that hire. There wasn't any real competition on that front.
Barnett had inside scoop on how dysfunctional the athletic department was in terms of how football was run, so he insisted on a separation of football from a lot of the decision making within the AD for him to take the job. Mack Brown, on the other hand, talked in his interview about what a privilege it would be to be the next head coach at Texas and how excited he would be for the opportunity. I'm boiling down hours long interviews into a short sentence, but that was a big part of the dichotomy of the two.
Brown wasn't exactly the slam dunk we think of him as. After receiving the offer to coach at Texas, he went back to UNC AD Dick Baddour to ask for North Carolina to match UT's offer. Baddour told him he was getting paid as much as he was going to. Sally Brown was earning over $1m per year as a luxury home developer, which she obviously wasn't going to be able to maintain in Austin. UNC was in the midst of finishing a Taj Mahal of football facilities that was going to help transform the program, built on money Mack Brown was instrumental in raising. He'd built a top 5 program after starting with two consecutive 1-10 seasons. If UNC had simply matched UT's offer, he wasn't going anywhere.
I don't know about the Strong hire being organized. Basically the message came down to hire the best African American coach available, and that's what Patterson did. That is not going out and hiring the best available candidate.
The Akers hire was mostly about freezing Darrel Royal out of the football program, never mind that he was still the AD. That hire was orchestrated primarily by Allan Shivers and Lorene Rogers, who wanted to lessen the power and influence they perceived Royal having.
As far as Sarkisian, I'm not exactly shouting out, "Fire him now!" I firmly believe you give a coach 3 to 4 years to do their thing. If it's an unmitigated disaster in year 3, then yeah, he should be gone. But if there are significant signs of progress throughout the program, then that's enough for me, personally. My doubts about Sarkisian lie in the old Darrell Royal line when talking about freshmen ballplayers, "If they're going to bite, they're going to bite as a pup." I'm not seeing the kind of wholesale improvement I think the greatest coaches would already be imparting on the program. And if we're not going to have one of the greatest coaches at Texas, what are we doing? We need another legend as head coach. Not someone who does pretty well. The enemy of great is good, and all that.
I'm seeing signs of a guy who has never won that much in his previous tenures. Who seems like a nice enough guy, but maybe not as much of a hardass as he needs to be, who is a very good playcaller when he has the right pieces, but when he doesn't the offense can look pedestrian, who doesn't have a good feel for what it takes to field a standout defense, and mostly, whose teams don't know how to win. Of all the coaches we've had since David McWilliams, who was always my personal favorite as a person, I like Steve Sarkisian personally the most. I like the way he comes across. He seems like someone I would enjoy having dinner with. But I have never professed to having a need to like the head coach. If they're complete assholes and they win at an extremely high rate, I'm good. If John Mackovic and Tom Herman, both of whom I despised, had won a whole lot more, I would have very easily come to peace with that. I never liked Mack Brown all that much. He drove me a bit crazy. But until he acted like he had figured out college football and quit working on the recruiting trail, I could have lived with his 2000-2009 results for a long time. We all could have.
I'm just not sure I see a guy who gives us regular 10+ win seasons with conference championships and regularly competing for titles when I look at Steve Sarkisian. Hell on earth for me would be settling for a coach who gives us 9 wins every year so that he wins enough not to get fired, with no hope of anything better. This might sound counter intuitive, but I'd honestly prefer a series of coaches who flame out right away so we can go look for the next one.
To me future legendary coaches come in and make a dramatic impact right away, even if it doesn't equal winning at the highest levels. I'm not seeing that in Sarkisian. Are you?