Its been the hot thing to do for the past few years. It worked out in LSU's case...

I think the theory is that an out-of-conference loss against a comparably ranked team doesn't really hurt the program that much from a pure calculation perspective.

In the case of Texas, you're right though that Arch looked pretty poor given the hype that surrounds him. Obviously he can bounce back, but it did tarnish him in the press...