Matthew McConaughey visited the UT-Austin practice field last week to give the Longhorns a pep talk after their loss to UCLA in Dallas and ahead of their game against the Kansas Jayhawks. The talk went well: The Longhorns shutout the Jayhawks 23-0, which prompted the firing of that team's head coach.
In the Longhorn Network video of the speech, which surfaced online this week, McConaughey tells players that they haven't yet done their best work for the Longhorns, encouraged the players to "ask [themselves] why they're playing the game" and shared a chest-thump session with the team à la "Wolf of Wall Street."
McConaughey complimented the team on their pluck, despite the UCLA loss.
"This team, there weren’t any heads hanging down, which I thought there might have been after last week,” McConaughey says in reference to the UCLA loss. “How does a team bounce back from that is real interesting, but there weren’t any heads hanging down that's for sure.
McConaughey also dropped some trivia on Coach Charlie Strong and the Horns, saying that the now-famous chest-thumping from the Martin Scorsese film is a warm-up exercise to get himself "on [his] own island" and combat his pre-performance jitters. Co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, McConaughey says, asked him to do the ritualistic exercise and it ended up in the movie.
Hopefully, for Longhorn fans, the Oscar-winning Texas Ex's mojo carries into this week, as the Horns will need all the help they can get against seventh-ranked Baylor.
