Texas Star Fakes Urinating on Opponent on Live TV, Gets Apology From His Own AD

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2026 — Let’s rewind the tape, because the number-one team in America just turned a blowout win into a national embarrassment in about four seconds flat. On September 27, in front of an ABC audience and a packed house, Texas star EDGE Colin Simmons — one of the most feared pass rushers in college football — beat his man, dropped the Tennessee quarterback, stood over the fallen Volunteer, and then, live on national television, mimed unzipping his fly and urinating on him. The referee, forced to announce this into a hot microphone in front of millions, delivered a sentence that will live forever: “Simulating using the restroom.” The flag was unsportsmanlike conduct. Somewhere in Austin, Texas’s media relations staff felt the floor open up beneath them.

You know a moment is bad when the broadcast booth drops all pretense. Chris Fowler, mid-call, went with “incredibly stupid.” Kirk Herbstreit went further: “vulgar.” These are two of the steadiest, most diplomatic voices in the business — men who have narrated a thousand bad decisions with professional calm — and they couldn’t find a single redeeming thing to say about it. When Herbstreit, a former quarterback who has seen everything this sport has to offer, lands on “vulgar,” the conversation is over. There is no rebuttal. There is no “you had to see the context.” The context was a man pretending to pee on another man while both wore shoulder pads.

The flag wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst of it came two days later, when Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte did the thing no AD ever wants to do: stand in front of the press and apologize for his own players. Del Conte called the celebrations “embarrassing” — for the school. Let that sit for a second. Not a position coach’s wrist-slap, not a fine, not a suspension. The head of the richest athletic department in college sports had to issue a public statement because one of his stars treated a fallen opponent like a restroom. That is not a celebration. That is an incident report.

He never left the game

And here is the part that turns a bad look into a certified Rewind: Simmons was never ejected. He took the flag, absorbed the lecture, and went right back in the game. Meanwhile his teammate Raleek Brown had his own highlight-reel of shame in the same afternoon — a crotch-grab, a hand-sniff, a pretend pass-out — for which he was also flagged, and which he later explained by saying he got it from a TikTok dance. Read that again. A TikTok dance. In one game, the number-one team in the country racked up multiple unsportsmanlike-conduct celebrations and lost zero players to ejection. The message the afternoon sent: the celebration is fine, the embarrassment is optional, and the AD will clean it up on Monday.

Why this one matters

Let’s be clear about who this column punches up at. Colin Simmons is not some anonymous freshman nobody’s heard of. He is the face of the No. 1 program in America, a future NFL first-rounder playing for the richest athletic department on earth, under a spotlight he chose. His own athletic director said the word himself: embarrassing. Sportsmanship isn’t some pearl-clutching antique — it’s the bare minimum when you’re standing over another human being who is on the ground. The tape doesn’t lie, the mic caught it, and nobody in Austin is pretending otherwise. Act like you’ve been there — because when you’re the number-one team in the country, everybody is watching. Even the referee’s microphone.

The Rewind will be watching to see if any real consequence follows, or if this gets filed under “boys will be boys” until the next flag. Our newsroom has the rest of the weekend’s fallout, and the college football desk has every score and storyline from Week 6.