And the players even persuaded Brown -- a fiftysomething native of small-town Tennessee -- to fill up his iPod with rap. "I don't think I was out of touch, but when we were kids, [our parents] were talking about Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash being rebels and cussing, 'They're ruining our music!"' Brown told a reporter last year. "Now, we're saying some of the rap music is so vulgar and so awful and they're ruining our music. It's no different, it's the times.

"What I needed to do was a little better job staying up with their times, not just my times," he said. "It's made a difference in my happiness and enjoying them more. I think they probably laugh at me more."

Whatever -- it worked. The hip-hop Horns have won since October 2004, and they have done so with both confidence and class. While Young is right when he says they are "gangsta," they are most decidedly not the cheap-shot thugs that made Miami infamous. They are gangstas who fight fair.

But what were they listening to? Since I couldn't get ahold of VY or any of the players before or after the game, I had to guess. I would say that both Paul Wall's "They Don't Know" and Bun B's "Draped Up" would have been hits in that locker room, and if I was Vince Young I would certainly be feeling his southside homeboy Z-Ro's "Respect My Mind," since the national media did their usual quasi-racist number of crediting the white Matt Leinart with being the more "cerebral" of the two signal-callers, even though Young's quarterback rating was second to none.

But those are just shots in the dark. One jam I know they were blasting was "Game Day," by Austin's Mic'Rich. Late one night outside KPFT studios just before their appearance on the underground rap show Damage Control, I caught up with the eponymous Mike Richardson and the track's producer Tim Curry. As "Game Day" blasted from an SUV's speakers, they told me the story of how their song became the Longhorns' theme.

"I was riding in my car one day and it just hit me like a phenomenon," Richardson said. "I like Texas music and I'm from Texas, but everything I hear is about Houston. I'm from Austin, over in the other part of Texas, but still in Texas. So let's do a song about Austin. But what does Austin have? We don't have no major-league football team or basketball team, so what do we have? The Longhorns. And we are all die-hard Longhorn fans, so I thought, 'Hey, let's do a Longhorn song.' "

Richardson met up with Curry in mid-December, and in two days they had the song, which features verses from Nealio, Be Be Kids, Krumwell and Silky Black and an intro from Longhorn receiver Brian Carter. There are also snippets of "The Eyes of Texas," UT marching band drum cadences, faux rednecks hollering "yee-haw," rhymes touting Vince Young, Jamaal Charles and Mack Brown, and shout-outs to many of the team's stars. The chorus is simple: "When you see us on Game Day throw them horns up." While "Game Day" might not be hip-hop's finest moment, it does beat the hell out of "The Super Bowl Shuffle" and certainly is a must-have for any Horn fan that is also into rap. (For now, the best place to track down a copy is to visit the Web site micrichmusic.com/home.html.)

The track found its way to the team in Los Angeles and back in Austin, where commentator (and former Longhorn star) Brian Jones gave it a push during his local and regional TV and radio appearances. Then Austin's rap station got on board, and the tune blew up simultaneously with both the team and the city of Austin. "That was the song that was playing at the Rose Bowl on the big speakers," Curry says. "When you saw them on ESPN and they were dancing around, that was what they were dancing to. We're friends with Brian Carter, and he told us the shit was bigger with the team than we could ever imagine. It's on Mack Brown's iPod."