Longhorns regain their defensive mojo in the nick of time
AUSTIN — It’s hard to say whether anyone inside Royal-Memorial Stadium was stunned when Texas fell behind Kansas State by two touchdowns just 10 minutes into last Saturday’s game.
The fans were distraught, and the players were incensed, but given the way both programs had trended the past few weeks no one appeared shocked. The Longhorns weren’t stupefied at the 14-0 deficit.
“This might sound crazy but no, not at all,” sophomore tailback Keaontay Ingram said Saturday. “We work that in practice. That’s why we go out there and execute. We’re not surprised for it because we work on it.”
The offense rebounded and looked ready to once again prop up a struggling defense. Reeling off 24 unanswered points from the second to fourth quarter, it did enough to regain the lead.
But the defense was, for the first time all season, the real hero behind the Longhorns’ 27-24 victory. After surrendering those two touchdowns and 159 yards in the first quarter, defensive coordinator Todd Orlando’s unit ceded only a field goal and 145 yards the rest of the way.
It was a cathartic performance, a public repudiation of all the criticism lobbed at that unit since the season began. It was an effort led three of the team’s most important voices: senior defensive end Malcolm Roach, safety Brandon Jones and sophomore linebacker Joseph Ossai.
“It’s not like when things are going poorly you’re going to start drawing stuff in the dirt and calling things you haven’t practiced,” coach Tom Herman said Monday. “So the calls were all the same.
“I think our guys settled down. And I think Malcolm Roach and Brandon Jones and Joseph Ossai, those three guys, their leadership was invaluable in that situation. When things weren’t looking really good, to have those guys be as confident to their teammates as they were was a big part of that.”
With Roach rallying the troops, the defensive line generated as much pressure as it has all season and held one of the nation’s more potent rushing attacks to 51 yards on 26 attempts. Texas (6-3, 4-2 Big 12) sacked junior quarterback Skylar Thompson three times and held him to no rushing yards — the same Thompson who totaled 156
yards and seven touchdowns on the ground in consecutive wins over Oklahoma and Kansas.
Even Joshua Youngblood’s game-tying 98-yard kickoff return touchdown in the fourth quarter and sophomore cornerback Jalen Green’s targeting ejection couldn’t rattle a Texas defense that appeared reborn.
After an ill-timed three-and-out by the Texas offense, sophomore corner D’Shawn Jamison batted away what would’ve been a 27-yard touchdown pass to wideout Dalton Schoen. That forced K-State to settle for a field goal with 6:45 left, but it never got the ball back as the Longhorns milked the clock then sent out kicker Cameron Dicker for a walk-off 26-yard field goal.
The hard-fought win felt like a sort of validation of Orlando and his scheme. He spent a portion of last Wednesday’s media session defending his strategy and explaining why it couldn’t be changed — it just had to be executed better.
“So you’re not going to change anything in the middle of a season from a schematic standpoint, from a philosophical standpoint,” Herman said. “This is what we are, this is what we believe in, and we’re going to try our best within the framework of the system to put you into situations to be successful and we gotta coach you better and you guys gotta buy in and trust it, and I think for three quarters you saw the fruits of that.”
Finally, with sophomore safeties Caden Sterns and B.J. Foster returning, the Longhorns were able to perform like Orlando believed they could. That sort of outing from what had been one of the nation’s most generous defenses may have stunned some last Saturday, but not Texas.