San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Longhorns lose to OU, but Aggies upset No. 4 Florida.
Sooners prevail in sloppy showdown that exemplifies nation’s surreal circumstances
DALLAS – The most interminable game in the history of the Red River rivalry lasted almost five hours. The only shame of it is it didn’t last longer.
Texas and Oklahoma should have kept trading blocked kicks, blown assignments and pop-up fumbles for 14 days, long enough for the gob-smacked sections of shoulder-to-shoulder fans to quarantine themselves from their communities, and long enough for both the Longhorns and Sooners to isolate from the rest of college football.
Hopefully, what they passed around at the Cotton Bowl on Saturday doesn’t spread.
The quality of play was ugly, and it was fitting, because no matchup better exemplified how everybody arrived at these surreal circumstances in the first place. They canceled the State Fair and limited tickets for the best regular-season tradition in the sport because too few of us displayed any leadership or self-control in the early stages of a pandemic, and in homage, UT and OU spent Saturday exhibiting the collective discipline of an all-Zoom elementary school.
Nobody learned much, nobody appeared to be in charge, and nobody deserved to win, even though the Sooners finally did, 53-45. When the whole affair ended in the fourth overtime, appropriately enough on an interception, OU claimed a victory both sides had spent hours trying to give away.
“We’ve got a lot to clean up,” UT coach Tom Herman said afterward, as if anybody has hoarded that much disinfectant spray.
For most of the Big 12’s existence, this game has represented the league at its best. But both old rivals confirmed suspicions Saturday that these are not good football teams in 2020, which might be understandable even if it’s undeniable.
The Sooners, coming off their
first back-to-back regular-season losses of the millennium, beat Herman’s team for the fourth time in five meetings, but did not exactly do it in style.
In front of a scaled-down crowd of 24,000, OU fumbled four times, committed 10 penalties, blew a 14-point lead in the final four minutes of regulation, and eschewed trying for a thirdovertime touchdown in favor of a field-goal attempt, which was no good.
And somehow, that was the smart team.
It wasn’t just that UT racked up four turnovers and 11 penalties of its own. Continuing a trend that predated this weekend, by about a decade, the Longhorns kept finding inventive ways to make things difficult, from an offensive lineman negating a huge run with a late hit, to the punter essentially jogging the ball over to a Sooner to let him block it.
Sam Ehlinger, the senior quarterback who’s as fiery of a competitor as the Longhorns have had but who probably would like to forget about the colors crimson and cream for the rest of his life, was alternatingly magnificent and mystifying, accounting for 399 yards of offense but also throwing two interceptions and taking six sacks.
Compared to young OU quarterbacks Spencer Rattler and Tanner Mordecai, Ehlinger had a huge edge in experience. But Saturday’s experience was all too familiar.
“We always seem to be tripping ourselves up,” Ehlinger said, and sometimes it’s that simple.
In the past there have been afternoons at the Cotton Bowl in which the Sooners just let a superior athlete make a superior play, but that hasn’t always been the explanation for UT’s misery, and it certainly wasn’t Saturday.
The Longhorns weren’t beaten by a team that’s headed to the College Football Playoff, or by a stud recruit headed for a Heisman Trophy ceremony. They were felled by their own sloppiness.
“I don’t think the problem is talent,” UT defensive tackle Ta’Quon Graham said. “The problem is discipline and execution, and those two things go hand-in-hand.”
And you know where that conversation leads. If anything was normal on the fairgrounds even without the carnival games and Ferris wheel, it was the way fans in burnt orange headed for the gates completely fed up with their head coach.
But thanks to the financial crunch of the pandemic and the decision two years ago to celebrate a four-loss season by rewarding Herman with a contract extension and an extra $13 million, guaranteed, he’s not going anywhere.
Herman still has at least 13 months to deliver on the improvement he’s been promising, but things have been trending badly for a while now, and he’d be far from the first UT coach to fail to overcome a string of rough October days at the Cotton Bowl.
The thing is, his team’s uninspired offense, shoddy tackling and strange cat-herding approach to special teams don’t bode well for the Longhorns in any venue, against any opponent, in any month.
“Are we deficient in certain areas? Yeah, we are,” Herman said. “We know what those (deficiencies) are.”
We sure do. And on a day when the Sooners tried their darnedest to match them?
The game that seemed to take forever still ended too soon.