Flashback: New Year’s Day, Texas Longhorn fans jumping for joy after seeing quarterback Vince Young parade up and down the field at will against Michigan and lead his team to a Rose Bowl win . Finally, after years of disappointments, coach Mack Brown had his defining win.
Now let’s move ahead three days. The loaded Oklahoma Sooners come into the Orange Bowl with many expecting them to not only beat USC but completely throttle them. Those predictions ended up being horribly wrong.
Little has changed in nine months.
No. 2 Texas threatens to break 100 points every week; OU threatens, on a good week, to break 100 yards passing.
But a question still pops into my mind.
Was Texas’ victory in the Rose Bowl actually a bad thing for the program?
For seven seasons, college football observers saw Mack Brown enter every season with talent and hype. And every year, the Longhorns would leave the field disappointed, often more than once.
Every season you’d see Brown standing on the sideline clapping away at his team, with no success.
In the Brown era, three things have been certain: death, taxes and Oklahoma beating Texas.
Brown’s eight- or nine-win seasons at North Carolina worked. They had been a doormat for years and years. But the same results don’t work at Texas, where everyone from the chancellor to the long-haired residential assistants expects domination every week.
After all of these years, it had become obvious to me that Brown’s days as head coach needed to come to an end. But winning the Rose Bowl meant more Mack.
What is Mack Brown’s vision? He’s without a doubt among the top-five coaches in February, when recruits sign. Yet when the games come around, he’s just plain ordinary. But one win turns a lot of haters into lovers. Longhorn fans shouldn’t cry when they come up short of a national title one more time.
Appealing options were out there: Steve Spurrier, Urban Meyer and Norm Chow among others. Coaches that would have loved to direct a team like Texas and have shown far superior in-season coaching ability than Brown.
Last year’s politicking helped buy Brown a chance to get his team into its first Bowl Championship Series game under his watch. The Longhorns would luck out in facing a fading Michigan team that forgot how to tackle and manage the game clock.
That bought Mack a 10-year contract extension after cashing in his Pasadena success.
But there’s one more hurdle for Mack to cross: beating OU.
You might think that a Texas win is signed, sealed and delivered after OU’s less-than-inspiring losses against TCU and UCLA and near-loss to Tulsa. But somehow, someway, OU is going to pull this game off.
There may not be much on the field to explain this, but a lot sits between the ears.
I’ve managed to cook up a few on-the-field storylines.
The Sooners shut down shifty Kansas State quarterback Allen Webb, a poor man’s Vince Young, and held the Wildcats to 22 yards rushing last week.
OU has held opponents to an average of 65.3 rushing yards per game. The problems have been on pass defense; unless Vince Young can sidearm his way to a big passing day (highly unlikely), the Longhorns may have met a team that can stop their quick backfield.
A mental edge and some luck might get the Sooners a victory. But after back-to-back humiliating national championship game losses, OU needs to replace its biggest loss if it wants to get back to winning national championships.
Not Jason White. Not Mark Clayton. The answer is former co-defensive coordinator Mike Stoops.
OU ran the “prevent offense” (prevent anything from happening) for two seasons under quarterback Nate Hybl. They ended winning a Cotton Bowl and Rose Bowl.
Ever since the 2004 Big 12 Championship Game, OU’s first game after Stoops took the head coaching job at Arizona, things haven’t been the same in big games. In the 2004 Sugar Bowl, they let Louisiana State running back Justin Vincent run wild. Then during the 2004-05 season, they let Oklahoma State and Texas A&M each put up 35 points. And who can forget the Orange Bowl? We all know what happened there.
Yet in one big game last year, the defense was able to come up large against a big-time opponent.
Who was it?
You guessed it! Texas!
Completely shutting down Vince Young and Cedric Benson in a 12-0 shutout win.
Some things never change!
Reach Troy Appel at [email protected]
