Deja Vu: Longhorns surrender another second-half double-digit lead
WACO, Texas — It happened again.
With two weeks to prepare for No. 16 Baylor, two weeks to try and overcome the continued struggles in the latter portions of games, and two weeks to ready for the battle of a sixty-minute football contest, the Texas Longhorns surrendered a second-half double-digit lead and lost, 31-24, dropping to 4-4 in Steve Sarkisian’s first season in Austin.
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The second-half script barely changed from the previous two showings. The Longhorns surrendered 21 points and 217 yards in the second thirty-minutes while only scoring 10 points of their own. Three Bears, Abram Smith, Trestan Ebner, and Gerry Bohanon, averaged over 5.4 yards per carry.
Bohanon wasn’t asked to do much in the passing game, particularly after throwing interceptions to BJ Foster and Luke Brockermeyer. Texas could only manage seven points off those two Baylor turnovers.
Baylor’s ground game did everything Dave Aranda’s squad needed in order to secure the win. Three of the four Bear touchdowns came via the rush. Bohanon reached paydirt after a nine-play, 75-yard drive midway through the third quarter. Tight end Ben Sims scored early in the fourth on a one-yard rush, and Smith added a late 32-yard run that gave the Bears a 10-point lead.
It wasn’t just the defense that held true to its poor form. The offense could not score 30 points, seemingly a magic number in Big 12 contests. Star running back Bijan Robinson couldn’t crack 100 yards, let alone 50. Texas itself needed 29 carries to muster 102 yards.
Though Xavier Worthy added his third 100-yard game of the season along with a touchdown reception, Texas’ offense could not maintain the marginal effectiveness it had in the first half.
RECAP: Baylor Bears 31, Texas Longhorns 24
Add in an special teams blunder late in the fourth quarter on a fake punt attempt, and Texas completed the third in a trilogy of collapses.
And there’s no way to know for certain when the series will end.
“That was a tough one to swallow,” Sarkisian said. “Any time you lose a game like that, with the little bit of the trend we’ve had now for three consecutive weeks, that’s tough. That’s tough on our locker room.”
What was unique about Texas’ defeat issued by the Bears was that where the Longhorns played decently well in the first halves of the Oklahoma and Oklahoma State games, that was not the case in Waco.
Robinson was stifled early, with Texas accumulating 36 yards on 12 carries in the first half. His lone score of the day was a one-yard run on the opening drive of the second half.
Joshua Moore caught a touchdown pass on Texas’ first drive, but struggled mightily as the first half wore on. He had a sequence where he dropped a pass from Casey Thompson in the end zone, then on the very next play had a pass slip through his hands and into a defender’s, costing the Longhorns a chance at points at the end of the first half.
Moore wasn’t the only player who dropped passes on the day. Late in the game and down a touchdown, Thompson heaved a pass for Marcus Washington that would have put Texas in position to tie, but could not haul it in. Two plays later, Texas turned it over on downs and Baylor knelt out the clock.
“I’m sure those guys would love to have those plays back,” Sarkisian said. “They’d love to make those plays. It didn’t happen, but the sign of really good football teams is they overcome those obstacles when they present themselves and we just weren’t able to overcome them today.”
Frustration surely exists within the Texas locker room. Thompson Ovie Oghoufo, Bijan Robinson, and Keondre Coburn said as much postgame. And after three-straight losses in heartbreaking manner, why wouldn’t it?
The same applies to the coaches, too.
“When you don’t ultimately get the result that you’re looking for, that’s disheartening for them and so I feel frustrated for them because I know what they put into it,” Sarkisian said. “My job ultimately is to get them to continue to put in what they’re putting in, and if all of us can get one percent better in whatever capacity our responsibilities are, we’ll get over this hump. And it’ll be very gratifying when that happens.”
Responsibility never falls solely on the coaches. Players shoulder some of the blame as well, and several Longhorns have ideas on how to turn things around before the season is out even with conference title hopes seemingly lost.
“Small margin losses, those are the ones that hurt the most,” Ovie Oghoufo said. “That also gives us hope that we can fix it up.”
Keondre Coburn put it this way: “We’re in the fight the whole game until it’s just a couple plays, a couple series that aren’t in our hands. That means we have to execute more than we have been doing.”
Said Robinson, “We need to understand every team is going to bring it no matter who we play. We have to execute at a high level and sustain in the game. We’ve got four quarters to play, and we just can’t let up at any point in the game.”
And Thompson?
“I just think we need to make the corrections we need to make throughout the week, then translate it to the field on Saturdays,” he said.
Sarkisian mentioned how in addition to execution, the psyche issues that hampered Texas versus Oklahoma and Oklahoma State did so again versus Baylor. He admitted it’s on the coaches to draw the players out of that rut while also encouraging better execution.
But when given the chance to prove those psyche issues were a thing of the past, they thrust themselves back into Texas’ present.
“That’s something we worked on this week,” Sarkisian said. “I thought we were better, but clearly it wasn’t good enough.”
