Texas surrenders another second-half lead due to paltry offensive production vs. Oklahoma State
With 11:43 left in the third quarter, Bijan Robinson took a handoff from Casey Thompson, ran left, cut upfield, made a couple of Oklahoma State defenders miss, and ran into the end zone for a 38-yard touchdown to make it 24-13 Texas.
That would be the final first down the Texas Longhorn offense achieved in the game.
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Texas punted on its next four drives before turning the ball over on downs with 1:25 left, then giving the ball back to OSU via a Casey Thompson interception. Spencer Sanders would then kneel out the clock to seal a 32-24 come-from-behind win.
“This has been two weeks in a row where we’re just trying to hold on as opposed to attacking,” Texas head coach Sarkisian said. “We have to get it rectified because you can’t play the way we played the second half of this game or the second half of last week’s game and be the team that we want to be.”
For the second week in a row, Texas surrendered a second-half double-digit lead to a school from Oklahoma.
Texas took the lead on its first drive with a Robinson touchdown run, added a Cameron Dicker field goal to make it a 10-3 game in the first, then took a two-possession lead when Robinson scored on a wheel route midway through the second.
Up until that point, the Texas offense was getting the job done. The game then turned on its head in the span of a few seconds.
Threatening to go up 24-3, Thompson dropped back and looked for Joshua Moore in the Cowboy red zone. Jason Taylor II knew Thompson would look for Moore, broke on the pass, picked it off, and ran 85 yards for the score, turning what was almost a three-score game a one-score game.
From that point on, Texas achieved just three first downs. It scored one touchdown, the aforementioned run by Robinson. Cowboy defensive coordinator Jim Knowles and his experienced 11 were constantly in position and made the plays in front of them.
On Texas’ last six drives, the Longhorns accumulated 14 yards.
“I do think that we did have a lot of self inflicted mistakes that we continue to have every week that we need to clean up,” Thompson said. “We can’t take turns making mistakes, whether it’s the offensive line, me as a quarterback, the running back, or the receiver, we can’t take turns making mistakes every drive.”
As a result, the amount of time the Longhorn offense spent on the bench meant the Texas defense was on the field often.
That same defense lost star linebacker DeMarvion Overshown due to a concussion ahead of the halftime break, which only made things worse for Pete Kwiatkowski’s side of the ball.
Oklahoma State ran all over the Longhorns in the second half, just as Oklahoma did, just as TCU did. Cowboy running back Jaylen Warren tallied a significant chunk of his 193 yards in the second half. In total, Oklahoma State rushed 33 times for 170 yards in the second half, suffocating a Longhorn defense that was already gasping for breath.
“You can’t go three-and-out four times in a row and expect those guys to keep holding up and keep holding on,” Sarkisian said. “Ultimately the dam broke, they got the lead, and we just couldn’t execute enough offensively to get it back.”
Despite Robinson’s three total touchdowns and 135 yards on the ground, the Longhorn offense was held to one rushing yard in the fourth quarter. Texas ran 17 plays total in the second half. The offensive line couldn’t hold up against the OSU defensive front, and Thompson could not do anything to truly threaten the Cowboy secondary down the field.
So OSU keyed on the run, and they keyed hard. No matter what combination Sarkisian and Kyle Flood utilized on the offensive line, and they used three different combinations, none of them worked against a stout OSU front.
“It’s little things that we really need to focus on,” Robinson said. “Because you see when you don’t, things like this can happen. It always sucks because the defense was doing really good, but we couldn’t score the ball on a lot of the drives.”
The opposite played out for the Cowboys, who exacted a measure of revenge for their loss at the hands of the Longhorns at home as a top 10 team in 2020.
“We did not play very good complementary football again late into the third quarter and into the fourth quarter,” Sarkisian said. “We just didn’t.”
The Longhorns hope the upcoming open week will allow them time to address the issues hampering the offensive product. It will allow for Robinson, who has touched the ball 160 times through seven games, to recuperate somewhat.
It will allow for Sarkisian and staff to try and fix the problems affecting both sides of the ball. And to try to put together plans that prevent the Longhorns from giving up 662 total yards like against Oklahoma, or from tallying zero first downs across the last six drives like against Oklahoma State.
Or from giving up another double-digit lead.
