Miscellaneous

Texas Football 2008: Fiesta Bowl and Season Recap

By Chris Stevenson

First of all, I'd just like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ because without him, none of this is possible.

Second of all, did I nail this motherfucking season, or what?  If you recall my preseason prediction post back in August, I said 12-2 with a final #4 ranking.  I also said we'd lose to Tech and Missouri in the regular season.  Well, we ended up 12-1 with what will probably be a #2 or #3 final ranking.  We did lose to Tech, though not by the score I predicted, but we beat Mizzou.  We didn't go to the Big XII Championship Game because of the three way ties.  I even had us going to the Fiesta Bowl and winning, which we did.  I was even pretty close on a lot of the scores:

Mine                                                              Actual

Texas 48, Florida Atlantic 10                            TX 52, FAU 10

Texas 52, UTEP 18                                        TX 42, UTEP 13

Texas 33, Arkansas 20                                    TX 52, Ark. 10

Texas 60, Rice 13                                            TX 52, 10

Texas 24, Colorado 21                                      TX 38, CO 14

Texas 18, Oklahoma 14                                    TX 45, OU 35

Missouri 36, Texas 20                                        TX 56, Mizzou 31

Texas 52, Oklahoma State 35                            TX 28, OSU 24

Texas Tech 45, Texas 21                                    TX 33, TT 39

Texas 51, Baylor 17                                            TX 45, BU 21

Texas 42, Kansas 13                                           TX 35, KU 7

Texas 28, Texas A&M 12                                    TX 49, TAMU 9

Big XII Championship:  Texas 35, Missouri 27         ------------------

Fiesta Bowl:  Texas 28, Wisconsin 20                    TX 24, OSU 21

On the Fiesta Bowl

It was a great college football game.  Lead changes, excitement, all of that.  It was not a great game for Texas.  Being favored, it was a lose-lose in the perception battle that is the college football championship crowning system.  By all rights, we should have beaten them by 20 and the game should have been in hand in the 3rd quarter.  Still though, Texas overcame the adversity of playing a game that the team felt they were above, which is a significant psychological hurdle.  My hat is off to Mack Brown for having the team as up and ready to play as they were.  I place my hat back on my head and then take it right back off to Colt McCoy.  The guy took a terrific pounding (Did you see all of those replays where he is just getting absolutely crushed?) and managed to lead the team from behind and clinched the win with a super drive and perfect touchdown pass on a perfectly called and executed play.  The guy is really, really tough.  He's a winner.  More on him in the recap section of this post.

It was troubling that the Ohio State offense was able to run the ball so effectively against our #2 ranked run defense.  The commentators astutely pointed out that they earned that ranking against offenses that primarily threw the ball, making the high ranking much less impressive.  Wells is an NFL-caliber back and Pryor bears a scary resemblance skill-wise to The Messiah VY, but still, Muschamp.  I thought our young defensive backs did well enough - they've overachieved all year - but they still gave up a lot of big plays.  (That touchdown pass to Pryor I'm still wondering what Gideon was doing.  Turn around!!  What, did you notice that Pryor had a booger or something and that distracted your attention from the fucking play?  Stop looking at his face!  Look for the goddamned ball!  Bat it away!  You are right fucking there!)

Still, all of the negatives aside (Oh, and can we please get a fucking unsportsmanlike penalty in the last seconds of the game and give them a realistic chance of scoring?  Can we, please?  Fuck!) it was a great win that should propel the program to a preseason top five and another prime position to compete for the Nat'l Title next season.

Season Recap

Here's the synopsis of the season:  Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy, Colt McCoy.  Seriously, without him we're like 7-4 at best.  I remember looking at who was on the roster and in the recruiting hopper when VY announced for the NFL and thinking, "We're fucked."  Colt was only a 3-star recruit and I think Jevan Snead was the same - maybe he was a four-star guy, I can't remember.  Anyway, they were skinny white dudes who looked weak as hell (McCoy) and punkish (Snead), respectively.  I thought that we could endure 2 seasons of quarterback mediocrity while we relied on the running game and defense.  Who knew?  McCoy better than VY?  I would have slapped you if you had suggested it back then.  What is even more impressive about the season he had is that he did it without a strong supporting cast on offense.  The offensive line is very good, but I don't think there's a first rounder in there.  We had no, I repeat, no tight end.  You know that stone hand that Hell Boy has?  Well, Peter Ullman has two of those.  We'll have Irby back next year, hopefully, so that will add a completely new dimension to the offense that we simply haven't had this year.  In addition to no tight end, Colt had no dependable running game or game breaking running back to take the pressure off.  I really expected one of the backs to emerge as the No. 1 guy at some point in the season.  That never happened, although the coaches basically went with the senior in Ogbannaya after he had one good game because they just had to make a decision.  That worked okay, but much of the success running the ball was probably because teams were scheming against the pass so much.  Lastly, he had no prototype NFL caliber receiver.  Quan and Shipley are extremely sure-handed, were durable, ran good routes and, best of all, had an almost extrasensory sync with Colt, but Roy Williams they are not.  Either the traditional recipes for offensive success and the traditional molds for the best players are not the only way, or Colt just did it all on his own.

One thing is for sure, we are in the Golden Age of UT Football.  We've only won one Nat'l Championship and one Big XII title in 11 years under Mack Brown, but over that same span we have won more games than any other Div. 1 program.  BCS bowl games and top 10 rankings are almost a given.  It's easy to focus on what hasn't happened (more titles), but almost any other school in the nation would happily trade places.  A few other programs have had similar successes, Oklahoma being one of them, but it doesn't get much better than where it's at right now.

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).