“It’s a trap game, I tell ya, Eyes, a trap game.  It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be wet, our team’s all beat up, and we’re due for the wheels to come off.  This is a game we lose under Mack Brown.”

That was my buddy Don’s opinion last Wednesday as we lunched at the Austin Club.  Don’s an animated guy, a big guy, and a smart guy for the most part, although we all have our moments.  And really, he had kind of a point.  I have to admit I never had the bad feeling in the pit of my stomach about this game that many Longhorn fans had during the past week, but on the other hand, I couldn’t blame them for worrying.

After all, it’s only been three months ago that most of us were wondering how this particular Longhorn team could possibly manage its way through what looked to be a loaded schedule without suffering at least three regular season losses.  This was a team without the obvious difference-making talent at the offensive skill positions possessed by previous Texas teams; it was a team that was going to be starting a bunch of kids just out of diapers in its defensive backfield; it was a team without a proven tight end, riddled with question marks in the offensive line, with no proven punter on the roster, and with a quarterback coming off what was for him a disappointing 2007 season.

So there many fans were last week, with the team sitting at 9-1 and only a second and clean tackle away from being undefeated and ranked #1 in the nation, pinching one another to make sure it wasn’t all a dream and finding it hard to believe that all this prosperity could continue.  Beaten down by the terrible late-season losses suffered by this program against rankly inferior opponents the last two years, many Texas fans couldn’t help but think this Kansas team was better than KSU and A&M in 2006 and 2007, and perfectly capable of pulling off the upset if the Longhorns had another letdown.

It was a perfectly rational thought process for the faithful to be engaged in, but it failed to account for two simple elements:  Preparation and leadership.  The 2006 and 2007 Texas squads were woefully prepared week-in and week-out to play the opponent at hand, and they also lacked leadership from the players.

This team suffers from neither problem.  With the exception of the offensive performance in the first half of the Texas Tech game, the team has been masterfully prepared by this coaching staff to attack each successive opponent.  The sea-change in this phase of the program this year over the last two years has been a joy to observe.

And, after two seasons of the team utterly lacking players willing to step up, this team has seen the emergence of leaders on both sides of the ball, from Colt McCoy to Quan Cosby to Jordan Shipley to Roy Miller to Brian Orakpo to Rod Muckelroy, anytime this year’s Longhorns have needed someone to jump in and stop the bleeding, it’s happened.

There was no bleeding to be stopped in Lawrence, Kansas on Saturday – just a thorough ass-whipping from beginning to end to be administered by a superior team that had been extremely well-prepared by its coaching staff to attack the opponent at hand.  The Jayhawks competed admirably on defense in the first half with a variety of blitz packages disrupting the Texas running game and putting consistent pressure on Colt McCoy. 

But offensively, Kansas had no chance.  The Texas defense, despite playing most of the game without its best DE and its best shutdown CB, and most of the second half without one of its starting safeties, smothered a very good Kansas offense, limiting it to 7 points.  To understand how good that is, realize that Texas was the first team to hold Kansas under 21 points, and just the third to hold the Jayhawks below 31.  That was some damn fine defense we saw on Saturday.  The kids have grown up.

Let’s go to the GBU, in no particular order:

UGLY – Texas A&M.  The Aggies played a couple of game there a few weeks back in which it looked as if they were finally grasping Sherm’s vaunted west coast offense (actually, it looked like Sherm may have figured out that the WCO doesn’t work so well in college football and was moving to more of a spread attack) and were starting to become more competitive as a team.  Then Oklahoma came to Kyle Field last week and administered a 66-28 ass-whipping that could easily have been 90-7 had Bob Stoops not called off the dogs.  Surely, most Aggies must have been thinking, it can’t get any worse than that.  Wrong.  On Saturday, the Aggies trailed the Baylor Bears – yes, those Baylor Bears – by 41-7 in the third quarter before tallying 14 meaningless 4th quarter points to make the final look slightly more respectable.  Non-Aggies knew this before the season began, but now not even Aggies can argue anymore that Texas A&M is not the very worst program in the Big 12 South.  That’s quite an achievement.

BAD – Fox Sports coverage of college football.  Yesterday, Dave Lapham officially became the winner by acclamation of the coveted Al Derogatis Trophy for special achievement in the category of annoyance of fans of collegiate football by a TV color analyst.  Bob Davie, after mounting an early season challenge for the award, faded completely into obscurity after Lapham’s fierce, constant, week-on-week assault of an endless stream of mindless metaphors, pusilanimous puns, repititious references and annoying analogies beat him and all other potential competitors into quiet submission.

 

Winner by acclamation – it wasn’t even close.

But it’s not just Lapham, oh no it’s not.  Sideline reporter Jim Knox, who appears to be increasingly desperate to be noticed by somebody, anybody, in the sports world outside of the backwater Big 12 college towns in which he spends most of his time, weekly resorts to more and more desperate and annoying gimmicks to maximize his limited face time.

 

“Knoxie” in one of his more lucid moments.

And then there are the constant staged shots of “excited” fans in the stands, going  berserk and screaming “we’re no. 1″ as their heroes on the field trail 28-0.  It’s been the same model from Fox for the last decade, and it’s gotten tired and stale as hell.  Really, really bad.

 

Fox Sports could use some lessons from ABC regarding its use of crowd shots.

GOOD – Kansas WR Desmond Briscoe.  Dude is a stud.  Poor Deon Beasley had to be wondering just what a guy has to do to catch a break after the hand-and-helmet catch Briscoe made at the Texas 6 on a play on which Beasley had outstanding coverage and even got his hand on the ball.  Beasley led the team in tackles mainly because Briscoe had 9 catches for 115 yards on the day.  On a KU team that has mostly pedestrian talent, Briscoe really stands out in the crowd.

GOOD – Christian Scott.  When Blake Gideon went out in the middle of the third quarter after being involved in a horrific helmet-to-helmet collision with KU RB Angus Quigley, Scott came in an immediately began kicking ass and taking names.  There was no dropoff in performance from the position at all.

 

Opposing offenses will see much more of this mug in the future.  And they won’t like it much.

GOOD – Other defensive standouts included Henry Melton, Roy Miller, Rod Muckelroy and, in limited action, Chykie Brown.  Melton recorded 2 tfls, including one sack, and was extremely active in his position.  Miller and Muckelroy continued their season-long dominance.  Brown broke up a pass, recorded three tackles, and reminded us why we’d been missing him so much the last few weeks.

 

Nice game, Henry.

GOOD – Laying the wood.  My goodness, the Longhorn defense beat the poor KU offense to a pulp in this game.  This was the hardest-hitting game we’ve seen from a Texas defense in a long, long time.  The ability to make hits consistently like we saw yesterday is a product of confident players making proper reads and being in proper position, all signs the defense is jelling late in the season.  

BAD – The Texas running game.  The run blocking was abysmal throughout, and Fozzy Whittaker unfortunately got into the rut of trying to break every play outside that plagued Vondrell McGee and Chris Ogbonnaya earlier in the season whenever the expected hole failed to materialize.  Which was pretty much all the time.  As a result, Colt McCoy was once again Texas’s leading rushing, thanks to several scrambles that were enabled by the Kansas DL failing to maintain containment up the middle.

 

The Texas running attack.

  

GOOD - As bad as his day running the ball turned out to be, Fozzy made up for it in the passing game.  He had one big play on a drag route out of the backfield, and another when he showed WR instincts and cut off a route to come back for an underthrown ball, setting the offense up with first and goal from the 2.  On the day he was Texas’s second leading receiver with 5 grabs for 42 yards.  He also did an excellent job in pass protection, presumably removing the last remaining excuse not to have him on the field.  All in all, a very productive day in a game in which the holes just were not there.

GOOD – Colt McCoy had another ho-hum-I’m-the-best-college-QB-in-the-country type of game.  It says a lot about the season he has had to note that his stat line – 24 of 34 for 255 yards and 2 TDs – was one of his least impressive of the season.  It says a lot about the kind of player he has become that he accumulated that stat line on a day on which his pass protection was just not good at all, especially in the first half, and on which the running game was not clicking.  Add in his 78 yards rushing, and you have Colt accounting for about80% of the team’s total offensive output on the day.  Should Texas Tech beat OU, it’s unlikely Colt will win the Heisman Trophy, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t.

Defensive Player of the Game – Tie between Christian Scott and Henry Melton.

Special Teams Player of the Game – Jordan Shipley, for his Dr. J – like 15 foot dive over the offensive line to convert a fake FG into a key first down.

Offensive Player of the Game – Colt, obviously.

My buddy Don called me after the game was over.  “Boy, I sure was wrong about this one, huh?  I guess this team really is different.”

Yeah, it really is, so quit worrying so much.  This is going to be a very happy Thanksgiving in Longhorn households across Texas.  So eat up.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving turkey.

Hook ‘em!!!