Texas continues to build a good playoff résumé. Will it be enough for CFP committee?
Sark #Sark
FORT WORTH — Quinn Ewers returned Saturday after a couple weeks off, and if it wasn’t perfect, it was good enough. He produced SportsCenter moments for Texas’ stars and kept turnovers to a minimum. Topping it off, Steve Sarkisian became the first Texas coach since Mack Brown to beat TCU twice.
All things considered, the seventh-ranked Longhorns did what they had to do in holding off the Horned Frogs, 29-26, at Amon Carter Stadium.
The question is, will it be good enough if the Longhorns keep it up?
Or is it a moot point?
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From here on out, the problem for the Longhorns, despite owning the best win in the nation, as Sark likes to remind us, is that there are too many conferences in front of them in the CFP’s pecking order.
Two teams from the Big Ten (Ohio State and Michigan), a couple from the Pac-12 (Oregon and Washington), the SEC (Georgia) and ACC (Florida State).
The best-case scenario for Texas seems to be if Alabama beats Georgia in the SEC title game, in which case Longhorn fans had better hope the committee believes in transitive laws.
My guess is the committee wouldn’t take a one-loss Georgia team if that loss is to a one-loss team beaten by another one-loss team.
No way the committee could take Alabama over Texas after it beat the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, right?
Suppose it’s possible Florida could beat Florida State. Other than that, I don’t see much potential for upsets until teams get to conference championship games.
Of course, the Longhorns must keep their record clean, too. They’ve got to go to Ames next week, then finish the regular season at home against the Joey McGuires. Just about any other year in the last decade or so, and it would be a pretty good chance Texas would do well to finish .500 in those last two.
But, as we learned in Tuscaloosa, this appears to be a different Texas team than the ones we’ve grown accustomed to. In the ages-old question of the-coach-or-the-player, Saturday’s game at Amon Carter proved once again that the latter makes the former.
Related:Texas-TCU takeaways: Longhorns hang on for road win after Jonathon Brooks’ injury
TCU went all the way to the national title game last year on grit and glory and all that, for sure. Sonny Dykes did a fabulous job in his first season, and he has more than a half-dozen awards to show for it. But the NFL is a much tougher judge, and big brother decided eight Frogs were good enough to be drafted, a school record.
A little program like TCU has a hard time recovering from that type of loss, and it’s showed this season in a 4-6 record. But give the Frogs credit for making a game of it late.
TCU came back with two touchdowns in the last six minutes, a furious charge led by the Frogs’ third-string quarterback, Josh Hoover. After a 3-yard TD pass to J.P. Richardson, Bucky’s boy, cut it to 10, Dykes went for two points. Hoover’s fade wasn’t close, and TCU’s upset bid seemed over.
But the Frogs, now 8-4 against Texas since entering the Big 12 in 2012, have made a habit of figuring out the Longhorns. They made it closer than it should have been after forcing Texas to punt and then getting the gift of an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, giving TCU the ball at Texas’ 36 with 4:02 left.
Hoover, who went 24 of 36 for 302 yards and a pick, covered that short field in a couple passes, the last 14 to Savion Williams to make it a three-point game, and still 3:28 to play.
Texas didn’t help its case by choosing to return a kick from the end zone, making it only to its own 15. But Ewers, who finished 22 of 33 or 317 yards with a touchdown and interception, put the game away with a rainbow to Adonai Mitchell at midfield.
For the record: Ewers’ 35-yard pass to Mitchell, who also had a touchdown catch, was proof of what the Longhorns ought to concentrate on, as former Texas QB David Ash indicated in a tweet late in the game. Ash wrote that if he saw one more wildcat formation from his alma mater, he would “lose what’s left of my mind.”
Like a lot of offensive coaches, Sark likes to show you how smart he is. But when you have a receiver no one can cover, like Xavier Worthy, who caught 10 passes for 137 yards, and a tight end like J’Tavion Sanders, an early-round pick, and a running back like Jonathon Brooks, who carried 21 times for 104 yards, you don’t need to get fancy.
Ask poor Josh Newton, TCU’s Jim Thorpe candidate at cornerback, who was asked repeatedly to cover Worthy or Mitchell all by his lonesome. Let me just say that NFL teams will not try to defend Worthy one-on-one.
The coaches on the committee love the kind of talent Texas has on offense as well as defense, where massive T’Vondre Sweat, all 6-4, 362 pounds of him, sits like the Rock of Gibraltar. Texas is building a good case for itself for the first time in more than a decade. From the looks of it, someone else will have to make the closing statement.
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Close one in Fort Worth: See photos from Texas’ win over TCU in Quinn Ewers’ return from injury
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