HotReads-Main-111315.jpg
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
November 13, 2015 10:54 AM | Football
Radio sideline reporter Jed Drenning provides periodic commentary on the Mountaineer football program for WVUsports.com. Be sure to follow Jed on Twitter @TheSignalCaller.
Texas is known for a lot of things.
Football, barbecue, black gold and cattle ranches are certainly among them. So are cowboy movies – and nothing says “Old West” like a spaghetti western. This was a genre within a genre – a subcategory of gunfighter flicks spawned in the 1960s. They were so named because they were filmed in Europe (often in Italy) for pennies on the dollar and because they were frequently directed by Europeans (often Italians, such as the iconic Sergio Leone).
Arguably the greatest of all spaghetti westerns was Leone’s 1966 epic featuring Clint Eastwood as a Civil War era loner pitted against a wicked bounty hunter and a Mexican desperado. In search of a cache of stolen gold, Eastwood’s gunslinger was meant to be the good guy in the story, peculiar considering the character was nearly as ruthless as his corrupt rivals, though a bit more cunning and blessed with a quicker drawing hand.
The movie wasn’t filmed in Texas. In fact, it wasn’t even intended to take place in Texas, set largely instead amid the chaotic backdrop of the Confederacy’s New Mexico campaign in 1862. Nevertheless, the film’s rabble-rousing title – “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – fits so neatly when summarizing the Texas Longhorns season to date that I couldn’t resist.
Four years and nine days after his Louisville Cardinals upset West Virginia 38-35, Charlie Strong returns to Morgantown as the skipper of the Big 12’s flagship program, though Texas hasn’t often looked the part this fall. The truth is, with four wins against five losses, the Longhorns are harder to read than an encrypted copy of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
After losing six of seven games dating back to last year, Texas has now won three of its last four in a season replete with ups and downs and way downs. So, cue the haunting music (Wa Wa Waaah) with that whistling trill and let the tumbleweeds roll as we explore the good, the bad and the ugly of West Virginia’s ninth opponent of 2015 – the Texas Longhorns.
THE GOOD:
A win over an unbeaten rival ranked in the top 10 certainly seems like a great place to start.
At 1-4 the Longhorns entered the Red River Showdown with Oklahoma as 16-point underdogs, but, as sometimes happens in rivalry games, intensity intervened. Throw in the game tape and you see a Longhorns squad with a Texas-sized chip on it shoulder firing off the football and rocking bodies, a team swarming like burnt orange bees and making plays with reckless abandon.
The 24-17 stunner in Dallas showcased many of the elements that still make Texas as scary as ever when it decides to flip the switch. For starters, the Longhorns didn’t turn the football over against OU a single time – a trend they seem to have mastered this season. Texas has committed just seven turnovers all year. In fact, only five FBS teams have committed fewer turnovers than the Horns this season and the combined record of those five teams is 36-7.
Above all else, Texas got back to basics against the Sooners, throwing the football just a dozen times while rolling up its sleeves and dominating both sides of the line of scrimmage.
The young but athletic Texas front seven harassed Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield all afternoon, sacking him six times, including two by true freshman linebacker Malik Jefferson – the crown jewel of Charlie Strong’s 2015 recruiting class. Moreover, against a Sooners defense that entered the game yielding just 3.5 yards per rush, the Longhorns exploded for 313 on the ground, marking the first time in Strong’s 75 games as a head coach one of his teams eclipsed the 300-yard mark. Texas was paced by sophomore running back D’Onta Foreman’s 117 yards. Foreman is the only FBS player with two runs of 80-plus yards this season, and one of those runs, an 81-yarder on the final play of the third quarter against Oklahoma, demonstrated what this Texas offense is capable of when firing on all cylinders.
On second down and 12 from their own nine-yard line, Longhorns play caller Jay Norvell dialed up a beauty, using OU’s own athleticism against it. When you can execute a game-breaking play without laying a finger on Oklahoma’s All-Big 12 dynamo Eric Striker, you know you’re onto something. That’s exactly what happened as Striker exploded upfield from his spot off the edge, looking to contain Horns QB Jerrod Heard who took the snap and started to his right in a full sprint out action. With Striker six yards deep in the Texas backfield but far too wide to impact the play, Heard handed off to Foreman who had helped sell the sprint out before pivoting back inside to take the ball from his quarterback.
As the Horns offensive line collapsed the backside of the Sooners defense at the point of attack, Texas tight end Caleb Bluiett sprung Foreman with a key block. The first two steps Bluiett took after the snap were his most deceptive. He sold the sprint out action by attacking Striker before redirecting abruptly inside. There, he got away with just enough of an open-handed arm bar on Sooners linebacker Jordan Evans to send Foreman racing into the secondary to set up a Longhorns score. Eighty-one yards later the third quarter was over and scoreboard watchers across the country were on high alert, realizing that another shocker might be just 15 minutes from reality at the Texas State Fair.
With 4:24 remaining, Oklahoma’s last breath came on a third down and 14 from its own 34-yard line. The play was snuffed out by the two things that best define this Texas defense: youth and athleticism. Mayfield dropped to pass but immediately saw the pocket start to crumble. He tried to escape to his left but it was too late. Sophomores Naashon Hughes and Poona Ford were in his face. Hughes ran the hump around OU left tackle Orlando Brown, waiting with open arms for Mayfield when the QB tried to break left. Ford, meanwhile, sliced like a hot dagger through an attempted double team by Sooners’ guard Nila Kasitati and tackle Josiah St. John. The two Longhorns converged on Mayfield in a flurry, burying him for a loss of 17 yards, effectively ending the game.
That’s what good looks like.
THE BAD:
If someone tries to show you game tape of the Longhorns loss at TCU last month, shield your eyes. Just imagine what a quicker and more efficient thrashing than the one the Horned Frogs unleashed on the Mountaineers a few weeks ago might look like and you’ll start to get a sense of what played out in Fort Worth on October 3.
This thing was over faster than a Ronda Rousey fight. TCU sprinted out to a 220-to-1 yardage advantage that helped them jump all over Texas by a 30-0 count less than 15 minutes into the game. The 50-7 TCU win marked the first time in more than half a century that the Frogs knocked off Texas in consecutive years. Only a consolation score in the final seconds prevented the Longhorns from matching the second-worst shutout loss in school history, 50-0 to Oklahoma in 1908.
Texas simply couldn’t get the parking brake off. A TCU defense missing six starters frustrated Heard all day while Trevone Boykin tossed five touchdowns, including four to freshman KaVontae Turpin. The Longhorns had no answers as the Horned Frogs finished with 376 yards through the air, the most allowed by a Charlie Strong defense since West Virginia’s Geno Smith threw for 410 against Louisville in 2011. Making this demolition somehow even worse was that it came on the heels of narrow Texas losses to unbeaten Cal and Oklahoma State that had prompted some pundits to suggest the Longhorns were on the verge of turning the corner.
Instead, Amon G. Carter Stadium proved to be a house of horrors for Strong’s squad as many of the same problems that had plagued Texas all year cropped up time and again. The Longhorns, who have allowed the most tackles for loss in the Big 12, were taken down behind the line of scrimmage eight times against the Frogs. That of course plays a role in accounting for the last place Big 12 ranking the Texas offense is saddled with in third-down efficiency – an issue that reared its ugly head on the trip to TCU as the Longhorns converted just 6-19 attempts to move the chains.
That’s what bad looks like.
THE UGLY:
For all the things I’ve lived and learned in four years of travelling the Big 12 circuit, the one that might surprise me the most is how unforgiving a place Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa, can sometimes be for visiting teams. It’s an often cold, often bleak, often loud place with an end-of-the-football-earth feel to it. The reality might be that it’s not actually 50,000 angry farmers with pitchforks in hand shaking the stadium, but it can certainly feel that way. No matter what the Cyclones record in the Big 12 standings might suggest in a given year, when you march into Iowa State you better bring your lunch pail.
On Halloween night, the Longhorns did not.
The eye in the sky shows a much different Texas team than the one that lined up in Dallas against Oklahoma. The burnt orange Longhorn logo on the helmet might have been the same but the effort and execution were not. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Texas was outhustled, outhit and out-leveraged by a 2-5 Iowa State team that prior to this season had beaten the Longhorns just one time in the history of its program.
Iowa State was in control from the outset. The Cyclones held the ball for more than 37 minutes and scored in every quarter. ISU outgained Texas 426-to-204 and the Texas offense didn’t advance past the Iowa State 47-yard line until the final 90 seconds of the game.
Sure the Cyclones were supremely motivated to play for their embattled coach Paul Rhoads, and sure they had an axe to grind with Texas after suffering a pair of controversial losses to the Longhorns in recent years -- but this was less about ISU than it was about Texas going through the motions.
It was another example of perhaps the ugliest of all the Longhorns problems. The neutral site game in Dallas against Oklahoma notwithstanding, Texas has proven so far this season to be one of the worst travelling teams in college football. The Horns road woes have been well documented, particularly on the offensive side. In a 38-3 season opening loss at Notre Dame, the Longhorns were outgained 527-to-163 and suffered three-and-outs on eight of their 12 offensive possessions. Then there were the aforementioned losses at TCU and Iowa State. In those three games combined Texas has been outscored 112-to-10. That's right, folks . . . The University of Texas --- the biggest budget and the biggest Bertha in the land -- has scored just one touchdown in three road games.
That’s what ugly looks like.
The question is, which Texas team will show up at Milan Puskar Stadium on Saturday - the inspired squad that knocked off Oklahoma, or the underachieving team that has labored to get out of its own way on the road?
Sure the Longhorns geographical clock will tell them it’s an 11 a.m. kickoff but don’t expect them to feel the 45-degree temperature and retreat sluggishly back onto the bus. At 4-5 and with games to follow against Texas Tech and Baylor, Texas knows their margin for error is razor thin if it wants to redeem its coach with a 13th game. This trip to Morgantown is, for all intents and purposes, a must win for the Longhorns if they hope to go bowling – and they know it.
Two dozen freshman saw time for Texas in last week’s 59-20 win over Kansas. In fact, only six teams in college football have played more freshman than the Longhorns this year. Texas’ top passer, top rusher, leader in receiving yards, leader in pass break ups and third-leading tackler are freshmen.
The Mountaineers are about to tangle with a very talented but very young and incredibly desperate football team that is tired of hearing it can’t win on the road.
Here’s hoping they’re a little more tired of it when they step off the field Saturday.
I’ll see you at the 50.
Gold-Blue Spring Festival Fan Recap
Sunday, April 19
John Neider | April 18
Saturday, April 18
Coach Zac Alley | April 18
Saturday, April 18
Coach Rich Rodriguez | April 18
Saturday, April 18
