Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on all things Texas Longhorns.
Goodness.
Ok, first, this is a bonus edition, so that’s why we aren’t talking about Oklahoma State. Second…
Goodness.
It was sad. It was funny. It was riotously exciting. It was Texas’s fault. It was Oklahoma’s fault. It was God’s fault. It was the Big 12’s fault. It was the fault of the referees.
My favorite thing about Saturday was when every Texas beat writer got triggered. Tweets about the officiating were flying, and not in the “Hmmmm there are gonna be some questions” way and not in the “Texas still has to make that play” way but in the “I’m telling you…” and “Oh my, the refs actually called a penalty on OU” ways (those last two are real).
My second favorite thing about Saturday was how good the Longhorns looked. Seriously! I’m not being a dick here! The Longhorns looked good. They only looked good for two or three quarters and one drive in the fourth, but there’s clearly a lot of good to work with there, even accounting for The Red River Shootout Divine Equalizer™, the phenomenon that makes everyone in the Red River Shootout capable of supernatural feats and supernatural mistakes. This is the reasonable take regarding the Longhorns: Progress is being made, there’s a ways to go before catching Oklahoma over a full season, there’s a long ways to go before competing nationally again. But progress is being made!
The problem, of course, is that people don’t want progress so much as they want Steve Sarkisian to snap his fingers and transport them back to January of 2006, when Vince Young was king and Alabama wasn’t yet even a glimmer in Nick Saban’s eye. That’s why you got that “new sheriff in town” narrative coming out of a narrow win over a mediocre TCU team. It wasn’t pleasant optimism. It was self-deluding hubris. This isn’t Sark’s fault—it isn’t his job to control local media and fanbase narratives—but at the same time, “all gas no brakes” is a pretty fitting description of what happened to the hype train.
You might think the hype train would have been derailed by what happened in Dallas. You would be wrong. The hype train zooms on, even if it may have been struck by a meteor in the form of Lincoln Riley’s offense and may be smoldering and may have a bunch of sobbing folks in burnt orange hanging on being dragged along by the caboose. Texas competed! Texas was that close! Texas almost won a highly emotional game that isn’t that indicative of the team’s overall quality and is one they often win!
Which brings us to my third favorite thing about Saturday, which is that Texas is still Back. As we wrote on Friday, they didn’t need to win the Shootout to achieve this. All they had to do was keep it close. Nationally? No. Texas is not Back. But in Texas’s eyes…
All gas, no brakes.
