Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Today is an important test for Texas. Not in the sense that they’re playing a phenomenal opponent, but in the sense that according to narrative law, this is a game Texas should lose. They’re a seventeen-point favorite playing at home against the team tied for last place with the team Texas just beat 49 to nothing. The Texas Longhorns are the biggest favorite they’ve been over a respectable foe in what feels like ages (might just be one or two years), and the assumption, “if I know Texas,” is that they’ll fall on their face. That’s just how the program works.
If they don’t fall on their face—if they come out and blow the doors off Iowa State (someone it shouldn’t be expected they’d relieve of their doors, based on recent seasons)—then it’s a lot easier to believe. Because a thing about Texas is that looking great isn’t all that new. It’s following up those performances with excellence, or at least adequacy.
I’m a little curious about the Heisman. I don’t think Quinn Ewers could win it, because I think you need to play more games than he’ll have played, but we’re also seeing a UCLA quarterback receive consideration, so the field’s wide open. We’re talking about Stetson Bennett as a contender, like how people used to talk about A.J. McCarron for it when they didn’t have any other ideas. Who’s the best team? Who’s their quarterback? At this point, with Bryce Young also dealing with a shoulder and, again, Dorian Thompson-Robinson in the picture, it’s really C.J. Stroud vs. the field, and if Ohio State does something silly like lose two games in the Big Ten, things are going to open up. Which makes Texas’s curious playoff case sound all the louder. If today’s a Longhorn romp, Texas is going to be healthily inside a lot of top tens, what with the rest of the country scheduling a collection of death matches. And if Texas is inside the top ten, Quinn Ewers is going to get a lot more attention than the Pac-12’s best-player-by-default (I’m sorry, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, you didn’t ask for this).
So, plenty at stake today. If anyone emblemizes the power vacuum Texas left in the space behind Oklahoma in the Big 12 these last five years, it’s Iowa State. Now, Sark and the boys try to restore a natural order to things. A gold mine of hype waits beyond the endzone.
