College Football – UCLA Bruins Maul Texas Longhorns

Every year in college football, there is one weekend that gets dubbed Upset Weekend, wherein several top teams fall to underdog opponents.  This weekend was not Upset Weekend—it was just nearly Upset Weekend, with Alabama only pulling off a win over Arkansas (who at number 10 was only an underdog compared to ’Bama’s number 1) in the last few minutes of the game, Oklahoma coming down to the wire against Cincinnati, LSU almost letting West Virginia get back into the game…but the only team to actually be upset was Texas, who imploded against UCLA and suffered the worst home defeat in Mack Brown’s tenure as head coach (ironically the worst home defeat in Texas history also came at the hands of UCLA, the year before Brown started).

That game was painful to watch, and I feel no shame as a fan of college football in general, in admitting that halfway through the third quarter I flipped to the Alabama/Arkansas game as my primary game, and just checked in on my ’Horns to see if they’d pulled it together yet.  (No was always the answer.) 

I got this text at half-time:  Did TX at least gift-wrap the ball before handing it over like a Christmas present?

Indeed.  I knew going into this season that it would be a growing year, with a new quarterback in Gilbert and a pledge from the off-season to remake the Texas offense into a pro-style offense, away from the spread.  But there’s no excuse for sloppy play two games in a row, especially when they aren’t the first two games of the season. 

The biggest problem with Texas—this was pointed out by my guy, and I think it is spot-on—is that they have the wrong mentality for the kind of offense they are trying to run right now.  If you have a power run game, like the standard SEC offense does, you have to be enthusiastic in your offense.  Treat a six-yard run like a fucking touchdown.  Get off on knocking the d-line in the teeth.  Texas isn’t accustomed to that mentality, and it’s why they’re lackluster on offense.  They have to learn to love that five-yard run on first down as much as they love a 25-yard pass.  They’ve been away from that kind of game for a long time.  Even when Ricky Williams was around, he was getting long runs, Explosive Plays as Texas defines them.  Basing an offense on controlling the line and punching the other team in the gut as you run it for five yards, four yards, seven yards at a time is not at all the same kind of game.  And Texas needs to learn that, and fast, and start taking the victories they get on the line as victories and not as fails because they didn’t move the chains in a single down.  Forget basing offensive play-calling on getting those Explosive Plays.  If you focus on getting the little plays, the big plays will come. 

Moving on to the glorious array of night games last night:  this was the first evening where I really had to struggle with how many great games were on.  LSU/West Virginia, South Carolina/Auburn, Boise State/Oregon State.  I considered going to a bar so I could watch all of them, but with this being Louisiana, of course most of the bars were going to have the LSU game on most of their screens, so in the end it seemed better to kick it at home and just flip channels.

LSU at least won their game, but it was the defense who won it for them.  And LSU’s defense was fun to watch.  Now the Tigers need to get their offense together.  It was painful to listen to the crowd at Death Valley boo Jordan Jefferson—but he was throwing badly.  Again.  Almost every throw.  And while I understand the argument to be made about having one leader on the team and letting him find his path…when you’re four games in, and he’s still shambling around lost in the woods, and you have by all reports a highly competitive alternate in Jarrett Lee—put him in.  And not just for one set of downs in which you run on two of the three plays.  It struck me as being very hard-headed of Miles, to keep sending in Jefferson even when it wasn’t working.  But perhaps hard-headedness is, in the end, Miles’ defining characteristic as a coach.  It worked three years ago in the iconic Florida game where he went for the fourth down five times and got it.  But it’s not working right now.  The SEC may be known as defensive conference, and it is—but what that means is your offense has to be even stronger to win.  I have too many years of watching Texas put in the wrong quarterback over and over again (my formative years of watching Texas ball came when Chris Simms was around) to have much patience for it anymore.  You don’t wait for the wrong QB to dig a hole too deep for the right one to climb out of before you switch them.  So unless Jefferson can get productive or Lee gets a chance to prove that he can’t do any better, I’m withdrawing my emotional investment from LSU this season.

I want to close this out with the one positive thing I came out of last night with:  Boise State.  You know what?  I want them to win out, and win big, and get into the national championship (I doubt there will be two no-loss big conference teams this year).  To hell with it.  Neither of my teams are making the championship; I’ll take a neutral team to cheer for.  Plus we all love a Cinderella story.  This hit me watching the Boise State/Oregon State game when I realized that they were just plain fun to watch.  It’s pretty football.  They play hard, they play big, they play with heart.  It’s certainly not the defensive trench wars that SEC ball is, or the emotional roller coaster that Texas is (for me), and I love that about them.  I can cheer for them, enjoy their games, not feel guilty if they run up the score on a nobody opponent the way I do when a bigger team does (style points matter for Boise where they don’t for a team from a BCS conference).  So go Broncos.  Buck up and win, babies.  Even if get up there and lose, at least we’ll all know you got there.