Instant Analysis: Oklahoma State-Texas

The result didn’t come quite so easily for the Texas Longhorns, but the top-ranked team in college football knows that any march to the national championship requires the ability to survive the Saturdays that fall short of perfection. Against an inspired opponent from Oklahoma State University, the leader of the BCS pack did what it had to do.

Texas received a strong challenge from an opponent who didn’t back down once the Horns powered their way to a 14-point lead. Texas led this game 14-0, 21-7, and 28-14, but the calm and composed Cowboys just kept coming, fighting to the finish in a Big 12 brawl in which the defenses actually stood their ground. Yards proved to be plentiful in Austin—920 yards, in fact—but the scoreboards didn’t sing the way they did in Texas’s previous two triumphs against Oklahoma and Missouri. This tense tilt tested the toughness of Mack Brown’s boys, and although Mike Gundy’s guys never went away, the home team carried the day.

What made this game so fascinating—and the result so impressive for Texas—lay in the fact that quarterback Colt McCoy completed just over 80 percent of his passes (38 of 45), led two more touchdown drives of 90 yards or longer (bringing Texas’s total to five such drives for the season), and had—by comparison—one of his worst games of 2008. The unofficial leader in the Heisman Trophy race continued to make this difficult sport look relatively easy for most of the afternoon, as his offense racked up 504 yards. Yet, his two situational stumbles—a pick and a fumble that kept the Cowboys close--left McCoy’s team vulnerable to an upset loss, the kind of stunning setback that ruins a march to the national title.

Greatness is tested, but also magnified, when teams face a difficult day at the office. An elite squad’s mettle is pushed to the limit, but also revealed, when it confronts a pulse-pounding pressure cooker, the kind of game that emerges when unusual events reduce its margin for error. Oklahoma State has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it can compete with the sport’s elite on even terms. Texas, though, had the final say, as an untiring defense used a red-zone fumble recovery and, later on, a fourth-down stop by defensive end Lamarr Houston—a supremely athletic play on an inside flanker screen with under three minutes left in regulation—to hold off the final charge of the Sons of Stillwater.

Three formidable Big 12 foes have been foiled. Texas will take this close win and carry added confidence to next week’s latest showdown in Lubbock against Texas Tech. If the Longhorns find themselves in another tight tussle, they’ll be able to use today’s narrow win as a calming mechanism when Graham Harrell tries to gun them down. Today’s win over the Cowboys didn’t win a national title, by any stretch of the imagination. But the 28-24 triumph is exactly the stuff magical seasons are made of.