Is Texas done? Red River Rivalry gives Longhorns timely litmus test on whether this season is a bust

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Six weeks ago, Texas was the No. 1 team in the country and Arch Manning presumed to be on a glide path to the Heisman Trophy.

Now the Longhorns’ College Football Playoff hopes are lying on a hospital gurney in need defibrillation, and the pendulum of takes has swung so dramatically against Manning that he enters Saturday’s Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma as something of a sympathetic figure.

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The Athletic’s Will Leitch even went so far as to characterize Manning as “a man synonymous with failure” after seven career starts.

Holy mother of hyperbole.

If you have any appreciation for the history of college football, you should always wait to bury Texas or its counterpart Oklahoma until after they play each other in that annual spectacle at the charmingly outdated Cotton Bowl where the results are often as unpredictable as the constitution of one’s stomach once it’s been filled with an array of deep-fried foods from the Texas State Fair.

“It’s just the most unique setting in college football,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said this week.

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And it will either be exactly what Texas needs to rescue its season from an early eulogy or the nation’s permission slip to do what Leitch and others have already done and declare both Manning and the Longhorns a bust.

But doing it before Red River?

Madness.

Because the history of this game leans heavily toward the unpredictable and sometimes unexplainable. For whatever reason, it’s exceedingly rare for this matchup to play out the way it looks on paper.

Some notable recent examples:

– In 2013, Texas had taken early losses to BYU and Ole Miss, making speculation about Mack Brown’s job the dominant storyline coming into the game. Though he would ultimately get fired at the end of that season, the Longhorns came out that day and dominated an Oklahoma team that was 5-0 and would ultimately finish 11-2. “It’s not about me,” Brown said after Texas’ 36-20 victory. “I want this team to win. I want them to feel like they don’t have pressure.”

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– Two years later, Oklahoma was again unbeaten and in the top 10 while Texas was 1-4 under Charlie Strong and coming directly off a 50-7 loss to TCU. But once again, the Longhorns jumped out to a 14-0 lead and ultimately held on 24-17 to deliver Oklahoma’s only loss before the College Football Playoff. “We needed this,” Strong said as he paraded around the field wearing a golden cowboy hat to mimic the trophy the winner receivers.

– Once again in 2016, everyone expected the struggling Longhorns to get blown out with Oklahoma favored by nearly two touchdowns. But with neither team able to stop the other’s offense, it turned into a bit of a classic and Oklahoma barely held on for a 45-40 win. It was much the same the following year, as the heavily favored Sooners blew a 20-0 lead, then scored with 6:53 remaining for a 29-24 victory.

– Texas was on the right side of another upset in 2018, coming in as a seven-point underdog but leaving with a 48-45 victory as Cameron Dicker made a 40-yard field goal with nine seconds left.

[Team feed news: Texas Longhorns | Oklahoma Sooners]

– Oklahoma was a two-touchdown underdog in the 2020 game after consecutive losses to Kansas State and Iowa State but won a 53-45 track meet in four overtimes.

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– And then once again in 2023, Texas had reached No. 3 in the rankings after some impressive victories, including at Alabama. Though Texas would go on to be the much better team over the course of the season, Oklahoma stunned the Longhorns in the end with quarterback Dillon Gabriel threading the needle for a touchdown and 34-30 victory with 15 seconds remaining.

“I don’t think there’s a better rivalry in all of college football with the pageantry that goes along with it and the passion, the intensity, the history between the two programs,” Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables said. “My first game [in 1999], we got up 17-0 and end up losing and then go on a five-game win streak and there’s just been streaks throughout history. We’ve been on the right side of it for the last 25 years more often than not.”

There are some unusual variables in this game that are perhaps responsible for results that either don’t make sense in the moment or don’t hold up well over time.

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The first, of course, is playing in front of a true 50-50, split-down-the-middle crowd. That doesn’t happen very often in college football. Also, before the SEC’s television partners moved the game to 2:30 p.m. local time last year, the game traditionally kicked at 11 a.m., increasing the likelihood that one team would start slowly. There’s also a unique psychological component for Oklahoma, which traditionally recruits more players from Texas than anywhere.

It also falls at a point in the calendar where, more often than not, one of the teams involved has no choice but to shove all its chips into the middle of the table.

This time, that’s clearly Texas.

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Can the Longhorns reintroduce themselves to the country as contenders after a close-but-tolerable loss to open the season at Ohio State and last week’s surprisingly juice-less 29-21 loss at Florida?

“How many teams are there in college football?” Sarkisian said. “Take the other 135 and have them go play at Ohio State and at the Swamp and see how they do.”

Sarkisian may be right that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem, but it comes off the wrong way when Texas is visually pretty far away from where it’s supposed to be. It’s not just Manning, either; throw in a flailing run game (Manning being the team’s leading rusher is a problem), protection issues and even a defense that isn’t performing up to the standard it set last year and you’ve got the makings of a pile-on.

Which is exactly why Oklahoma comes into this week wary of a Manning breakout. If it’s going to happen, history suggests it’ll probably be this week.

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“Heavy is the crown,” Venables told reporters this week. “That position has to carry a lot of weight, and he’s done it like a champ, in my opinion. That’s who he’s been. He comes from a lineage — it doesn’t guarantee anything — but that’s who they’ve been and so far that’s what I’ve seen. The toughness, the courage, the edginess, the response, all those things are indicative of what I’m talking about.”

Manning did, in fact, make some promising plays toward the end of the Florida game. Sarkisian talked about the grit he showed to take some hits, hang in, and put together a couple long touchdown drives in the second half.

At the same time, when your offensive issues center on inability to protect the quarterback and Manning struggling to process quickly enough to make decisive throws, the last person you want to see on the other sideline is Venables.

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“You can see his footprint all over this defense now,” Sarkisian said.

At 5-0 after finishing 6-7 and overhauling the program last season, Oklahoma is in some ways the more interesting story but the less relevant entity in this game.

Regardless of outcome, the Sooners will have to prove their playoff worthiness in the second half of the season against Ole Miss, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri and LSU.

But for Texas, this feels like a last chance.

Yes, to this point in the season, the Longhorns have made a lot of people look like fools. But until the final whistle blows on the 121st edition of college football’s most unpredictable rivalry, counting out the Longhorns or Manning is begging to be made into a fool for a second time.

This news was originally published on this post .

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