ARLINGTON, Texas — Vegas may have the Buckeyes favored over the Longhorns by nearly a touchdown, but Texas coach Steve Sarkisian doesn’t like to think of his team as the underdog in Friday night’s national semifinal game against Ohio State.
“We don’t talk that way,” Sarkisian said Thursday. “And the reality of it is you don’t get any points for being an underdog. You don’t get to (say), ‘Hey, we lost by five, you win.’ It doesn’t work like that in our world. You either win or you lose the game.
“So, our job is to put forth maximum effort with great attention to detail to make sure we’re in the right mental frame of mind to compete and then ultimately perform — and to perform in those critical moments.”
Though Sarkisian used coach-speak to explain something that’s a bit more complicated than that, he’s not wrong. Texas knows if it is able to prepare and then execute at its absolute best, it will have a shot to win this game. (It’d certainly help if the version of Ohio State that shows up at AT&T Stadium looked more like the one that played Michigan and not the kind that trounced Tennessee and Oregon.)
But there are legitimate questions facing these Longhorns, and the answers will determine whether they advance to the College Football Playoff national championship game. Is the defense for real or have the past two games shown it to be closer to a mirage? Can Texas actually finish a game strong?
The Longhorns outplayed Georgia for much of the first half of the SEC championship game but had drives stall out in the red zone. Still, Texas led at halftime before the Dawgs came back and eventually won in overtime behind backup quarterback Gunner Stockton.
Against Clemson, Texas allowed 24 points and 412 yards of offense; Tigers quarterback Cade Klubnik threw for 336 yards and three touchdowns in the losing effort.
Against Arizona State, Texas allowed 31 points (24 in regulation, seven more in overtime) and an astounding 510 total yards of offense. Cam Skattebo and co. rushed for 214 yards while the Longhorns as a team tallied just 53 rushing yards and struggled to sustain drives. Through four quarters, Arizona State possessed the ball nearly 38 minutes and ran 94 total plays; Texas’ defense could not get off the field. And, of course, Texas was one fourth-down stop away from losing to the Sun Devils in a massive upset.
The Longhorns’ defense had been among the best in the nation in all of the major categories for the entire season. The secondary in particular is considered elite. But if the Texas defense looks more like it did the past two games than it did all regular season, it’s going to struggle mightily to contain Ohio State’s quick-strike offense, which boasts two of the best receivers in the country in Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka.
“I just hope we’re good enough to guard them,” Sarkisian said. “These guys are really good players. We’ll find out.”
We’ll also soon find out who wins the chess match between Sarkisian the elite playcaller and Jim Knowles, the architect of a Buckeye defense that tallied eight (!) sacks of Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel in the quarterfinals. Ohio State pressured Gabriel routinely despite blitzing relatively infrequently.
And now it’s Quinn Ewers’ turn to go up against this defense, an unenviable task. But he’ll have right tackle Cameron Williams back in the lineup after suffering an injury in the first-round game against Clemson, which should help both with pass protection and Texas’ ability to run the ball against the “ferocious” Buckeye front, as Sarkisian put it.
Still, it’s clear that a lot will need to go right for Texas to win this game against the hottest team in the Playoff. Maybe Sarkisian doesn’t like to acknowledge the reality of life as an underdog, but the rest of us can and will.
“In this format, it’s not always about who was the best team for 12 games — it’s who’s playing the best football this time of the year,” Sarkisian said as his final pregame news conference. “I think we could all agree what coach (Ryan) Day has done, their team, them coming out of that Michigan game and what they’ve been able to do since the Playoff has started has been tremendous.
“I could probably poll everybody in this room and you’d probably all agree that they’re the favorite to win the game, and that’s OK. That’s football. That’s sport. That’s why we have to do what we do. I’m not going to back off of what I said. The reality is the reality. Now, we have to go perform.”
