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    Jeff Howe
    When Davon Booth reeled in a shovel pass from Blake Shapen and weaved through a beleaguered Texas defense for a 62-yard touchdown, which gave Mississippi State a 38-21 lead with 12:29 to go in the fourth quarter of Saturday’s game in Starkville, I thought about 2010.
    Mack Brown’s program carried the weight of a BCS title game loss to Alabama into a season that began with sky-high expectations. Will Muschamp’s defense did what it could to keep the Longhorns afloat, but Greg Davis' listless offense turned the football over enough that the dam eventually broke.
    Fifteen years later, the fate of Steve Sarkisian’s club was all but sealed.
    The 2010 squad went from a 13-1 juggernaut in 2009 to a 5-7 dumpster fire. Even with a win over Oklahoma sandwiched between road losses to Ohio State and Florida, and last Saturday's 16-13 overtime road win over Kentucky, it felt like the 2025 group was headed in the same direction.
    The offense consistently shooting itself in the foot allowed the defense, which was gashed time and again by the Bulldogs, to be overexposed.
    Nevertheless, Deonte Anderson’s personal foul penalty for roughing Arch Manning on a failed fourth-and-1 on the ensuing possession after Booth’s touchdown changed everything.
    With the drive still alive, Manning connected with Emmett Mosley V for a 21-yard touchdown with 9:34 left in regulation, kickstarting a run of 31 unanswered points. Manning went 12-for-20 for 169 yards and two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, persevering through another game in which he was under constant pressure and got little to no relief from a virtually non-existent running game (72 net yards on 32 carries, including the five times Manning was sacked, which lost a total of 29 yards).
    Less than two minutes after Mason Shipley made it a 10-point game with a 26-yard field goal, Ryan Niblett took advantage of Ethan Pulliam's booming 57-yard punt. Pulliam outkicked his coverage down the middle of the field, paving the way for Niblett's game-tying 79-yard touchdown.
    The defense, as it did in last Saturday’s overtime victory over the Wildcats in Lexington, allowed only one first down after the Shapen-to-Booth touchdown, ending a miraculous 45-38 triumph on Ethan Burke’s fourth-and-20 walk-off sack in overtime. The stop came on the heels of Matthew Caldwell making the most of his lone pass attempt, relieving an injured Manning and lofting a 10-yard touchdown to Mosley on second-and-8 in overtime.
    Texas (6-2, 3-1 SEC) defied logic by rallying from 17 points down in the fourth quarter to win. The Longhorns were dead in the water. The on-field meltdown coming on the same day that off-field news surrounding Sarkisian’s future on the Forty Acres dominated the pregame chatter ahead of the team’s fourth consecutive game away from Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium created a perfect storm for a program to be in complete and utter turmoil at the final gun.
    Instead, Sarkisian and the staff will get ready for Texas to welcome a good Vanderbilt team to town next Saturday with all of the team’s season-long goals on the table.
    The Longhorns will head home from Starkville with blemishes that could prevent them from reaching their preferred destination. Chief among them is the health of Manning, who had to be helped off the field after taking a shot at the end of a 13-yard run on the first play of overtime, abruptly ending a day in which he threw for 346 yards and accounted for four touchdowns (three passing and one rushing).
    Nevertheless, Texas is done with a month’s worth of football games played away from home with only one SEC loss on the ledger. Unlike the 2010 Longhorns, Sarkisian’s club is bowl eligible and had enough about it to escape two road games with a pair of too-close-for-comfort victories.
    That’s the bottom line. Texas won back-to-back overtime road games it had little to no business winning.
    It remains to be seen what becomes of a season that started with talk of a return to the College Football Playoff and a possible national championship run. For now, Longhorn fans should take comfort in the fact that this team, as flawed as it is, had enough about it to pull out two wins that could’ve easily gone the other way.
    Jeff Howe
    LEXINGTON, Ky. — Texas won a football game on Saturday.
    That’s almost the full extent of the positives from a sobering 16-13 overtime win over a lowly Kentucky squad at Lexington’s Kroger Field.
    A team shouldn’t apologize for winning a road game in the SEC. Still, Steve Sarkisian’s offense put up a putrid performance, so much so that it nearly wasted an outstanding night on special teams and a defensive effort that, while not dominant, saw the Longhorns dig deep enough on the 86th official snap they defended to finish off a goal-line stand.
    “I always feel like, once a year, you have a culture win where the game is not pretty, but the team — because the team is so close — finds a way to win the game,” Sarkisian said. “Tonight, these guys found a way to win when the game was sliding in the wrong direction. So, absolute credit to our defense. What a tremendous goal-line stand in overtime. What a tremendous job by our special teams — Mason [Shipley], Jack [Bouwmeester], Ryan Niblett, that punt return unit — and the way they played in that phase of the game.”
    The 179 yards of total offense Texas (5-2, 2-1 SEC) posted is the lowest single-game total for the program since a 2015 season-opening loss to Notre Dame.
    Shawn Watson’s offense tallied 163 total yards in the first game of Charlie Strong’s second season, finishing a woeful night in South Bend with an average of 3.1 yards per play with only eight first downs to their credit. Tyrone Swoopes slugged his way to a 7-for-22 night, throwing the football for 93 yards.
    The Longhorns averaged 3.3 yards per play on Saturday. The offense’s anemic production matched the per-play output in a 2022 loss to TCU for the second-worst for a Sarkisian offense on the Forty Acres, trailing only the 3.2 yards per play Texas averaged in a 2021 loss to Iowa State.
    Furthermore, after a low-penalty game against Oklahoma, the offense had two critical infractions late in the game. Those errors contributed to 24 of the Longhorns’ 55 plays coming on passing downs (second-and-8 or longer and third and fourth down with a to-go distance of five or more yards) and 12 plays from scrimmage (not counting two kneel-downs by Manning) that went for no gain or lost yardage.
    “We do some things that are, obviously, very frustrating,” said Sarkisian, whose offense faced six third downs with nine or more yards needed to convert (5-for-16 on third-down attempts). “You get a hold on the first play of overtime. You get a false start in the fourth quarter when we're trying to put the game away. We catch a pass with a minute to go and we go out of bounds without getting the first down, or stay in-bounds and make them use the other timeout. There's little things that we're not doing offensively. We miss open throws. Clearly, I'm not calling enough stuff for our guys to feel good about what we're doing."
    On Saturday, Sarkisian’s offense had half as many three-and-outs (4) as first downs (8).
    Arch Manning, who has been sacked 13 times in four games against Power Four competition, had to try and make something out of nothing too often while, once again, facing an absurd amount of pressure. The Wildcats harassed Manning in 15 of his 32 dropbacks, according to Pro Football Focus, accounting for a 46.9 percent pressure rate.
    When he had time to throw, Manning’s 12-for-27 outing (132 yards) was eerily reminiscent of his performance against UTEP earlier in the season, making this game another that was marred by poor execution and numerous missed opportunities.
    “We've got to find ways to get him more completions,” Sarkisian said of Manning, who was 4-for-9 for 51 yards on third down. One of Manning’s four third-down completions was a 9-yard strike to DeAndre Moore Jr. on a third-and-7 en route to Shipley’s game-tying field goal late in the fourth quarter.
    “There’s some good things there, but there’s some layups that we’ve got to hit for him, too, and that he needs to hit,” Sarkisian said. “We need to find more of those opportunities for him.”
    After the 2015 loss to the Fighting Irish, Strong stripped Watson of play-calling duties and Swoopes was benched in favor of Jerrod Heard. Sarkisian isn’t going to demote himself and he admitted afterward that he didn’t entertain the idea of sitting Manning for a stretch and going with Matthew Caldwell.
    Still, comparing Saturday’s offensive showing against a Kentucky (2-3, 0-3) defense that came into the game allowing 192.7 rushing yards per game in SEC play side by side with a 38-3 bludgeoning at the hands of Notre Dame, a team whose two regular-season losses came to top-12 opponents on the road by a total of four points, frames the historically horrific nature of the offense's attempt to build on their efficient, productive afternoon in last Saturday’s win over Oklahoma.
    Thankfully, Texas continues to put up a united front. The defensive leaders chose to prop the offense up rather than throw the other side of the ball under the bus.
    Even when Sarkisian said the Longhorns’ identity is centered around the defense and kicking game, Colin Simmons, who had three sacks and a forced fumble in the win, felt his coach must've misspoke.
    “We're a team. We're a whole team,” Simmons said. “It ain't just defense and special teams. It's defense, special teams and offense. We've got the offense's back. The offense has got our back and the special teams got both of our backs.”
    Anthony Hill Jr., who had a game-high 12 tackles and notched his first interception of the season, said the defense understands how much it must help the offense right now. Hill indicated the defense is comfortable carrying the load, specifically because Pete Kwiatkowski’s group has the talent, experience and leadership to get the job done.
    “We know we're very young on that side,” Hill said of the offense. “We've got a lot of older guys on defense, so we want to help them out and just keep lifting them up and keep pushing them because we know their time is coming.”
    Even though the Texas offense’s ceiling is significantly lower than anyone expected, a repeat of Saturday’s performance will all but guarantee another loss, especially with the upcoming uptick in competition.
    The offense can't be expected to evolve into a juggernaut. Still, an identity in which winning the field position battle and counting on the defense to keep the opponent’s point total down is the path to victory won’t get Texas anywhere if the offense continues to drag the other two phases down.
    The defense and the punt team could’ve secured one of Kentucky's four combined fumbles. The Wildcats' 7-for-18 night on third down extended too many drives in which the Texas defense had a chance to get off the field.
    Nevertheless, the offense was so bad on Saturday that the Longhorns needed the defense to be elite and the kicking game to be virtually flawless to win. While the bar doesn’t appear to be set very high for what the offense must do to carry its weight, their ability to clear it (and by how much) will determine what becomes of the 2025 season.
    “If our style of game and our style of play is that we're going to play hard-nosed football and we're going to play great on defense and great on special teams, we need to be more efficient on offense with the opportunities that we get,” Sarkisian said. “That's what we need to do offensively, is we've got to minimize the self-inflicted wounds and become more efficient.
    “We just… We weren't efficient enough tonight.”
    Jeff Howe
    LEXINGTON, Ky. — A goal-line stand by the defense and Mason Shipley’s third field goal of the night helped No. 21 Texas avoid a staggering upset on Saturday with a 16-13 overtime road win over Kentucky at Kroger Field.
    On Texas Football has live coverage of the postgame press conference with coach Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns.
    Jeff Howe
    On the eve of No. 21 Texas attempting to build on winning last Saturday’s 23-6 fist fight with Oklahoma when it faces Kentucky on the road (6 p.m., ESPN), what Colin Simmons said on Monday stands out as the theme of the week for Steve Sarkisian’s team.
    Texas (4-2, 1-1 SEC) wants its suffocation of the Sooners to be the jumping-off point to a prosperous second half of the regular season. Coming off of his most productive game of the season (five tackles and 2.5 sacks), Simmons, who was named SEC Co-Defensive Lineman of the Week for his performance in the win over Oklahoma, was blunt in his response when asked about the challenge of maintaining the mental approach the Longhorns carried into the Red River Shootout.
    “Well, I'll let you know this right now: We're not here for the emotional roller coaster. We're not here to go up and down,” Simmons said. “We're only here to go up and be consistent.”
    Simmons, along with the other Texas players who met with the media on Monday, and Sarkisian referred to Saturday’s meeting with the Wildcats as “an SEC Championship Game.” While that might sound disingenuous on the surface, the mantra speaks to the Longhorns' understanding that a loss to Kentucky (2-3, 0-3) would all but put an end to their hopes of returning to Atlanta for the second consecutive season.
    A start to Saturday’s game that mirrors what happened when Texas got itself into an early 10-0 hole in Gainesville on Oct. 4 (Florida hung on for a 29-21 win that knocked the Longhorns out of the Associated Press Top 25) is one from which the Longhorns might not recover. Mark Stoops has had better teams than the one he’ll lead onto Kroger Field. Still, the Wildcats’ potential to successfully utilize a ground-and-pound style of offense (Kentucky averages 159.4 yards per game and 4.22 yards per attempt on the ground) is the kind of attack capable of protecting a lead.
    According to College Football Data, the Wildcats average 3.2 line yards per carry, which ranks fifth in the SEC. According to the metric, which distributes a percentage of the credit for an offense’s rushing yards to the offensive line, the Kentucky offensive line gets the job done in the running game better than all but four lines in the conference.
    For all of the talk about the Texas offense needing to start fast, the defense’s job is just as important in that regard.
    “We've got to come out and stop the run,” defensive tackle Hero Kanu said on Monday. “That's, obviously, the mindset we’ve got to have.”
    In the loss to the Gators, Florida gained 94 of its 159 rushing yards in the first quarter. If the Longhorns can replicate what it did against the Sooners — the defense allowed only 80 sack-adjusted rushing yards (3.2 yards per attempt) and, once Texas grabbed the lead in the second half, turned up the heat on John Mateer to the tune of five sacks — it will go a long way toward making sure the team returns home with all of its goals intact.
    “We've got to force them to have third-and-longs,” Kanu said. “We've got to stop them on first and second down. That's really the mindset we have and we know what we've got to do.”
    Jeff Howe
    Texas replicating exactly what it did while choking the life out of Oklahoma en route to winning the Red River Shootout for the third time in four years is a formula capable of giving the Longhorns a chance to win their six remaining regular-season games.
    Specifically, Texas (4-2, 1-1 SEC) would love the manner in which it manhandled the Sooners in the second half to carry over to the back half of the schedule, which begins with Saturday’s road game against Kentucky (6 p.m., ESPN).
    After trailing Oklahoma at halftime, 6-3, the Longhorns recorded a 20-0 edge on the scoreboard in the second half. Texas had a 188-88 advantage in total yards, racked up 91 net yards and averaged 3.8 yards per attempt on the ground and got a near-flawless performance from Arch Manning (11-for-13, 97 yards and a touchdown).
    Pete Kwiatkowski’s defense held Oklahoma’s offense to a combined 1-for-10 effort on third and fourth down and an average of 2.9 yards per play after halftime. A defense that failed to record a sack in losses to Ohio State and Florida got to John Mateer five times, with constant pressure (according to Pro Football Focus, Mateer was pressured on 17 of his 47 dropbacks), contributing to the quarterback’s three interceptions.
    Steve Sarkisian’s club “showed a lot of maturity and mental toughness and resolve and then, ultimately, imposing our will as the game went on,” he said during his press conference on Monday. Now, with Saturday’s trip to Lexington looming, the internal challenge is building on the process that led to the team’s success in Dallas.
    “Do we get right back to those same habits that we had last week?” Sarkisian said. “With the intent, with the sense of urgency, making every rep count in practice and then playing the brand and a style of football that we're very proud of, which is a physical one?”
    For Texas to continue being a team that can finish strong, the Longhorns must start becoming one that gets off to faster starts. When analyzing the first three drives for Texas and its opponents in the team’s three games against Power Four competition, the Longhorns have made a habit of putting themselves behind the 8-ball.
    Texas’ starts against the Power Four: Three games, nine total possessions
    Texas
    Points: 7
    Total Offense: 45 plays, 178 net yards (3.96 yards per play)
    Rushing: 23 carries, 68 yards (2.96 yards per attempt)
    Passing: 15-for-22, 110 yards
    Third Down: 1-for-10
    First Downs: 8
    Penalties: Nine for 85 yards
    Opponents
    Points: 20
    Total Offense: 68 plays, 344 yards (5.06 yards per play)
    Rushing: 36 carries, 152 yards (4.22 yards per attempt)
    Passing: 18-for-31, 191 yards, one interception
    Third Down: 7-for-13
    First Downs: 21
    Penalties: One for five yards
    The win over the Sooners was a microcosm of the Longhorns' early-game struggles.
    For starters, penalties and negative plays plagued their first three possessions. When the dust settled on those drives, Texas mustered only 40 total yards (3.1 yards per play) and was 0-for-3 on third down while facing a minus-6 play differential (19 snaps for Oklahoma to 13 for the Longhorns).
    When the offense took the field facing a 6-0 deficit with 9:09 remaining on the clock, Texas got it together.
    A 12-play, 75-yard drive took 4:40 off the clock and ended with a 39-yard Mason Shipley field goal, allowing the Longhorns to break through on the scoreboard. On that series, Texas wasn’t assessed a penalty and, although Quintrevion Wisner was dropped for a 1-yard loss one play after he burned the Sooner defense for 37 yards, Manning’s third-and-10 completion to DeAndre Moore Jr. for 14 yards on third-and-10 was the first of two third-down conversions on the drive.
    In short, the Longhorns proved that they’re capable of playing complementary football against a formidable opponent.
    “It's like, 'Guys, can we just execute a little bit and move forward?’ Third-and-6 is a heck of a lot better than third-and-12 or third-and-23 or third-and-whatever. Just give ourselves a chance,” Sarkisian said. “Then, when they start to figure out, 'Hey, this is a lot easier,' Arch is like, 'Wait, this is a lot easier.'
    "Then what happened? The penalties, all of a sudden, went away," he added. "We're more productive. We have a 12-play drive, a 14-play drive, a 10-play drive — we're controlling the ball. The defense is getting their rest. They're playing with a little bit more energy on defense. That's where the complimentary football piece comes into play.”
    To build on the win over Oklahoma, and for Texas to avoid getting into a hole against the Wildcats, Sarkisian needs his squad to get into a rhythm and play successfully off each other a lot earlier than it’s taken them to get settled.
    “We have to be able to take things throughout the week — and then on Friday — that we say, 'Hey, these are going to be things we're going to open the game with, and we've got to execute those things with confidence.' We did it better later in the game than we actually did earlier in the game, so we've got to do a better job as a staff to instill that in them, for them to understand that this is what's going to get called — we don't need to have any anxiety. We had too many breakdowns early in the game, for my liking. That's an area where we have to improve. We should be starting games better than we have been and we need to do that. We've got to — as a staff — find a better way to instill that in those guys.”
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