Horns look to ‘different’ challenge against BYU

By Steve Habel

Horns Illustrated Associate Editor

The days following Texas’s season-opening 56-7 win against outmanned and overmatched New Mexico State have been spent lamenting how the Horns could have beaten the Aggies even worse and how UT’s slow start will be indicative – or not – of the team we will see the next 12 games.

The bottom line is that, yes, Texas could have blown out NM State earlier by making fewer mistakes.

It’s also true that no matter how impressive the Horns played once they got rolling,  [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]  there’s little likelihood that we will see such a scintillating eight-minute stretch of dominance (when the Horns scored five touchdowns, four of them covering 54 yards or more) as we did when Texas found its stride and blew past the hapless Aggies late in the second and early in the third quarter.

Things will change – a lot – this Saturday when the Horns travel to the Wasatch Mountains of Utah to play a BYU team that lost 19-16 to Virginia last Saturday in a driving rainstorm in Charlottesville.

Where NM State was young, inexperienced and soft (and has little or no tradition of success), BYU is just the opposite – older (hey, there are some guys on the Cougars’ roster that are 24-years old), chockfull of players who’ve seen it all and are hard and tough.

“We made some mistakes in the first game but they didn’t really affect the outcome because we were playing a team that was an inferior opponent,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “We can’t make those kinds of mistakes against BYU – they are too talented and too well-coached for us to overcome some of the things we did the other night.”

The Cougars, which got 144 rushing yards on 33 carries from workhorse running back Jamaal Williams and led until the final minutes, also made un-BYUlike mistakes, taking a safety and having a punt blocked. Expect the Cougars to be sky-high and bent on redemption (both for their opening-game loss and for the 17-16 loss Texas laid on them in 2011).

Both teams played plenty of young players in that matchup two seasons ago, and those underclassmen make up the meat of the two teams’ respective rosters this time around.

“We know that what to expect from BYU,” Texas guard Trey Hopkins said. “We can’t expect those guys to take even one step back, and everything we get we will have to fight for. It will be a great opportunity to show how we have grown as a team.”

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