Longhorns Football | Five Questions TCU

By Steve Habel/Associate Editor

Sponsored By:

If there’s one overwhelming difference between Texas and TCU it’s that the Horned Frogs know exactly what kind of team they are; the Longhorns football team, on the other hand, are still trying to figure that out.

That fundamental dissimilarity — along with six Texas turnovers, five of which set the table for TCU points — spelled doom for the Longhorns. Texas lost 48-10 to No. 6 TCU on Nov. 27 before an announced Thanksgiving night crowd of 96,496 at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.

Texas’ chances of pulling an upset were[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] intercepted and fumbled away to a TCU team hungry to make a move and vie for a possible spot in the four-team College Football Playoff.

Fans certainly won’t hear head coach Charlie Strong argue about the Horned Frogs’ ability to win big.

“TCU has a good football team,” Strong said afterward, his body language clearly indicating defeat and disappointment at how his team played on Senior Night. “Whenever you play a team like that, you have to play clean and we didn’t do that tonight.

“I just didn’t see that coming,” he added. “We played well up to this point and, knowing what was at stake, I felt we would’ve played a lot better.”

Tyrone Swoopes had his worst game as Texas’ starting quarterback, throwing four interceptions (including a pick-six) and fumbling after a sack, which led to a return touchdown.

“I couldn’t get into any kind of rhythm and I knew I wasn’t playing well,” Swoopes said. “Turning the ball over is never good and it got to me. I couldn’t get back up and get going again.”

With the loss, the Longhorns finished the regular season at 6-6 and 5-4 in Big 12 play. All the confidence Texas gained from a three-game winning streak in November to become bowl eligible was quickly erased by the poor game it played against the powerful Horned Frogs (10-1, 7-1 in Big 12).

“We came in here to win a ballgame — we didn’t come here for anything else,” TCU coach Gary Patterson said. “We got some takeaways and did some things we needed to do to win. If you had asked [before the game] if it was going to be 48-10 in Austin, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Texas and its supporters are having a hard time believing it, too. It was the first time the Longhorns had six turnovers in game since a 48-24 loss at Baylor in 2011. And it’s the first time Texas has lost at home to Baylor and TCU in the same season since 1933.

TCU converted a 53-yard punt return by Cameron Echols-Luper into a 42-yard field goal by Jaden Oberkrom on its first possession. Although the field goal was the lesser of two evils, the drive set the tone for the remainder of the game.

Later in the first quarter a Swoopes interception by Sam Carter allowed the Horned Frogs to set up shop at the Texas 24. Fortunately Texas’ defense stiffened and forced another Oberkrom kick, this one from 29 yards out, and held TCU to a 6-0 advantage.

Another Swoopes mistake handed the Horned Frogs their first touchdown. Carrying the ball loosely in traffic with TCU’s Josh Carraway attempting to bring him down, Swoopes fumbled. The football took one bounce on the turf before it was scooped up by Terrell Lathan and returned 40 yards for a touchdown and a 13-0 Horned Frogs lead.

Texas finally got on the board in the second quarter when it had its best drive of the half, moving 36 yards in nine plays to a 47-yard Nick Rose field goal. But even that successful possession had its own hiccup. The Longhorns were set up to go for a first down on 4^th-and-1 at the 25 until they were whistled for a false start penalty, forcing Strong to reconsider his strategy.

The Longhorns’ defense allowed just one significant drive in the first half (nine plays, 67 yards) that resulted in a 4-yard scoring pass from Trevone Boykin to David Porter with 1:34 to play before halftime.

The drive’s two biggest plays came on third downs — the first a 38-yard hookup from Boykin to Josh Doctson (who jumped over Texas cornerback Quandre Diggs to make the catch) and the second was the touchdown pass. Porter worked a double move in the back of the end zone against Texas’ former walk-on safety Dylan Haines to make the catch.

Texas’ defense managed to keep TCU out of the end zone in the third quarter despite two more Swoopes’ interceptions, the second of which came in the waning seconds of the quarter at the Texas 18-yard line. The Longhorns managed just 38 total yards of offense in the quarter.

Early in the fourth quarter TCU made any comeback for the Longhorns a lost proposition when Boykin hit Doctson with the pair’s second scoring connection, this time from 22 yards out.

The pass was a jump ball over Diggs.

A bit of the Longhorns’ future was on display on Texas’ ensuing drive, when freshman Armanti Foreman took a short pass from Swoopes for a 73-yard touchdown while showing off his blazing speed.

After a TCU punt bounced off Diggs’ right foot midway through the fourth quarter, the Horned Frogs needed just three plays to drive 19 yards for an in-your-face touchdown — a 10-yard run by Boykin in which he hurdled a Texas defender on the way into the end zone.

TCU pushed the lead to 41-10 on a 5-yard Aaron Green touchdown run at the 2:53 mark of the fourth quarter and added insult to injury when Carraway picked off a Swoopes pass and returned it 33 yards for a final score.

 

1. Why has Swoopes not taken a major step forward?

In college football, if you’re not moving forward, you’re left behind. That scenario finally caught up with the Longhorns against TCU, a team that plays physical football on every down and forces the quarterback out of his comfort zone. To beat the Horned Frogs, Swoopes needed to make unexpected plays.

He couldn’t, and part of the reason is that Swoopes hasn’t had the normal competitive push in practice like every other player — there’s little to no chance he’ll be replaced if he doesn’t perform.

It’s a no-win scenario for Swoopes, who was thrown into the fire when starter Davis Ash quit football because of continuing symptoms from a series of concussions. Swoopes was likely not ready to become “the guy” on a rebuilding team under a new staff, but there was no other choice.

Some have called for freshman Jerrod Heard to replace Swoopes but Shawn Watson, Texas’ assistant head coach for offense and quarterbacks, outlined the reasons why this has yet to happen.

“One of the biggest things that [needs to happen] for Swoopes and our future here is competition,” Watson explained. “That helps a quarterback grow. You need it in your classroom. You need to have people here to push the classroom, because when the quarterback’s right, the team’s right. The only way you get that is by having competition in your classroom.”

According to Watson, as a freshman, Heard has yet to provide that competition in the classroom.

Swoopes hit on 20 of his 34 passes against TCU — ironically the exact same numbers produced by Boykin — for 200 yards, with 73 of those yards coming on the short pass that Foreman turned into a stirring touchdown. His longest pass outside that was a 13-yarder to Johnathan Gray.

 

2. Who did TCU attack on the Texas defense?

The Horned Frogs went after Diggs and exposed him as an undersized corner.

The stats show that Diggs led Texas in tackles (nine) because TCU targeted him. Twice he had key passes thrown over him to the 6’4” Doctson. Diggs also dropped an interception that was thrown right to him in the fourth quarter — three plays before a punt bounced off his foot and turned into a fumble that was recovered by the Horned Frogs.

Diggs, never one to shy away from responsibility, made no bones about the fact that he felt like he had let his team down.

“There’s nobody to blame but myself. I’m a man and I accept that and will move forward,” he said. “I’m a competitor and it hurts that I had the chance to make some plays that could have made a difference. It happens, you know? As a defensive back, you’ll have those days and today was my day.”

Strong said that the lack of execution shook Diggs’ confidence.

“When that happens to you, you have to have short memory,” Strong explained. “[Diggs] didn’t. He let it bother him. He didn’t play with the juice that he’s used to playing with, or the enthusiasm he usually has.”

 

3. How did the Longhorns’ senior class respond in its final home game?

Texas feted 32 seniors in a ceremony prior to the game. Of those, a handful of players were among the team’s leaders against TCU.

Malcolm Brown led the Longhorns’ running backs with 29 yards on 11 carries and caught four passes for 33 yards. John Harris was Texas’ leader in receptions (five for 39 yards) and became just the sixth receiver in school history to have 1,000 receiving yards in a single season.

Punter William Russ shared duties with fellow senior Michael Davidson and the two combined for nine kicks for a 40.4 -yard average.

Six seniors recorded tackles against TCU, including Diggs (nine), Steve Edmond and Cedric Reed (six), Mykkele Thompson (five) and Jordan Hicks (four).

“Senior Night is always emotional, especially when guys put so much into a program. You would like it to work in the right way for them,” Strong said. “It’s the last time they’ll run out of the tunnel — this is it for them. I saw this team at 2-4 and 3-5 and it was the seniors who stepped up and got us to [win] No. 6.”

 

4. What’s the state of the Texas program after the first regular season under Strong and his staff?

The Longhorns are certainly a better team than they showed against TCU — and the Horned Frogs had much to do with that — but they’re nowhere near ready to rack up wins against the Big 12’s upper echelon on a regular basis, much less be part of any national “best of” equation.

“We have to get better,” Strong said. “You can’t look at 6-6 and say you made improvement. We have to do a better job of coaching and we just have to play better.”

“It’s all about managing the game,” he added. “It’s all about looking at yourself and making sure we have this team ready to go. We have to get this program back to where it needs to be. We’ll get it back there.”

 

5. What’s next for the Longhorns?

The Longhorns will have to wait to see which team they’ll face in their bowl game. Despite the fans’ call for a matchup between Texas and Texas A&M in the AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl in Houston, a more likely scenario will send Texas to Memphis to play Arkansas in the AutoZone Liberty Bowl on Dec. 29.

“For some players, it’s the last [game] — they’ll never play again,” Strong said. “This is going to be the test of how well we can get this team ready heading into the bowl season.”

Texas has a month to stew about its performance on Turkey Day and to figure out how to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

“I’m still confident — you can’t let games like this one ruin the next game,” Brown said. “You need to learn from it, watch film, see what you did wrong and move on. We just need to go get a ‘W’ in this bowl game.”

[/s2If] [s2If !current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [article-offer] [/s2If]