By Steve Habel, Senior Editor
AUSTIN, Texas — Remember all the good feelings that surrounded the Texas football team last weekend in the hours after the Longhorns beat West Virginia to earn the chance to play in a bowl for the first time since 2014?
All those warm and fuzzies were vaporized in a 14-minute, 23-second span of the fourth quarter Friday as Texas Tech’s Nic Shimonek came off the bench to throw two touchdown passes, including the game-winner with 1:47 to play, to lift the Red Raiders to a gut-punch 27-23 victory over Texas in a wild Big 12 Conference game at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.
The win made the Red Raiders (6-6 overall, 3-6 in Big 12 play) eligible for a bowl game and likely saved the job of coach Kliff Kingsbury. It had been [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]rumored that Kingsbury’s team, which went 5-7 last season, had to beat Texas and earn a bowl for him to return for another year on the South Plains.
The Tech win was the Longhorns’ own fault as much as it was Shimonek’s credit. UT had four second-half turnovers — two fumbles and two interceptions — and those are the kind of mistakes a team that is fighting for everything it can get can find too difficult to overcome.
“We’re not at a point right now in out program’s development where we can overcome four turnovers in one half and expect to win a football game,” Texas coach Tom Herman said. “In the second half we put our defense in some really bad situations. They continued to respond save for the last, when we just ran out of gas, ran out of momentum.
“Losing that way hurts. We’ve got to find a way to play smarter, better, consistently.”
The loss denied the Longhorns (6-6, 5-4 in Big 12) a chance to clinch their first winning season since 2013. Texas still can achieve that milestone with a win in its bowl game.
Tech trailed, 23-13, in the opening minute of the fourth quarter when Shimonek, who despite being eighth in FBS in passing yardage spent the first three quarters on the bench, engineered a six-play, 75-yard touchdown march, with the score coming on a 13-yard pass to T.J. Vasher that brought the Red Raiders to within three points, at 23-20.
Shimonek then passed Texas Tech into the lead by hitting Cameron Batson with a 16-yard touchdown throw with 1:47 to play. The touchdown came after the Red Raiders’ Justus Parker intercepted Texas quarterback Sam Ehlinger and returned the pick 55 yards to the UT 14.
“You know, Nic was feeling it and came up to me and said ‘you’re about to run out of time,’ so we put him in,” Kingsbury said. “It was as clutch a performance as I’ve ever seen. He had no fear. He cut it loose and won us a game.”
Texas stuck first, using machine-like precision to move 75 yards in just four plays to a 27-yard touchdown pass from Ehlinger to Armanti Foreman. The Longhorns began the drive with a pass from wide receiver Lil’Jordan Humphrey to Ehlinger that gained 27 yards and set the tone for the game.
The Red Raiders answered late in the first quarter when quarterback McLane Carter ran 1 yard for a touchdown at the end of an 81-yard march that featured two receptions by Keke Coutee for 68 of those yards. Texas Tech added a 32-yard field goal by Clayton Hatfield on the second snap of the second quarter to move to a 10-7 lead.
The Longhorns’ Joshua Rowland tied the game at 10 with a 20-yard field goal with 8:07 to play in the second quarter after Texas used 14 plays to drive just 37 yards to the Tech 1-yard line but couldn’t punch it into the end zone.
Texas reassumed the lead on its ensuing possession on a 9-yard scoring run by Daniel Young. The touchdown came on the first play after Kris Boyd intercepted Carter and returned the pickoff 41 yards.
Late in the second quarter, Davante Davis nabbed the Longhorns’ second interception of the half to set the table for Rowland’s 19-yard field goal with 9 seconds left in the half, staking Texas to a 20-10 lead at intermission.
Hatfield cut the lead to 20-13 on the first possession of the third quarter with a 34-yard field goal at the end of an 11-play, 54-yard drive. Rowland responded with a 40-yard field goal with 14:23 to play to re-establish its 10-point advantage. Then Shimonek entered and the game flip-flopped to the Red Raiders.
“We certainly felt like we had a lot of momentum,” Herman said. “We still will once the sting of this wears off. We kept fighting. We’ll keep fighting through the bowl season.”
The Longhorns will have to wait until after the Big 12 Conference championship game to find out the bowl game in which they will play. UT can finish no better than tied for fourth in the final conference standings, and at 6-6 would be tied with Texas Tech and possibly Kansas State for the worst overall record of the league’s bowl-eligible teams.
Expect, in predicted order, either a trip to Houston Dec. 27 for the AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl, to Memphis Dec. 30 for the AutoZone Liberty Bowl or to Phoenix Dec. 26 for the Cactus Bowl.
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