On the surface, all things look rosy in Texas Longhorn football land these days.
The Horns are the second-ranked team in the U.S., dramatically defeated Michigan in the Rose Bowl after last season, have already beaten mighty Ohio State on the road this season, and have a bonafide Heisman Trophy candidate in QB Vince Young. So, coming into the annual Texas-OU game this weekend in Dallas against an Oklahoma team that has been relatively unimpressive this season, the Horns and their faithful should be calm and supremely confident, right?
Not a chance.

As this Ted Lewis piece notes, you can almost feel Coach Brown and his team gripping the golf club too tightly as they prepare to confront their nemesis, OU head football coach Bob Stoops, whose teams have beaten the Horns for the past five straight years. There is a palpable sense that the mere thought of Coach Stoops throws Coach Brown into a panic, and that Texas’ dull offense (at least pre-Vince Young) does not even challenge the defensive-minded Stoops:

Chicago Bears rookie running back Cedric Benson, who just finished playing four years for Brown, sees it much the same way, saying during an ESPN radio interview that “without a doubt” the Texas coaches approached the Oklahoma game trying not to lose more than planning to win.
Certainly the Longhorns, dominant against just about everybody else during Brown’s tenure (their 73 victories in his seven-plus seasons at Texas are more than anyone else in the same span), have not been at their best against the Sooners of late.
“We know there are questions about Oklahoma, and that’s fair,” Brown said. “We haven’t played very well or coached very well on that day.”
Indeed.
Two of the last five games wound up in humiliating blowouts – 63-14 in 2000 and 65-13 in 2003.
Last year, Oklahoma won 12-0, handing Texas its first shutout in 24 years.
Small wonder frustrated Texas fans have taken to wearing “Reverse the Curse” ornaments.

Still, the Horns are a 14-point favorite, the biggest spread in the game since 1970. OU lost two of its first three games this season, including a shocking home defeat to TCU. Given the Horns’ strong play so far this season, Coach Brown should be brimming with confidence, right? Well, not exactly. Commenting on OU’s victory this past weekend over Big 12 rival Kansas State, Coach Brown said the following:

“Bob has done an amazing job getting his kids back together. They used that week off to get themselves back to being the Oklahoma teams we’re used to — quick, tough and aggressive.”

Yeah, and there is that little problem about the five straight losses to OU, which Coach Stoops uses with the mastery of an experienced gridiron psychologist:

“It gives us the confidence that we match up well against them and we understand what they like to do,” Stoops said. “Our players have a sense of that.”

Even Barry Switzer, the hated former OU coach whose teams dominated UT for over a decade, chimed in:

“The problem for Mac is getting it done,” Switzer said. “He’s supposed to win, and by more than he was before the season began. If he can’t get it done this time, it’s really going to eat away at him. . . “

This is clearly a huge game for Texas and Coach Brown, another put-up-or-shut-up game for a program that has been notorious for underachieving during most of Coach Brown’s tenure. Last season’s Rose Bowl game was the Horns’ highest-profile bowl appearance since they lost the 1978 Cotton Bowl game to Notre Dame while ranked no. 1 in the country. Despite Texas’ dramatic win, Michigan was not really a top-tier team last season — it lost to mediocre Notre Dame and Ohio State (7-4) teams, and San Diego State came within three points of beating the Wolverines at Ann Arbor. As a result, Michigan was ranked only 13th in the BCS standings going into the game and only Pitt, the Big East co-champion, had a worse BCS standing (21st) among the eight schools that played in the last season’s BCS bowl games.
In 17 seasons at North Carolina and Texas, a Coach Brown team has never won a conference title. Now, that is understandable at North Carolina, which is a basketball school and had to deal with conference-rival Florida State during Coach Brown’s tenure. But no conference championships at Texas — where the resources and talent pool is virtually unlimited — is almost unfathomable.
In fact, the quality of play of Coach Brown’s Texas teams has often had an inverse relationship with the relative importance of the game, as the following reflects:

Those five consecutive losses to Oklahoma.
An 0-2 record in Big 12 championship games, where the Horns lost to Nebraska in 1999 and, with a BCS bowl berth seemingly in the bag, were upset by Colorado in 2001.
A 4-3 bowl game record, including that horrifying 28-20 loss to Washington State in the 2003 Pacific Life Holiday Bowl in which Texas’ offense acted as if it had never seen a zone blitz before.

Accordingly, despite the apparent mismatch, this particular OU game may be the most important game of Mack Brown’s coaching career. The Horns’ win over a strong Ohio State team on the road was arguably the most impressive win by a Brown-coached team. But if the Horns blow this one to OU and its uber-coach Stoops, then the Ohio State win will quickly fade from memory as Longhorn fans contemplate whether the Texas program will ever gain true top-tier status under the very well-paid Coach Brown.