Ohio State 24 Texas Longhorns 7
Ohio State came into Austin on Saturday night and won the season’s first big game by playing as exceptionally as Texas did last year in Columbus. The Horns did not play badly and would have been threatening to take the lead deep in Ohio State territory midway through the 4th quarter had Michael Pittman not fumbled away a Longhorn TD in the first half. Although the Horns ran the ball reasonably well against an always rugged Buckeye defense, none of the Horns’ receivers were able to break a big play, which is going to be an important element for the Longhorns to win big games in the post-Vince era. And what on earth is UT doing allowing Matthew McConaughey to act like an idiot on national TV while on the Longhorns sideline? The Horns have a nice scrimmage against Rice this weekend in Houston at Reliant Stadium before beginning the Big 12 schedule the following weekend in Austin against Iowa State.
What was that I said in the pre-season review of the Texans of not being able to protect their QB and not being able to pressure the opposition’s QB? Eagles QB Donovan McNabb carved up the mediocre Texans secondary like a Thanksgiving turkey as he could have checked stock quotes on most of his pass drops against the ineffectual Texan pass rush. Meanwhile, Texans QB David Carr was, as usual, running for his life while being sacked five times, usually on jailbreak blitzes by the Eagles that Carr may not have recognized properly. And on one of the sacks, Texans RB Vernand Morency completely whiffed on his blocking assignment. The more things change with the Texans, the more things remain the same. The Chronicle’s John McClain has a good blog post on the game, and mentions that things don’t get any easier as the Texans go to Indianapolis next week to help Peyton Manning pad his career passing statistics.
That’s more like it. After an unimpressive first game against Rice, the Cougars plastered a veteran Tulane team in running up 621 yards of total offense, almost perfected balanced between rushing and passing. More importantly, however, is that the Cougar defense put in its second impressive preformance by holding the Green Wave to 244 yards of total offense while dominating the line of scrimmage. The Coogs take on Grambling next week at home before returning home the following weekend for Okie State. Stay tuned to the Cougars — they have the tools to become something special.
The 0-2 Owls made a game of it again versus the Bruins, but ultimately UCLA cruised to the victory. As with last week’s game against Houston, the Owls struggled again on offense, gaining less than 200 yards total offense as starting QB Chase Clement was out with a broken finger. The Owls have now lost 18 of their last 19 games and are 0-13 on the road since closing the 2003 season with a win at Louisiana Tech. With Texas looming next week and Florida State the week after, the Owls do not have a realistic chance of winning a game until they travel to West Point to meet Army on September 30.
Texas Aggies 51 Louisiana Lafeyette 7
The Ags continued the cupcake portion of their schedule as they trounced La-La. It’s not a good indication of the quality of a program’s non-conference schedule when the premier opponent is Army, which the Ags take on next week at the Alamodome in San Antonio. As noted before, none of these glorified scrimmages are doing much to prepare the Aggies for a well-seasoned Texas Tech team, which beat a good UTEP team in overtime over the weekend and will be the Aggies first real opponent when they invade Kyle Field on September 30.
Tom,
Rice is 2-0 against the spread. And we don’t have that annoying guy in the picture on our bandwagon. There is still room on the Rice bandwagon by the way.
Kenneth J. Stanley, MD
Rice University, Class of 1994
As long as he isn’t running around in his tighty-whities and banging on his bongo drums what harm could he possibly do by making himself look like a bafoon?