(AP Photo/Dave Einsel; previous weekly reviews are here)
The Texans (3-4) won their third game in a row for the first time in franchise history by drubbing the Bengals (0-8), who are truly dreadful. The Texans still have not beaten a good team this season, so it’s not time to start printing playoff tickets just yet.
However, one thing struck me about this game and almost every other one that the Texans have played during the 2+ years of the Kubiak era — the Texan players appear to play hard, if not particularly well all the time, for Kubiak. That effort reflects that at least the players think that he is the man to lead them to greater success. In contrast, it is clear that a number of Bengal players have packed it in on Bengal Coach Marvin Lewis. The Texans attempt to even their record next Sunday against the Vikings (3-4) in Minneapolis.
Texas Longhorns 28 Oklahoma State 24
The top-ranked Longhorns (8-0/4-0 Big 12) survived a rough-and-tumble offensive shoot-out with the rugged, ninth-ranked Cowboys (7-1/3-1 Big 12), who should be moving up in the BCS rankings as a result of their stellar performance rather than down. Texas continues a murderous stretch of games next Saturday night against undefeated and sixth-ranked Texas Tech (8-0/4-0 Big 12) in Lubbock, which makes it four straight weeks that the Horns will be playing in one of college football’s elite games of the weekend.
By the way, there has to be a great deal of concern in Longhorn coaching circles this week on how Oklahoma State’s offense carved up the Longhorn defense and special teams (217 yds rushing/200 yds passing/137 yds on returns). Tech’s offense is OSU’s on steroids.
The Aggies (3-5/1-3 Big 12) won their first Big 12 game of the Mike Sherman era over Iowa State (2-6/0-4) in a performance by both teams that set back the concept of football defense by several decades. At this juncture, the Aggie defense could not stop a hard-chargin’ marching band. However, the Aggie unit is still better than Iowa State’s absolutely atrocious defensive unit, so that’s essentially why A&M won the game.
At least the Ags’ offense continues to develop and appears to have enough firepower to give A&M a legitimate chance of beating Colorado (4-4/1-3 Big 12) and Baylor (3-5/1-3 Big 12) in College Station down the home stretch of the season. Meanwhile, can anyone explain to me again why Iowa State did this?
The Owls (5-3/4-1 C-USA) continue to make my pre-season prediction look good as they dominated the Green Wave (2-5/1-3 C-USA) in the first half and then cruised home for an easy victory.
The bottom line is that any team that plays Rice better be prepared to score a ton of points because the Owls’ offense behind QB Chase Clement is a good bet to score at least 35 points in most games. The Owls go to El Paso for a Saturday night game this week against UTEP (3-4/4-1 C-USA) before returning home to play their three final games of the season (against Army, Marshall and Houston) in Houston.
The Houston Cougars (4-3/3-0 C-USA) play Tuesday night in Huntington, W. Va. against Marshall (3-4/2-1 C-USA) before returning home to play their final four games (Tulane, Tulsa, UTEP and Rice) beginning a week from Saturday in Houston.