The Almost Longest Offseason
4th and 13. Quinn Ewers to Matthew Golden. Texas lives.
All I could think about before 4th and 13 was how long the freaking offseason was going to feel. Somewhere between Bert Auburn’s wide-right kick and his leftward doink off the upright, I had accepted that Texas was going to lose to Arizona State. I was already talking to my skin, asking it to “please be thicker.” The onslaught of verbal Horns Down trash talk in the coming months was going to be awful. I didn’t like that I’d mentally surrendered, but the Peach Bowl no longer felt like the “play with your food” type of game Texas has earned a master’s degree in under Steve Sarkisian. It might have felt like that when Texas was up 24-8, but after that, it went from “I’ve seen this movie before against Arkansas and Texas A&M” to full-on body horror. It was more than a bad third quarter or a superior team sleepwalking against its opponent—it felt cosmically cruel. It seemed as though the Sun Devils had sold their souls to Lucifer to steal the Peach Bowl from the Longhorns. There was nothing I, nor Dorian Gray, could do to reverse the slow decay of Texas’ season before my horrified eyes. Swallowing this loss would’ve been the worst kind of bitter, and I doubt I would have washed the pill down by August.
It didn’t matter that Texas had beaten all three of its historical rivals, dominated its first season in the SEC, won a home playoff game, and finished with the number one recruiting class. The levels of schadenfreude directed at Texas would have blown the Richter scale. It was a full-on Skattecism. And it was going to be a long-ass offseason.
Maybe there’s a universe in which Arizona State’s Todd Orlando zero-blitz on 4th down works and Quinn Ewers and Matthew Golden are stopped. In that timeline, the Sun Devils become the first football version of a bracket-busting Cinderella, usually reserved for college basketball in March. In that plane of existence—or offshoot strand of being—there are overturned Kia Souls in Tempe, set ablaze from the inside by Molotov cocktails. Guys sporting slicked-back mohawks and unwashed Jake Plummer jerseys are engaging in Edward Fortyhands on the rioting streets. Brett Yormark is drinking a Hennessy with the world’s largest shit-eating grin, and Joey McGuire is claiming the Big 12 by transitive property. Some version of me is trying to bring my limp, defeated body to pry open my laptop and write. But I don’t live in that miserable world—that wicked and cursed beginning to 2025.
In the place where I reside, Texas did everything they could to lose, then did everything they possibly could to win. Ewers to Golden, Ewers to Gunnar Helm, Ewers to Golden again. Andrew Mukuba. Names and moments now chiseled in stone in Texas football lore.
Did I enjoy the process? Hell no. My anxiety levels would have preferred a world where the Longhorns kicked Cinderella out of the ballroom after taking a 14-3 lead. If you or a loved one played a drinking game every time Joe Tessitore said “Cam Skattebo,” then Rest In Peace. But a fan rarely enjoys the moments of doubt before a game becomes legendary.
Did Texas fans enjoy being down 14-0 to Arkansas in 1969? Or being down 12 to USC in the waning minutes of the 2005 Rose Bowl? One thing is certifiably true: the Longhorns need not apologize for how they win. Though other methods might be preferable, the way in which they consistently grind out wins is something to behold. This win goes alongside last year’s 4th down stop on the goal line against Kansas State and Jahdae Barron’s PBU against Houston as a testament to what contenders do.
None of it excuses that Texas allowed everything that has plagued them all season to catch up with them in Atlanta. Any underdog Texas faces next season might deploy the first-ever offense designed entirely around trick plays and fake punts. Today showcased all of this team’s bugaboos: unreliable special teams, anemic third quarters, pre-snap penalties, a maddeningly inconsistent run game, and ill-timed situational awareness by the units led by Sark, Pete Kwiatkowski, and Jeff Banks.
Perhaps it all means the Longhorns are simply too fundamentally flawed to be national champions. They could have cheated death against the Sun Devils only to experience a more swift one against Ohio State in Arlington at the Cotton Bowl. Questions need to be asked at some point. I really hope Sark looks inward at his own game management when he has the lead, his post-script play calling, and the bewildering kicking game. None of these things are Quinn Ewers problems that can be fixed with an Arch Manning antidote. They’re concerning Sark trends that have persisted all four years he’s led the Texas program.
But those questions don’t need to be asked yet, because tomorrow isn’t the start of a long and bitter offseason. Ewers to Golden on 4th and 13 gave Texas life. It gave Ewers the moment he so deserved as the Longhorns quarterback. It gave Texas fans a better start to 2025 than what we got in 2024. Maybe all 4th and 13 did was stall an inevitable disappointment.
But maybe not.
Either way, the offseason isn’t as long now.
Well said on all accounts. Hook ‘em.
Several years ago–while going through my mom’s prolonged illness, after my own broken bones requiring surgery and rehab, and looking at cancer diagnoses of dear friends–I took Texas sports off the pedestal where I had placed them since childhood. I had always let the successes and failures of especially the baseball and football teams affect my whole outlook on life. I cried all the way home on the band bus from Dallas following the loss to Notre Dame in the 1978 Cotton Bowl following an undefeated regular season. A failure of the baseball team to make it out of the regional or a short run in the College World Series could seriously dampen my summer. But after those aforementioned occurrences, I started to treat Longhorn sports as most other people; they were a diversion, but not a governing force in my life. But this afternoon I felt physically ill during the second half of the Peach Bowl. I’m getting back to that place that I had left about seven or eight years ago. No longer am I able to treat UT sports as a simple diversion. I don’t want to go back, but it seems I’ve put this team back on its pedestal where it is able to make me physically ill. It’s scary, but this is where we currently stand. Hook ‘em across the board from Mary Faye