Texas beat No. 8 Baylor Saturday in Austin, 35-34. Trent Domingue hit a decisive field goal from 39 yards in the last minute, and Texas’ embattled defense stood up to seal the game after that. Texas avoided falling to 3-5, and college football fans who didn’t want to see scandal-plagued Baylor run undefeated to the Playoff got a reprieve.
Fans chant Charlie Strong’s name after Texas ends Baylor’s undefeated 2016
The Longhorns got a win they needed, and Baylor’s unbeaten year is no more.
Whether Strong and Texas are better off apart has become an open and fair question. But for at least a moment, they’ve found bliss. Fans were chanting for Strong when he walked off afterward, and athletic director Mike Perrin was chanting, too.
Fans chanting "Charlie!" pic.twitter.com/uNj9oiLYPP
— Brian Davis (@BDavisAAS) October 30, 2016
Perrin tweeted this:
Strong’s sounding a defiant tone.
The game swung back and forth a bunch.
Texas had a nine-point lead for about six minutes in the second quarter, but the two teams otherwise stayed within a possession of each other all the way through.
Baylor never got especially close to winning the game after Domingue’s field goal, but the Bears at least had a last-ditch pass attempt to do that. Texas thought it had sealed the game after stripping Baylor QB Seth Russell for a fumble-runback TD in the last minute, but officials ruled Russell’s forward progress had already been stopped. So Texas had to hold one more time, and that’s just what the Horns did.
That the game would have such a wild ending was highly foreseeable. The game had a chaotic feel to it for a while.
The third quarter included Texas defensive back putting a hit on Baylor QB Seth Russell that looked a whole lot like targeting. But officials didn’t flag (or thereby eject) Boyd, who stayed in the game to its conclusion.
Texas’ season has been, to put it mildly, tumultuous.
A season-opening win against Notre Dame gave the impression that Strong had brought the Horns back, but both teams’ failures since then have wiped the shine from that win. Texas’ offense has been uneven, and the defense has been generally awful.
The situation at Texas has been deteriorating, and this win probably won’t be enough, on its own, to save Strong. But the coach needed it, and now he has it.
Baylor’s started impressively under new head coach Jim Grobe, who replaced Art Briles after the latter was fired in disgrace last spring.
The Bears mostly cruised through their first six games, needing a narrow escape at Iowa State but otherwise breezing past people.
They entered as one of two Big 12 unbeatens, and with West Virginia also losing on Saturday, the league now has zero. It’s not impossible that Baylor makes the Playoff with one loss, but it’s far from likely.
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