Upset of OU had 3 of Horns’ top plays
Not everything that happens in a 5-7 season is bad. We promise.
At one point, you might recall, it appeared Jay Norvell and Jerrod Heard had fifixed an offffffffffffense that required signifificant change after the opener at Notre Dame. Heard and his “juice” were loose against Rice and the next week against Cal.
But Heard soon regressed, and losses accumulated.
Still, the future is bright, as eight of the season’s top 10 plays were generated by players with eligibility remaining in 2016.
Here are the 10 best plays of Texas’ season: 10. Heard goes deep. All week of the Kansas game, Norvell the play-caller and Heard the quarterback had to answer questions about why they hadn’t taken deep shots in the 24-0 Halloween blanking at Iowa State. So, of course, they responded by throwing deep on the fifirst play. John Burt outran single coverage, and Heard’s pass was on target for an 84-yard score. It was the second-longest pass and third-longest
catch by freshmen in school history.
Heard “needed that,” Texas coach Charlie Strong said. “The thing about him, once he gets going and once he ... if it happens, if it’s positive for him early, then you’re going to get positive results from him. Just to see him bounce back. And once he made that first throw, then you just knew that he was going to be on point.” 9. Fabulous freshman. With injuries sidelining Johnathan Gray and D’Onta Foreman, Chris Warren III got the Thanksgiving call against Texas Tech and responded with 276 yards, the most ever by a Texas freshman. Ninety-one of them came on a second-quarter touchdown when he broke a tackle behind the line of scrimmage and then broke four more.
“I told Chris Warren before the game, ‘I guarantee you’ll have a breakout game; you’ll probably have 200 yards rushing,’” Strong said. “We knew what we had with him. He’s just a big, strong, physical runner, and you look at him, he can break tackles, he can run through people, and that’s why I wasn’t concerned going into this game. Everybody kept saying, well, you’ve got two (running backs) down, but I knew we’d be OK with the running game with him.”
Said Warren: “He just told me, ‘25, I expect a good game from you this week,’ and I was like, ‘All right, Coach, I’ll do what I can.’” 8. Hill’s pick-six. Holton Hill made Oklahoma State’s Mason Rudolph pay for an overthrown ball, returning it 41 yards for a score. It gave Texas a 27-24 lead heading into the fourth quarter.
From that point forward, however, the offense turned lifeless and the officiating became curious, and Texas never scored again in a 30-27 loss. 7. Bluiett’s role reversal. Baylor was supposed to have the quickstrike offense, yet it was Texas that took the early lead on a 57-yard touchdown catch by Caleb Bluiett, a former defensive end. A breakdown in coverage let Bluiett move freely down the field, resulting in an easy hookup with Tyrone Swoopes.
The score launched the Longhorns to victory. Of Strong’s 25 games at Texas, the team that scores first has won 22 of them.
Still, Bluiett says deep down, he sees himself as a defensive end.
“That’s where my heart belongs,” Bluiett said in October. “I love beating quarterbacks. I hate quarterbacks. I love my own, but I hate all the others.” 6. Payback for Foreman. Foreman has had a strong dislike for Oklahoma dating to when the Sooners gave him the cold shoulder during recruiting. So it was all the more gratifying when he ripped off an 81-yard run against the Sooners. It came on a speed draw, something Norvell took from his time as an assistant with OU. Foreman didn’t score on the play, but the drive culminated with a touchdown grab by Bluiett, giving Texas a 24-10 lead early in the fourth quarter We just wanted to gas them, to just run at them,” Foreman said. “I told the coaches, ‘Let’s just keep running at them, keep running at them.’ For some reason, I just have a lot of success running that play. They called it, and I felt like I was going to do good, and I did.” 5. Double trouble. With Texas needing a big stop against Oklahoma — UT led by a touchdown with 3½ minutes left, with OU facing a third-and-14 at its own 34 — Naashon Hughes beat left tackle Orlando Brown and collaborated with Poona Ford to sack quarterback Baker Mayfield. That 17-yard loss, coupled with a false start on the next play, forced OU into a fourth-and-36 at its 12. The Sooners punted, and Texas ran out the clock to ice its stunning 24-17 win, which remains Oklahoma’s only loss to this point. It was the sixth sack of the day for Texas.
“That felt amazing,” Hughes said. “It basically summed up how hard we’ve been working, and to get that last sack was tremendous.” 4. Bringing the juice. It was an exhausting week in the days after the season-opening loss at Notre Dame. Shawn Watson was demoted as play-caller, Swoopes was benched as quarterback, and speculation swirled about Strong’s job securi.“ty after a third straight blowout loss. But tension calmed when Swoopes’ replacement — Heard, making his first career start — took off on a run on the third play against Rice and picked up 35 yards. It represented the sort of explosion with which fans had been teased when Strong announced in the offseason that the offense was switching to the spread.
Norvell, in his first game as play-caller, said Heard’s scramble “changed our whole football team. ... It gave us a spark.” 3. Locke’s big knockout. Baylor staggered into the season finale with its No. 3 quarterback because of injuries. Before the first quarter was over, the Bears had to go to their fourth option after Chris Johnson suffered a concussion on a shot from safety P.J. Locke. Already up 10-0, Texas suddenly was in a great spot facing emergency quarterback Lynx Hawthorne, a receiver. Hawthorne couldn’t pass, making Baylor’s offense one-dimensional.
2. The big tease. With Texas trailing by seven points against Cal, Heard broke loose for a 45-yard touchdown run with only 71 seconds to go. Royal-Memorial Stadium was rocking, as Texas had erased a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit. Well, almost. There was still an extra point to be kicked, and Nick Rose missed it, which goes down as No. 1 on the list of the season’s worst plays.
Heard, a redshirt freshman starting only his second game, knocked Vince Young from UT’s record book for total yards in a game for a freshman. He had 527 yards of offense and became the first Longhorn to throw for 300 yards and rush for 100 in the same game since Colt McCoy’s big 479-yard effort vs. Texas A&M in 2009.
“The last run that he scored the touchdown on was really electric,” Strong said. “I mean, you see where he takes off and we called a draw, he makes a wideout miss, and then all of a sudden, an open field is very dangerous.
“But just watching him, he’s exciting, and he has brought the excitement into the team. You watch our whole sideline now when our offense takes the field; our guys are all just locked in.” 1. Booming the Sooners. Marcus Johnson always saved his best efforts for Oklahoma, and that was no different in his final Red River Showdown. With the game scoreless early, Johnson took a shovel pass from Heard and blew through five defenders for a 24-yard touchdown and a 7-0 lead.
The tackling efforts, ESPN’s Chris Spielman noted, were “awful,” but credit Johnson with a stiff-arm and for keeping his balance along the sideline.
“Being such an angry team that just wanted to be great, we had no choice,” Heard said after the game. “We knew one of these games was going to give in and favor us. So when something like this happens, we’re just going to keep that momentum and feed it into next week.”