In 2007, and in any season under Mack Brown prior to 2004, this is a game that would have probably gone down to the final few minutes before being decided. It’s a game those other Texas teams might well have even lost.

But not this team. Even with a stunningly inept offensive game plan, even with repeated mistakes by the special teams, even with the sputtering offense constantly being put in long field situations in the first half, this team was not going to allow itself to drop this game in Laramie, or even to allow a close outcome.

So what’s the difference between this team and those more vulnerable squads named above? Defense. Butt-kicking, ball-busting, well-prepared, hostile defense. The Texas defense allowed Wyoming to mount all of two sustained drives the entire day, and allowed them ZERO points, with both Wyoming scores coming as the result of errors in the punting game. The days of the soft, vulnerable Texas defensive teams ended when Coach Boom showed up in Austin.

This is the difference between close wins against Arkansas State in Austin and beat downs at Wyoming.

The other difference is coaching in general. Mack has done a good job over the years of purging his initial staff of the weak links and upgrading them significantly. This is a much, much better coached team than the earlier Brown teams at Texas, on both sides of the ball.

So far this season, we have seen #3 Oklahoma drop a game to Brigham Young (which admittedly is a better team than anticipated), #6 Oklahoma State drop one to Houston (also probably an underrated team), #5 Ohio State damn near upset by Navy, an overrated Georgia team being whipped by OSU before slipping past South Carolina at home, an overrated Notre Dame team losing to Michigan at Ann Arbor, and many more close calls and upsets of ranked teams. Earlier Mack Brown teams at Texas might well have by now been listed among those upsets and close calls after yesterday.

As it is, we’re reviewing a 41-10 beat down, yet another very solid road win for a program that has made a habit of racking up such wins since 2004.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here: These are the good old days for Texas Longhorn Football.

These are the days she was singing about.

Let’s go to the Good, Bad and Ugly.

Good: Television coverage on VS, believe it or not. I thought the play-by-play guy, Joe Beninati, did a fine job of giving the viewer the basics – down, distance, time, properly identified payers and their numbers, and did it all without being obnoxious. On these second tier networks, that’s really all you can ask for. The color guy, Glenn Parker, was really excellent. In direct contrast to what we’ve become used to seeing on Fox Sports games, this guy showed up fully prepared to discuss both teams’ personnel, both teams’ tendencies, and had more than 2-3 talking points prepared, so that he didn’t end up constantly repeating the same things over and over again. He also was not shy about pointing out the inexplicable nature of the Texas offensive game plan, which had every play going east/west until the final possession of the first half, or to the utter incompetence of the officials. Even the sideline reporter, the comely and succinct Lindy Thackston, managed to not be annoying, which is more than we get most weeks. Add in some really good quality high definition visuals, and you have a damn nice job of covering a football game. Kudos to VS.

Nice work, Lindy.

Who gives a damn moment of the week: Oklahoma runs up a 41-0 lead over vaunted Idaho State (yes, that is Idaho STATE). Yippee, Sooners!

Oops moment of the week: Radio guys on ESPN talking about how Florida was “getting all it can handle” from Troy, leading only 7-3 towards the end of the first quarter. Halftime score: 35-3. Final score: 56-6. Yeah, buddy.

Good: Dan Buckner is a beast. A man among boys. Now if we can just keep him healthy…

Question of the week: Why does Lisa Salter get the prime time games on ESPN instead of Erin Andrews? This does not make sense to me, since Erin has all sorts of Talent advantages over Lisa.

I was really just looking for an excuse to post a pic of Erin.

Ugly: Horizontal game plan. Why did it take Greg Davis almost a full half of football to figure out you need to run some north/south plays against a team you have completely out-manned? The horizontal play-calling in the first half was mind-numbingly stupid, and completely inexplicable. This was just the first of what will no doubt be several games this season in which our offense shows up completely unprepared to play the game of football. We were very fortunate to have only had two such games last season (one of which, unfortunately, was at Texas Tech), but in prior years the numbers of such games general amounted 4 or 5. If we can keep it to 2 again this year, and OSU or OU is not the other one, we have a shot at running the table.

Good: All that having been said, the Wyoming defense showed up fired up, and executed a hard-hitting zone defense to near-perfection for two solid quarters. Their LB Brian Hendricks was a beast in the first half, although he obviously got worn out as the game went on. The Gipson brothers, especially Marcell (#2), were also real, quality Division I players. Those kids and their coaches really did themselves proud in this game.

Bad: The Longhorn Internets were up in smoke at the half. Not to pick on any one in particular - I imagine all Longhorn bulletin boards were in the same meltdown mode at halftime. The abject stupidity of some of the posts I saw at a couple of places at that point rivaled Greg Davis’s playcalling. There were actually people screaming for Colt to be benched in favor of Garrett Gilbert. For the record, Colt’s halftime stat line read 16-27, 166 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT. That was in spite of being forced to execute a game plan that looked as if it had been put together by Danny DeVito’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and in spite of his getting f*ckall help from his teammates.

Bench Colt now! Yeah!!!

Ugly: Receiver, receiver, where’s a receiver? To illustrate the dearth of help Colt got from his teammates, one only need to review the replay of his scramble near the end of the first half in which he ended up getting erroneously called for intentional grounding as he fell to the turf. The wide angle shot of that play showed the whole field, with the exception of the lower right-hand corner of the endzone. As Colt desperately scrambled for about 4 seconds to his left, there was never a point in which you could see more than 2 of the 5 receivers who were out on the pattern on that play. Those two players were simply lounging at the back of the endzone, stuck behind three Wyoming defenders. The other three were apparently clustered in the unseen corner of the enzone, clear on the opposite side of the field from their desperate QB. Not a single one of these guys, including the savvy, veteran Jordan Shipley, made the slightest effort to come towards their QB and present a decent target for him to throw the ball to. It was just a disgraceful play, one that was sadly emblematic of the receiver corps’ inability to get open in the first half. But that’s not all: On the following play, Colt is once again forced out of the pocket by a 3 man Wyoming rush, scrambles to the right, and once again, there is not a single receiver in the pattern, not even Shipley, making the slightest effort to come to the QB and present him with a decent target. Not good at all. That Colt was 16 of 27 at halftime borders on the miraculous in my mind.

Good: Tre Newton. Sure would like to see more of this guy. Not to say that he’s obviously the answer at tailback, but he does seem to have good instincts running the zone/read, cutting it upfield quickly, rather than stringing it out to the sideline as Vondrell has a tendency to do. With Fozzy Whittaker apparently a chronic injury case, and Davis dedicated to a zero misdirection running game, Newton becomes the latest hope to give us a back who can create some running room on his own.

Ugly: The punting game. Yeesh. One near block, which one would have thought might have given our coaching staff a head’s up that some adjustments needed to be made, is followed later by a block that gave the Cowboys their only TD of the game. In between the near block and the actual block, Justin Tucker takes it upon himself to run for it on 4^th and long from his own 7 yard line. What a cluster you-know-what. This must not continue.

Good: Kickoffs and kick returns. Justin Tucker slammed all but one kickoff way out of the endzone in the thin Rocky Mountain air. Lovely. In the return game, Malcolm Williams had two very nice ones, although he looked a little awkward while making them, carrying the ball very high and exclusively with his left hand. Someone needs to teach him to switch the ball to the hand that is away from oncoming defenders. Or perhaps not. At any rate, they might have looked odd, but they were effective.

Ugly: Officiating. Speaking of cluster you-know-whats, we give you Mountain West officials, who rival Big 12 officials with their amazing ability to completely screw up a football game. The unsportsmanlike call against Chykie Brown was bizarre. Then, after you let Wyoming run a play thinking it was first and goal, you suddenly move the chains back, and tell them it’s now third and 1 rather than second and goal? Frankly, I don’t believe the officials can even do that once they’ve allowed the prior play to be run. But they did. The Wyoming coach was incensed, and I couldn’t blame him. Then they spent 3 minutes reviewing the play on which Colt was first incorrectly called for intentional grounding (it was an obvious fumble), then had to spend five minutes reviewing it before they figured out it was a fumble, something anyone with functional eyes could determine in about ten seconds. Sheesh. Enough – my blood pressure is spiking.

This is Stan, head of Mountain West Conference football officials.

Good: Heather Cox, redhead sideline reporter for the SC/GA game. I’d love to see a study on the percentage of redheads born in the last 40 years whose name is Heather. It has to approach 40%. These are the things I wonder about.

Good: Houston 45, OSU 35. Or is this bad? I can’t tell. I’m sure all the BCS nerds out there will tell me this is horrible for our chances to make it into the BCS Championship Game at the end of the year, but in the 2^nd week of the season, watching Mike Gundy’s team drop one to a 16 point underdog in Boone Pickens Stadium sure feels good to me.

Homely: The Wyoming cheerleaders. Seriously. I mean, I know there’s only 700,000 or so folks living in that state – a state I truly love, by the way – but dang, some of those girls looked like they’d been pulled out of the local all night diner. Just another reason to be thankful to be a Texan.

Ok, these really aren’t the Wyoming cheerleaders, but it’s close…

Good: Michigan 37, Notre Dame 34. I can tell about this one. No matter how much some of you hate Rich Rod, it’s always a good day when the Irish drop a big one.

Good: Defensive backfield. Both Browns were nails all day. Earl Thomas is turning into a major force. Blake Gideon played a fine game, although it becomes more obvious with each passing week why he ended up on defense rather than offense. He just cannot catch the football. But he can hit.

Bad: Offensive line play. Again. Holding penalties and false starts all over the place. Wyoming brought no more than 4, and mostly 3, pretty much all day, and Colt was constantly scrambling from pressure or rushing throws. This is just inexcusable. It really is. There is no room in the running game, but I’m done blaming that on the players. There’s not going to be any green space when your blockers are out-numbered 2 to 1 at the point of attack on every play. All in all, though, our OL is the single most overrated phase of our game at this point. That does not bode well for the rest of the year.

Good: RAC. James Kirkendoll and John Chiles both made hellacious RACs for TDs in the game, and Kirkendoll had another outstanding run after a grab over the middle early in the second quarter. Both TDs were facilitated by outstanding downfield blocking by the other WRs. Malcolm Williams took out three defenders at the end of Chiles’ TD run. Tre Newton also threw a hell of a block on that play. Cool.

Good: DTs. Lamar Houston was excellent, and Ben Alexander had a big game. Wyoming had nothing going up the middle.

Good: Sacks. We had 5. Can everyone who threw a fit after last week’s deceptive sackless game calm down now? Thanks.

Good: Third down defense. We limited Wyoming to 3 of 17 on 3^rd down conversions. That’ll work every time.

Ugly: The Colorado Buffaloes. This team is just awful in every phase of the game of football. They may well be the most poorly coached football team I’ve seen this year. How Dan Hawkins keeps his job is a real mystery at this point.

Bad: Terrell Pryor. This is a tremendously talented kid, athletically. But he still plays his position like a raw freshman. And he got out-played by a raw freshman this week.

Good: …to see Fred Akers on the sideline. Nothing particularly insightful from him – it was just good to see him still looking sharp and dapper at 70.

Defensive Player of the Game: I’m going with a tie between Lamar Houston and Ben Alexander, just because I’m so happy to see the middle of our defense looking so much stronger than many had anticipated.

Special Teams Player of the Game: This is a tough one since the special teams were not so special. I’ll call it for Malcolm Williams.

Offensive Player of the Game: Dan freakin’ Buckner, not only for being a beast, but for sucking it up and staying in the game with a gimpy knee. And I’m not taking any arguments on this one.

Note: There will be no G, B and U next Sunday. My beautiful daughter Jessica is getting married Saturday afternoon to a fine young man, and I will miss the game with Texas Tech. I will be recording it, and may try to post something on Monday or Tuesday, but am making no guarantees.

This is a case of the best laid plans gone awry. When we were scheduling the date for this wedding last November, Jessica and my lovely wifey Terri were acutely aware that they needed to attempt to conform the wedding to the Texas Longhorns’ football schedule. Thus, with September 19 looming as an open date on the schedule, it became the obvious choice.

By the time the Tech game was moved to next Saturday to accommodate national television, too many plans had already been put into place to make a change feasible. Thus, while all of you are enjoying watching the Longhorns beat Texas Tech, I’ll be celebrating my only daughter’s marriage, and enjoying the fruits of the vast depletion of my life’s savings.

See you in a couple of weeks.

Hook ‘em!!!