Texas coach Steve Sarkissian was on the spot when he tried to turn Saturday’s loss to Alabama into a win for the program.
For the definitively decided game, there is plenty of room for interpretation in football.
Winning is winning and losing is losing, but the nuance of that is sometimes greater than the sum of the parts it seems to be. Take Saturday’s loss by the Texas Longhorns and how it isn’t truly loss beyond the obvious.
A 20-19 loss to Alabama is a total loss against the program, but taking it at face value misses the point.
That’s something Longhorn coach Steve Sarkissian wants to be clear about. After the loss, Sark boldly told reporters that it wasn’t Alabama that defeated his team but rather the clock that defeated them.
All the long horns needed was more time.
The normal reaction to this is to roll your eyes and chalk this on the football guy crap. Texas had a six-point lead in the third quarter at home against the best school in the country and couldn’t hold it. The rules of the game are the same, and Longhorns Bama is not defeated in the allotted time for each game.
What’s next, a comment on how if only the Texans had more points they would have won?
Moral victories are an opiate for fans of coaches, but instead of being rude and silly about Sarkissian’s comments, let’s appreciate the fact that this is a rare case where nuances are relevant.
That’s a dangerous thing to say, especially in the post-reality world of Texas, but it’s not what you say it is how you interpret it.
Don’t focus on the fact that Texas blew up the lead, it’s six points ahead of the #1 school in the country. Longhorns didn’t lose, they let the National Championship finalist escape by one point. Alabama didn’t win, he needed a miracle play to create a field goal in the last second to avoid losing to Texas.
The importance is to place the correct emphasis on the correct syllable.
Keep in mind that the Longhorns tried to maintain that lead with their reserve quarterback, who replaced the injured Quinn Ewers and also injured himself. Was it a dirty play that got Bama punished the most under Nick Saban, or was the Texans getting into their heads?
What happens if Texas isn’t called to issue a highly questionable verdict for a bystander penalty that nullified the safety in what ended up being a one-point game? Or that a late missed face mask that would have extended driving distance and both drained more time in a game, would need Alabama about a second to come back, and likely result in a touchdown rather than a field goal for Texas?
Perception is just a lens through which reality is viewed, especially in college football and especially for school as being as unlucky as the Texans.
Over the past few years, the only consistent thing in Texan football has been the number of jokes it has been making. Seeing TEXAS BACK does not call for horror as much as laughter, and the school has deserved all the criticism it has received. But Saturday went a long way in starting to change perceptions, and for the first time in what seems like forever, there is more hope than despair.
We need to see how Longhorns respond after the loss to get a good reading of how bright the light at the end of the tunnel is, but
Let us also not ignore what Sark is really saying and who says it; He says that Alabama didn’t win the game, but Texas let them get away and the one he was directed to is Nick Saban.
When was the last time Texans got that kind of supremacy and went down? Even better, when was the last time Texas had any advantage at all?
Texas is now in an SEC state, and moral victories don’t produce championships, but the Longhorns played Big Boy style of football we haven’t seen them play in a very long time.
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