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Remembering What Mack Did Well


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6 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

Herman was "that guy".  What he did at tOSU's MNC run was miraculous.  They come here, and crap the bed.  Maddening.  

Which, BTW, is why these guys make so much.  Top coaches at top programs are unicorns.  Beyond rare.  And when they "hit", the revenue they bring in and notoriety can be measured in the hundreds of millions.  

*See rationale behind Jimbo's contract (which I still think he's the 2010 version of Mack).  Either money-whip Carroll or go get Harsin.  

Shit even Harbaugh is struggling to turn it around at Michigan. 

A lot of luck is involved in trying to find the next superstar coach like a Lincoln Riley or Kirby Smart.

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7 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

63-14 still haunts me.  We'd come back the year before 34-24 in fairly dramatic fashion.  It was bitterly cold.  Only time I've had more cocoa/coffee than beer at a game.  I was wearing a polo and jeans, something stupid like that.  Sleet, rain and wind.  Just a violation.  

 

63-14 haunts.  As did / does 65-13.  And 55-17. And 63-21.  We'll always be indebted to Brown for the national title.   But those 4 Black Saturdays were and still are inexcusable.   

Things that Brown did?  He somehow managed to turn our most important game of the year into a full fledged picnic which resulted in having our players scraped off the Cotton Bowl floor with Bianco and whoever else scrambling for next of kin. 

 

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2 minutes ago, Wally Pryor said:

63-14 haunts.  As did / does 65-13.  And 55-17. And 63-21.  We'll always be indebted to Brown for the national title.   But those 4 Black Saturdays were and still are inexcusable.   

Things that Brown did?  He somehow managed to turn our most important game of the year into a full fledged picnic which resulted in having our players scraped off the Cotton Bowl floor with Bianco and whoever else scrambling for next of kin. 

 

It took Vince basically telling Mack and everyone else:  "relax, take a breath, I got this".  I always guessed he'd get to the huddle and did whatever he wanted while Mack chewed his fingernails off on the sidelines.  He won in spite of the staff.  Not because of it.  

Mack was wound so tight for those games.  Over analyzed to such an extent you could see it on the sidelines.  OU's players were loose and relaxed.  That all stems from the staff.  These are still kids.  Young adults at best.  I see it in Herman also.  He second guesses everything.  Schemes his ass off.  But can't execute when his "plans" don't work.  

What's the saying?  Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face?  

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On 9/5/2018 at 11:40 PM, Gigglebush said:

Mack would almost always win close games. IDK the record but it was something ridiculous. If we got the ball back in the final few minutes we could always count on a scoring driving in clutch time. Mack also went 10-5 in bowl games here.

He also rarely lost a game he should have won and no I’m not talking about 2010-2013. From 98-09, we rarely had an NC St or Stanford or KSU loss. He was the antithesis of what Herman and Strong have been in that regard. 

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43 minutes ago, Wally Pryor said:

63-14 haunts.  As did / does 65-13.  And 55-17. And 63-21.  We'll always be indebted to Brown for the national title.   But those 4 Black Saturdays were and still are inexcusable.   

Things that Brown did?  He somehow managed to turn our most important game of the year into a full fledged picnic which resulted in having our players scraped off the Cotton Bowl floor with Bianco and whoever else scrambling for next of kin. 

 

He still went 7-9 in the series. Yeah those losses are the worst in my existence, with ‘01 CCG and ‘08 Tech being up there. But it wasn’t all bad. 

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1 minute ago, Rex Kramer said:

He also rarely lost a game he should have won and no I’m not talking about 2010-2013. From 98-09, we rarely had an NC St or Stanford or KSU loss. He was the antithesis of what Herman and Strong have been in that regard. 

I wonder what Mack's record would have been if the current 10-team Big 12 was what he entered into in 98. Even Mack said 9 wins was the new 10 wins when the Big 12 went to 9 games. Then add the yearly 2 P5s OOC, something Mack rarely had in the early years and struggled with during his reboot attempt. The level of coaching in the conference has also incredible since the move to 10 teams. The Big 12 South was basically the Mack and Bob show with Leach providing the main challenge in the later part of Mack's peak. He avoided Snyder and peak Mangino in most seasons. Patterson, Gundy, Holgerson and Briles and a yearly dose of Snyder has made this league a lot more difficult than it was when Mack entered. 

I doubt he would have ended up on the hot seats like his successors, but I also wonder if his coaching faults would have stood out much more in a league with so much quality coaching and a schedule with fewer gimmes.

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1 hour ago, kopp0e said:

Highlights of the Mack Brown era:

 

If Ricky doesn't come back, what does Mack's tenure end up looking like? I really feel that set the tone. He put us on his back Mack's first season. I just feel like it would have been a much tougher start for Mack.

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Just now, Deej said:

If Ricky doesn't come back, what does Mack's tenure end up looking like? I really feel that set the tone. He put us on his back Mack's first season. I just feel like it would have been a much tougher start for Mack.

I think Ricky and his Heisman season played a big part in the 1999 class, which helped skyrocket Mack's recruiting.

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1 hour ago, rickyspub said:

I wonder what Mack's record would have been if the current 10-team Big 12 was what he entered into in 98. Even Mack said 9 wins was the new 10 wins when the Big 12 went to 9 games. Then add the yearly 2 P5s OOC, something Mack rarely had in the early years and struggled with during his reboot attempt. The level of coaching in the conference has also incredible since the move to 10 teams. The Big 12 South was basically the Mack and Bob show with Leach providing the main challenge in the later part of Mack's peak. He avoided Snyder and peak Mangino in most seasons. Patterson, Gundy, Holgerson and Briles and a yearly dose of Snyder has made this league a lot more difficult than it was when Mack entered. 

I doubt he would have ended up on the hot seats like his successors, but I also wonder if his coaching faults would have stood out much more in a league with so much quality coaching and a schedule with fewer gimmes.

His seat was getting warm from time to time. If VY didn't get set free to go hogwild I don't think Mack would have made it to the Colt era. Mack would have gone into the books as a John Cooper-level coach -- a steady winner but one who could not win the biggest games or whip his archrivals. 

It's kind of amazing when you set them side by side. They come from a few counties apart in Tennessee. They both recruited extremely well. They both won pretty much every game they should have won, EXCEPT for the games they needed to win most. Cooper was Michigan's bitch year after year -- didn't matter if the Buckeyes were ranked higher or not, he'd find a way to fuck it up. It was uncannily similar to Mack and even though he went 8-4 in his last season (again, like Mack) and his overall record was 111-43-4, he was fired.

Though he had five top ten teams, not a single one of them were Big Ten champs -- another weird stat Mack was good at racking up.  

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One thing Mack did right was that he immediately corrected our linebacker problem.  No more slow Tyson King types, Mack's first year we started a converted running back (DD Lewis), a converted safety (Aaron Babino), and a true freshman (Everick Rawls). 

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4 hours ago, Deej said:

If Ricky doesn't come back, what does Mack's tenure end up looking like? I really feel that set the tone. He put us on his back Mack's first season. I just feel like it would have been a much tougher start for Mack.

Hmm, you have a solid point there, and one could argue that helped to promote the XII as a power conference to be reckoned with, as other than a falling off Nebraska, there was no other XII brand in 1999, that had the shine of Texas, as Oklahoma was in the 1st year of the Stoops "experiment", and it can be said UT kept the XII relevant between 1998 to 2001, between the years of Nebraska & Oklahoma winning national titles, and Brown extended the legitimacy of the league, as the last official national champion winner of the XII conference...

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  • 1 year later...

Played for Mack...

A walk-on for two seasons under Mack Brown, the Coppell, Texas native initially arrived on the Forty Acres in the fall of 2010 intent on one day attending medical school. The self-proclaimed science nerd chose to major in biochemistry after a recommendation from a friend, while also joining the band to continue his passion for music. It was during his time with the band and performing at football games that Izadi began to think about playing football, something he had not done since his sophomore year at Coppell High School.

An unsuccessful open tryout in the spring of 2011 followed by another in the fall of that year did not discourage Izadi, who made the team as a walk-on in 2012 after a third open tryout.

"I don't know what he saw, but Coach Brown took a chance on me," Izadi said.

"Shawn has a never give up, never quit attitude and we just loved that about him," Mack Brown said. "What we saw in him was passion, determination, dedication and pride. He just kept coming back, was not going to be denied and once he became a member of our team, he poured his heart and soul into everything he did."

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Being a UT fan for over 50 years,  I will say that Mack did some really positive things here despite the fact he overstayed his welcome/ 

1) He totally flipped the recruiting on aggy eventually getting RC Slocum fired and getting Texas back to its rightful spot as the prominent program in the State. I remember in the mid 1980, a prominent sportswriter for the DMN(later at the FWST) wrote that aggyy will forever be the prominent program in Texas at that point and it's just wishful thinking for UT fans to ever think we ever get it back/ Mack turned that little prophecy wrong and that same sportswriter started calling him "Macky Mack" as a result.

2)He proved that Texas can be a constant 10 game winning a year program again. That all our wins and championships were not just a result of   carpet bombing on recruiting. UT was accused of recruiting players just to keep them from playing against us. BTW, it's not true at all. The common thought among  sportswriters was that scholarship limits had exposed our football program as being a fraud on the national scene  Mack proved that theory totally wrong.

3) He totally embraced and respected the UT tradition unlike the previous coach before him. He wasn't aiming to just  be good once out every five years like Mackovic was. Mack wanted to put the program in a place where it was nationally relevant every year.  

True,. he eventually got lazy, did not make the necessary changes on the offensive side of the ball  but he did do some good things while here. This UT fan is appreciative of it. 

 

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The 2009 team deserved better.  I was a "first-guesser" all of the way through the year.  Probably most of us knew that because of Colt's injury history he wasn't going to make it through the year without injury.  I wanted to vomit when I watched Gilbert hand-off game after game in relief of Colt.  The golden opportunity occurred the week we played that Florida directional school, in probably November.  We were up something like 35 to 0 at half.  All GG needed was some real game time experience throwing to the first team receivers.  That was the ultimate chance.  Two or three series in the second half of throwing.  That's all he needed.   Bottom line, it should have been two NCs.  

 

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9 hours ago, orangecat92 said:

The 2009 team deserved better.  I was a "first-guesser" all of the way through the year.  Probably most of us knew that because of Colt's injury history he wasn't going to make it through the year without injury.  I wanted to vomit when I watched Gilbert hand-off game after game in relief of Colt.  The golden opportunity occurred the week we played that Florida directional school, in probably November.  We were up something like 35 to 0 at half.  All GG needed was some real game time experience throwing to the first team receivers.  That was the ultimate chance.  Two or three series in the second half of throwing.  That's all he needed.   Bottom line, it should have been two NCs.  

 

Hell, all we had to do was punch the ball in the endzone a few times to start the game and that game is drastically different. When Colt got hurt, we were deep in their territory. Settled for a FG. Ensuing kickoff I think they fumble and we recover deep in their territory. Settled for another FG. Gave them 7 right before half with that dumb ass play. And someone dropped an easy TD in the 2nd qtr. Gilbert dropped a dime.

The biggest kick in the nuts was the 2008 season. That was the best team we had since the 2005 team. They were electric and fun to watch. 2009 they seemed to go through the motions and that excitement from 2008 was not there for me. Sure wish we got a shot at Florida.

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5 hours ago, Vic Mackey said:

The biggest kick in the nuts was the 2008 season. That was the best team we had since the 2005 team. They were electric and fun to watch. 2009 they seemed to go through the motions and that excitement from 2008 was not there for me. Sure wish we got a shot at Florida.

Yeah, the 2008 team was better than 09 and was probably the best team in the country. The offense was a lot better - it had Quan and Collins at WR, who were better than anyone accompanying Shipley in 09. Chris O was a good player too. Also had Orakpo on D. 

Florida was good, but I think Texas matched them up better than OU (because Texas was better than OU). 

There is no logical reason that OU was handed that B12 South title. Texas lost on last play on road (after dropping a game-clinching INT). OU lost at a neutral site by 10. Tech lost on road by like 40. Ugh, still pisses me off. 

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57 minutes ago, Hank Chinaski said:

Yeah, the 2008 team was better than 09 and was probably the best team in the country. The offense was a lot better - it had Quan and Collins at WR, who were better than anyone accompanying Shipley in 09. Chris O was a good player too. Also had Orakpo on D. 

Florida was good, but I think Texas matched them up better than OU (because Texas was better than OU). 

There is no logical reason that OU was handed that B12 South title. Texas lost on last play on road (after dropping a game-clinching INT). OU lost at a neutral site by 10. Tech lost on road by like 40. Ugh, still pisses me off. 

Exactly. The most logical way to decide a 3 way tie is how the SEC does it. You eliminate the lowest ranked team and then head to head with the other 2. Tech got blown off the field by OU and dropped in the rankings. Below us by the end. So we get it over OU head to head. Or hell, pick which team has the worst loss and eliminate them. Also Tech. Blown out by 50. We had the best win. Tech was also the last game of a gauntlet run through our schedule. OU, Mizzou, Okie State, Tech. I believe that was all in October. 

But even after all that, we actually had a chance to get in the Big 12 title game on our own. Kind of goes under the radar now but Tech played Baylor on the day after thanksgiving. Baylor had a 14pt lead twice. Crabtree was hurt that game and Tech looked bad. Had Tech lost that, we win because they drop to 2 losses and we have head to head vs OU. I remember being so deflated because we were so close to getting in and not having to worry about the voters and rankings. And we would have easily rolled Mizzou in the Big 12 title game.

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49 minutes ago, Vic Mackey said:

Exactly. The most logical way to decide a 3 way tie is how the SEC does it. You eliminate the lowest ranked team and then head to head with the other 2. Tech got blown off the field by OU and dropped in the rankings. Below us by the end. So we get it over OU head to head. Or hell, pick which team has the worst loss and eliminate them. Also Tech. Blown out by 50. We had the best win. Tech was also the last game of a gauntlet run through our schedule. OU, Mizzou, Okie State, Tech. I believe that was all in October. 

Even my Tech-loving father agrees with this.  He's as pissed as any of us that Texas didn't get in.

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Guest Lobo

You gotta give Mack credit on one thing, he led us and coached us through a Pandemic that lasted from 1998-2010.  Gre-Davids09 or H1N1OC

Those wounds run...pretty deep.  

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8 hours ago, RC Horn said:

Agreed that both the 2008 and 2009 teams deserved better. One got screwed over because of college football politics and the other was done in by poor depth development at QB.

We got incredibly unlucky in 2008 w/ the nonsense tiebreaker and 2009 w/ Colt's injury. But at the same time, we also had a habit of shooting ourselves in the foot with earlier squads.

- 2001: We lose to blOU, but the Sooners leave the door open for us when they lost in an upset to Okie Lite. We were one win away from the Big 12 championship and a spot in the national title game, against the same Colorado team we had absolutely obliterated earlier in the season. So naturally, Chris Simms melted down at the worst possible time and we fell all the way down to the Holiday Bowl.

- 2002: We lose to blOU (again). And again, the Sooners left the door open for us when they suffered another upset loss to Okie Lite. So of course, our defense collapses against Kingsbury and the Red Raiders and we hand the Big 12 South right back to the Sooners.

- 2003 was the 65-13 obliteration at the hands of blOU. This time they don't give us another chance. Michigan jumps ahead of us to the #4 ranking by beating Ohio State (knocking us out of the automatic BCS wildcard), we fall all the way down to the Holiday Bowl again, and get our asses handed to us by Wazzu after David Thomas' critical fumble that got returned for a touchdown. A crappy end to what should have been a great season.

- It wasn't until 2004, when a fed-up Mack Brown openly advocated for us to get the #4 spot and Cal struggled against Southern Miss in a late-season game delayed by Hurricane Ivan, that things finally turned around for us. If things didn't fall our way that year, it would have been another relegation to the Holiday Bowl. Instead VY explodes against the Big Ten champions Michigan in front of a national audience and sets us on the path to the national title.

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3 hours ago, Hank Chinaski said:

Yeah, the 2008 team was better than 09 and was probably the best team in the country. The offense was a lot better - it had Quan and Collins at WR, who were better than anyone accompanying Shipley in 09. Chris O was a good player too. Also had Orakpo on D. 

Florida was good, but I think Texas matched them up better than OU (because Texas was better than OU). 

There is no logical reason that OU was handed that B12 South title. Texas lost on last play on road (after dropping a game-clinching INT). OU lost at a neutral site by 10. Tech lost on road by like 40. Ugh, still pisses me off. 

Anybody remember the dick who dropped that int?

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26 minutes ago, The Marsellus Wallace said:

Anybody remember the dick who dropped that int?

The same guy who a year later in the national championship actually caught the interception his way. Except this time it was on 4th down when Saban tried a fake punt. Giving us worse field position. I still don't know he dropped the ball against Tech. Definitely not going to lay the game at his feet but holy shit, you can't drop that.

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22 hours ago, orangecat92 said:

The 2009 team deserved better.  I was a "first-guesser" all of the way through the year.  Probably most of us knew that because of Colt's injury history he wasn't going to make it through the year without injury.  I wanted to vomit when I watched Gilbert hand-off game after game in relief of Colt.  The golden opportunity occurred the week we played that Florida directional school, in probably November.  We were up something like 35 to 0 at half.  All GG needed was some real game time experience throwing to the first team receivers.  That was the ultimate chance.  Two or three series in the second half of throwing.  That's all he needed.   Bottom line, it should have been two NCs.  

 

UCF

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4 hours ago, satyanash said:

We got incredibly unlucky in 2008 w/ the nonsense tiebreaker and 2009 w/ Colt's injury. But at the same time, we also had a habit of shooting ourselves in the foot with earlier squads.

- 2001: We lose to blOU, but the Sooners leave the door open for us when they lost in an upset to Okie Lite. We were one win away from the Big 12 championship and a spot in the national title game, against the same Colorado team we had absolutely obliterated earlier in the season. So naturally, Chris Simms melted down at the worst possible time and we fell all the way down to the Holiday Bowl.

- 2002: We lose to blOU (again). And again, the Sooners left the door open for us when they suffered another upset loss to Okie Lite. So of course, our defense collapses against Kingsbury and the Red Raiders and we hand the Big 12 South right back to the Sooners.

- 2003 was the 65-13 obliteration at the hands of blOU. This time they don't give us another chance. Michigan jumps ahead of us to the #4 ranking by beating Ohio State (knocking us out of the automatic BCS wildcard), we fall all the way down to the Holiday Bowl again, and get our asses handed to us by Wazzu after David Thomas' critical fumble that got returned for a touchdown. A crappy end to what should have been a great season.

- It wasn't until 2004, when a fed-up Mack Brown openly advocated for us to get the #4 spot and Cal struggled against Southern Miss in a late-season game delayed by Hurricane Ivan, that things finally turned around for us. If things didn't fall our way that year, it would have been another relegation to the Holiday Bowl. Instead VY explodes against the Big Ten champions Michigan in front of a national audience and sets us on the path to the national title.

We probably still would have made the Fiesta Bowl in 2003 if OU hadn’t shit the bed against K-State in the B12 championship game. At least it ended up giving us Mack On A Mobile...

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1 hour ago, Ignatius said:

We probably still would have made the Fiesta Bowl in 2003 if OU hadn’t shit the bed against K-State in the B12 championship game. At least it ended up giving us Mack On A Mobile...

Ah, you're right... got the years mixed up. In 2003 we would've made a BCS bowl even at #5, because there was no undefeated Utah to take up a wildcard spot. But no more than two teams from each conference could make a BCS bowl, so when KSU knocked off blOU... down we fell to the Holiday Bowl.

Felt like absolutely nothing went right for us those first few years. Always on the cusp of a BCS bowl berth before some bullshit happened. And it happened again in 2006, when we were just one win away from the Big 12 South title before Colt got hurt and the season was derailed.

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10 hours ago, Ignatius said:

We probably still would have made the Fiesta Bowl in 2003 if OU hadn’t shit the bed against K-State in the B12 championship game. At least it ended up giving us three and a half of the most entertaining football all year. 

The talk right up until kickoff was whether this OU team was the greatest football team in history.  IIRC, OU scored a TD in like the first 5 minutes of the game.  THE ROUT WAS ON!!!!   Then it was 7-7, then 14-7, then 21-7, 28-7, and finally 35-7.  

I think Musberger and Danielson were the announcers.  I wonder when it dawned on them that OU wasn't.  

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On 5/20/2020 at 2:55 AM, orangecat92 said:

The 2009 team deserved better.  I was a "first-guesser" all of the way through the year.  Probably most of us knew that because of Colt's injury history he wasn't going to make it through the year without injury.  I wanted to vomit when I watched Gilbert hand-off game after game in relief of Colt.  The golden opportunity occurred the week we played that Florida directional school, in probably November.  We were up something like 35 to 0 at half.  All GG needed was some real game time experience throwing to the first team receivers.  That was the ultimate chance.  Two or three series in the second half of throwing.  That's all he needed.   Bottom line, it should have been two NCs.  

 

Should have been 3.  We had the best team in 2008.

 

From 2000-2009 UT had the best winning percentage and the most end of year AP Poll points in the country.  And that despite OU and Bob Stoops and Mack's difficulty with OU.

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On 5/20/2020 at 7:01 PM, Vic Mackey said:

Exactly. The most logical way to decide a 3 way tie is how the SEC does it. You eliminate the lowest ranked team and then head to head with the other 2. Tech got blown off the field by OU and dropped in the rankings. Below us by the end. So we get it over OU head to head. Or hell, pick which team has the worst loss and eliminate them. Also Tech. Blown out by 50. We had the best win. Tech was also the last game of a gauntlet run through our schedule. OU, Mizzou, Okie State, Tech. I believe that was all in October. 

But even after all that, we actually had a chance to get in the Big 12 title game on our own. Kind of goes under the radar now but Tech played Baylor on the day after thanksgiving. Baylor had a 14pt lead twice. Crabtree was hurt that game and Tech looked bad. Had Tech lost that, we win because they drop to 2 losses and we have head to head vs OU. I remember being so deflated because we were so close to getting in and not having to worry about the voters and rankings. And we would have easily rolled Mizzou in the Big 12 title game.

That team played Colorado, who was top 10 earlier in the season and then 4 straight teams ranked in the top 11 when we played them (OU #1, Mizzou #11, OSU #7 and TT #6).  I don't know when a team has had such a murder's row schedule.  And the last one was lost with 1 second left on the road.

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