Why Texas’s final attempt to win the Sugar Bowl failed
The Longhorns attempted four plays from inside the 15-yard line but were unable to score the game-winning touchdown.
NEW ORLEANS: Elijah Jackson of the Washington Huskies had a commanding position on Texas Longhorns wide receiver AD Mitchell with the clock at the Sugar Bowl reading double zeroes. Jackson also had all the vertical necessary to make the game-winning swipe at the football that Quinn Ewers delivered to Mitchell. The Huskies defeated the Longhorns 37-31 on Monday to advance to the national championship game the following week.
The spirit of our squad and the men in that locker room—those guys are fighters—is reflected in the tenacity our team displayed in the fourth quarter to find a way to win the game, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said. They engaged in combat as a team. Even when everything appeared hopeless, they continued to believe. And in my opinion, that’s how you ultimately give yourself a shot.
Texas was in desperation mode and needed just four plays to get into the red zone, where Ewers twice failed to connect with Mitchell on second and third down, forcing the game’s final play to end in a field goal. Texas had trailed by 13 points after a 40-yard field goal by Washington in the opening moments of the fourth quarter, but had narrowed the margin to a touchdown with the fifth touchdown of Mitchell’s illustrious College Football Playoffs career midway through the final quarter.
With thirty seconds remaining, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian had to strike a balance between his team’s need for a touchdown and the absence of a timeout, which limited his number of calls for anything that could result in a tackle on the field of play.
Because there are no more timeouts, Sarkisian added, “it’s a tricky situation where we have to be very careful that we don’t complete a ball short of the goal line or pretty much the game is going to end at that point.”
Texas ran three go routes with Whittington serving as the post on first and ten from the 28-yard line. Ewers decided to focus on Mitchell faced Oklahoma State transfer cornerback Jabbar Muhammad, whose awareness of the clock and the state of the game
It’s challenging when you have to throw it into the end zone every time, particularly when they’re guarding the end zone, said Sarkisian. Thus, our goal was to arrange some matchups using various route combinations so that our playmakers may have a chance to engage in one-on-one playmaking. We simply couldn’t quite pull it off. Sometimes that is the way things work.
