“If we play as good as we can play,” Houston Cougars head coach Kevin Sumlin said last week, “I think everybody will be happy.”
Saturday, the Houston Cougars played as good as they could play, and they pulled off the upset of the college football weekend, defeating the then fifth-ranked Oklahoma State Cowboys by the score of 45-35.
Junior quarterback Case Keenum seemed to treat the Oklahoma State defense like a cat treats a mouse, playing with his various toys and just doing whatever he wanted as he was 32-for-46 for 366 yards and three touchdowns. He also ran for another touchdown, and he appeared to be in total command the entire game.
The Cowboys came in riding the high of a week-one defeat of Georgia and
their highest ranking of the coach Mike Gundy era. But the Cowboys
offense, which had no difficulty stopping the Georgia Bulldogs, just
couldn’t shut down the Houston offense, giving up a total 512 yards.
Senior Carl Barnett, the team’s anchor on the offensive line, gave a
glimpse of the team’s thinking last week when he expressed confidence
in their ability to handle Oklahoma State. “The key [to handling OSU
defense] is we have to change up our looks like coach said,” Barnett
said. “And their defense is more of a run-stop defense, so, I mean
Georgia really played into their system….[but] we spread it out on
them, open up the field, let Case run down the field and dump it off,
then our running game will open up.”
The Cougars racked up 146
rushing yards with sophomore Bryce Beall accounting for 80 of those
yards on 18 rushes. Beall also ran for a touchdown, then made the
spectacular end zone catch off of the Oklahoma State deflection to put
the Cougars up 38-35 with 6:42 left in the game.
The win wasn’t an easy
for the Cougars. Though the team jumped out to the 24-7 halftime lead,
as was the case when they played the Cowboys last season, the Cougars
allowed 21 third-quarter points to go into the fourth quarter trailing
28-24. The defense made some adjustments in the fourth, making some key
stops as well as intercepting Cowboy QB Zac Robinson late in the fourth
and returning the ball for the final TD to make the score 45-35.
“We
feel that we can compete with this team,” Barnett said last week. “Our
opportunities that we have against them are real high, and we should be
able to execute to our plays, and we should do real well against them.”
Barnett was right in every way.
The Cougars competed. They had the
opportunities, and they executed their plays. And getting the 45-35
upset win was evidence that the Cougars did do real well against
Oklahoma State. The Cougars get this next weekend off, then return to
play on Saturday, September 26 when they host the Texas Tech Raiders on
a nationally televised game on ESPN 2 with kickoff set for 8:15 p.m.
SOME
MISCELLANEOUS COUGAR NOTES: The AP rankings came out yesterday, and the
Cougars were in the number 21 spot — for those interested, the Houston Chronicle‘s
Steve Campbell is an AP voter and he put them at 14. This is the first time the Coogs have been in the AP rankings since
September of 1991….This win was the Cougars’ first against a top
five ranked team in 25 years (a defeat of third-ranked Texas in 1984).
This win was the team’s first after 11 straight losses to teams ranked
in the top five….Case Keenum was named the Walter Camp Football
Foundation Offensive Player of the Week. This was the 15th time in his
collegiate career that Keenum has thrown for 300-plus yards in a
game….The leading tacklers for the Cougars were linebackers Marcus
McGraw (14 tackles) and C.J. Cavness (12 tackles)….The loss dropped
Oklahoma State to 16 in the rankings, and Texas continues to be
rewarded for playing absolutely nobody by being ranked second in the
country.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.
