Armed with quarterback Vince Young, the best running game in the country and a defense that leads the Big 12 Conference, the Texas Longhorns have their best chance to finally beat rival Oklahoma in what seems like all 100 years that the teams have been meeting in the Red River Shootout.
The rankings say so.
The oddsmakers say so.
Even the most ardent OU fans would have to say so, with the Sooners having lost much of their mystique, along with half of their first four games, and fallen out of the national rankings for the first time since . . . well, since the last season they lost to the Longhorns in 1999.
Yeah, well, Mack Brown doesn't want to hear it.
As far as the long-suffering Texas coach is concerned, he's facing an OU team at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on Saturday that's every bit as powerful as the ones that have made him one of the most intriguingly beleaguered figures in college football over the last five years.
"They look like all the other Oklahoma teams we've seen," he said. "They're quick, they're tough, they're aggressive . . . I think we're seeing Oklahoma back to where they've been."
Of course, what else is he going to say?
The last thing Brown needs is more pressure, as he takes his Longhorns into the game that very well may define his career in Austin.
He already has acquired a sort of overmatched reputation by losing five straight games to coach Bob Stoops and the Sooners -- the Longhorns are 56-6 against teams without "OU" on their helmets in that span -- and he knows that losing a sixth will ruin a potential national championship season and cost him dearly among his supporters.
After all, the Longhorns are ranked No. 2 in the nation and riding an 11-game winning streak. They have an amazingly versatile big-play quarterback who's more than capable of delivering a big victory -- as evidenced by his heroics in the Rose Bowl last season and at Ohio State four weeks ago -- and a swarming defense that will be going against an OU offense with quarterback issues and a hobbled leading rusher.
There are no excuses.
They have to win this game.
Yet somehow . . . you wonder.
You wonder if there's something about Stoops and his program that renders the Sooners impervious to burnt orange. You wonder if the Longhorns are going to crack under all the pressure, and if the Sooners are somehow going to make magic again, despite losing 10 players off last year's team to the NFL draft -- not including quarterback Jason White, the 2003 Heisman Trophy winner who graduated but did not get drafted.
The Sooners also have lost three defensive ends to season-ending injuries and two offensive linemen who quit. They're working with redshirt freshman quarterback Rhett Bomar (who might not even be the starter, if Tommy Grady hadn't transferred to Utah), and can only hope running back Adrian Peterson will be recovered enough from a sprained ankle to take a shot at killing the Longhorns the way he did last season.
Yet the Sooners also are coming off their best performance of the season in a 43-21 victory over Kansas State, in which they limited their turnovers and held running back Thomas Clayton -- he had been leading the nation in rushing -- to 8 yards on 12 carries.
"It shows the players that all the hard work is paying off," Stoops told the Dallas Morning News, "and that we're not as far off as maybe people want to think."
It all adds up to perhaps the most fascinating game of the entire season -- right down to that oddsmakers' line.
The Longhorns have been installed as 13 1/2-point favorites, which casts the Sooners in their biggest underdog role in the series since coach John Blake's first season in 1996. The Sooners were 20 1/2-point dogs and without a single victory going into the rivalry game that season against a Texas team that had been ranked as high as eighth.
Guess what happened.
