The Morning After - Washington 37, Texas 31

Longhorns' run ends in Sugar Bowl thriller as Michael Penix was dominant all night.

The biggest argument on why we need college football playoffs was on full display Monday. The argument basically starts and stops with the fact that no matter how hard we try, our brains discount players because of what school they choose to attend and how long and winding their journey happens to be.

Without a college football playoff – even in its formerly “current form” of four teams which only exists for another week, mind you – many of us would not have spent time marveling at the QB mastery of Michael Penix as he put on full display on Monday Night in New Orleans.

Sure, we are all aware of his work and have watched him play in decent-sized doses, but it is never with the undistracted attention that he has been given because he was in a national semifinal matched up with Texas. Watching a guy from afar in a game that is only sort of important is a completely different experience than seeing him dash the dreams of millions in front of a national television audience on easily the biggest stage he has ever performed.

To many returning to normal life after their 2023 Longhorns journey ended in some level of sadness, the images of Penix literally doing whatever he felt like doing for an entire football game will never be forgotten. If any fanbase is familiar with the premise of a QB not allowing a team to lose a game like this, it would be those who experienced Vince Young. There comes a time where it really doesn’t seem to matter what your side tries to slow him down. On this night, it felt like you simply got in the ring against the wrong guy at the wrong time.

Penix finished the night 29-38 for 430 yards and two touchdowns. All of those numbers are impressive enough, but perhaps even more so was the reality of zero sacks and zero interceptions. And drilling down on those, it felt like neither category of mistake was even very close to happening.

A quarterback of a team that has won 21 games in a row is obviously not out there by himself or dragging a team of lesser players along, but it did feel like if Texas could make this a battle of 22-starters they would be in pretty good shape in this contest. Instead, to me, it felt a lot like Washington was getting about as good a performance as anyone could imagine from their QB1 and they were going up against a Texas QB in Quinn Ewers who seemed to be largely a passenger until things got very desperate for Steve Sarkisian and his side.

Ewers started the night missing his first four targets and nine of his first fifteen passes fell incomplete. A late surge before halftime in the final 90 seconds of the half seemed to get him going and perhaps was triggered by a couple moments where he got there with his feet on scrambles. But, the item we assume the Texas offense will regret more than anything must be this: Adonai Mitchell and Xavier Worthy were hardly involved in the game until the 4th Quarter when the game was already put in some manner of desperation mode.

For Texas to have two absolute fantastic gamebreakers without either having really any impression on the game whatsoever until they trail by double-digits in the final 10 minutes of the night is a failing on Sarkisian’s part. Nobody wanted Ewers trying to match Penix throw-for-throw in a QB competition for all the marbles, but it would seem highly unlikely you can win games of this magnitude without those difference-makers on the perimeter making some sort of difference in a game like this, right?

In the first three quarters of this Sugar Bowl, Ewers threw five passes to Mitchell with only one completion for a grand total of five yards. He threw four passes to Worthy in those same three quarters and found just one completion for seven yards. Without being experts on efficient usage of two top-shelf receivers in a shootout game, I think we can surmise that nine different passes to your two main perimeter guys for a total of 12 yards in over three quarters of a huge game is probably all the evidence someone needs to conclude things were not going anywhere good with the Texas passing game last night.

Meanwhile, Penix and his weapons were not having problems in the other direction. Ja’Lynn Polk alone had four catches for 123 yards by the end of the 3rd Quarter and his mate Rome Odunze had five catches for 93 yards. The third member of that absurd wide receiving trio, the slot Jalen McMillan would have four for 44 yards by the end of the 3rd Quarter and by himself our produce the Texas receiving corps. We realize that this the end-all, be-all of a game like this and that three quarters is not the game, but this is to demonstrate how Texas was trying to win a game that was not going in a way that they could compete until it seemed almost too late.