DALLAS — In a game so crammed with ruckus that it probably even shook the fried Jell-O at the adjacent Texas State Fair, there came a 142nd offensive play, as if the previous 141 had not been too chockablock to comprehend already.
Ten seconds remained. The whole thing had looked like some mobile museum of athletic prowess. The score stood at a large 48-48 after standing 28-7 and 41-23 for No. 21 Texas and then 48-41 for No. 6 Oklahoma. The burnt-orange and Sooner-red halves of the Cotton Bowl had alternated as madhouses. Oklahoma operated from the Texas 33-yard line, maybe trying to arrange a field goal for some brave kicker forced to trot out amid 92,100 and decide this 117th festival of loathing between the two neighbors, a game sprung from 11 a.m. Central time through the 90-degree heat and all the way to jeez.
Somehow, that kicker would appear only for an extra point with two seconds left in a 55-48 win Oklahomans figure to relish for merely the rest of their lives. Somehow, the game had one last gasp in it. Somehow, once a direct snap went to running back Kennedy Brooks and Brooks faked a pitch to quarterback Caleb Williams, the Washingtonian freshman who had wowed in second-half relief of struggling star Spencer Rattler, Brooks had roamed the left side of the field clear to the end zone.
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The Oklahoma red bounced madly in the stands, the kind of bounce only a comeback can produce.
“It was awesome, man,” Oklahoma Coach Lincoln Riley said of the atmosphere. “It was as good as I’ve ever seen.”
“Aw, man,” Brooks said. “It was an amazing feeling.”
“This one hurts,” said Texas Coach Steve Sarkisian, who told of “a little window-dressing with the motion” for that last play and said, “They blocked it well,” and said, “We just didn’t fit the run right, and then he had the explosiveness to crease it and find the end zone.”
Multitudes might try to remember all the plays of a game that rose to matter more for what it was than for what it meant season-wise, even as it did send Oklahoma to an escapist’s 6-0 and Texas to a heartbroken 4-2. Those memories might not even count the one early on, when a fox took the field and raced down a sideline.
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The game had 12 touchdowns including those of 75, 48, 66, 52, 31 and 33 yards. It had 217 yards on 25 carries from Brooks, and 137 yards on 20 carries from the great Texas runner Bijan Robinson. It had so many plays that one might even forget Oklahoma’s 48-yard flea-flicker sometime back in there (second quarter), the fifth-longest punt in Texas history (78 yards, Cameron Dicker) or the third-longest punt in Oklahoma history (85 yards, Michael Turk). It had Texas ahead 14-0 after 113 seconds after a marvel of a player, linebacker DeMarvion Overshown, spent consecutive plays blasting a sack and blocking a punt. It had Texas ahead 28-7 after the first quarter in which Casey Thompson, the Oklahoman playing quarterback for Texas, had a passer rating of a celestial 383.6.
It had Oklahoma wide receiver Marvin Mims’s remarkable catch of a Williams heave at the left pylon to tie things at 41 with 7:25 left — “What a play,” Riley said — and it had Robinson’s impossible, right-to-left, 50-yard run in the second quarter that included an elusion from a four-man thicket and a big-man stiff-arm that planted a defender seemingly deep into the grass.
It had 1,178 yards, a 662-516 edge to Oklahoma, 370-171 in the second half.
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It had spectacles from the late-morning get-go. On the first play, the coffee still churning around the system, Thompson tossed one leftward to freshman wide receiver Xavier Worthy. For the first of his nine catches for 261 yards, Worthy caught the ball at the 21-yard line, stutter-stepped right, cut gaspingly left, went by Jaden Davis at the 25, went by a diving Delarrin Turner-Yell at the 32 and found clear terrain.
The burnt-orange half hopped like mad itself, its team all recovered from a bruising by Arkansas last month, its hopes restored that it might cease being the national capital of football underachievement, that it might be able to sit around and yammer about something other than squandered resources, that Texas might improve its record in the rivalry this century to 8-14. By halftime, Thompson had 244 passing yards, Robinson 102 rushing yards, Worthy 141 receiving yards and Sarkisian maybe even one of those hasty contract extensions in his first year.
It slowed thereafter. Williams, who had materialized and then boomed in the second quarter when he took a snap, nudged his way left and got out of the thickness before sprinting to a gap of a 66-yard touchdown run, spelled Rattler after halftime, the latter having explored the Texas big men foolishly toward a crushing fumble late in the second quarter.
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Williams, who attended Gonzaga College High, led Oklahoma on second-half moves of 30 yards (field goal), 78 (touchdown), 71 (field goal), 61 (touchdown), 18 (touchdown) and 75 (touchdown). He made big plays even after he dropped snaps, as on a 14-yard touchdown pass to Mims that seared through defenders to a corner of the end zone. He thrived in the pocket and, more thrillingly, out. “I didn’t feel very hamstrung by the second guy being in,” said Riley.
“He made it simple,” Brooks said. “That’s what I told him. ‘Just keep it simple.’”
Yet this beautiful hell of a game asked one more thing of Williams, because it had asked one more thing of Worthy. Worthy, the Texas receiver, had grabbed a kickoff amid the end zone at 41-41, had charged on out trying to return it and had a fumble ripped out of him by Caleb Kelly at the Texas 18-yard line. It had set up Oklahoma’s first go-ahead touchdown at 48-41, an 18-yard Brooks run.
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That made it heartwarming when, with 1:23 left, Worthy crossed the field right-to-left and one-on-one and hauled in Thompson’s leading throw, just over the goal line, to tie the score. So Williams had to seem anything but so young yet again. Across that final minute he threw three completions in the march to the 33 with 10 seconds left — nine yards, 10 yards, 11 yards — the last one a 141st offensive play (and 80th for Oklahoma), in a game so unwilling to quit its surprises that it went ahead and had a crazy 142nd.
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