If the committee needed a statement win from TCU to convince them they deserve to be in the playoff, their 48-10 drubbing of Texas in Austin should be enough to earn them some style points. There’s also the matter of actually winning the Big 12 and getting over a team or two in the final rankings, but that’s another matter.

TCU did their best at what they can control, which was take advantage of six Texas turnovers (TCU had a couple themselves), as Tyrone Swooped looked like he was being eaten alive by a sea of white with purple tops each time he dropped back to make a pass. He completed just 20-of-34 passes for 200 yards, finding someone for a touchdown once, but his throws were intercepted four times. One of them returned for a touchdown, and one of his fumbles as well.

Trevone Boykin finished with 233 yards and two touchdown passes, helping out with 50 more on the ground and another touchdown. He got almost half of his passing yards by tossing it high to Josh Doctson, who seemed to have a mismatch working in his favor almost every time he was left in single coverage. Doctson finished with 115 yards on 7 receptions, one of them for a touchdown. It was Doctson’s first touchdown catch since October, and he’s 192 yards away from making it to 1000 receiving yards this season.

Texas will be in a bowl game this winter thanks to a defense that carried them all season long. In fact, the defense didn’t do too badly against TCU in this case, but having to deal with an offense that turned the ball over on so many occasions, leaving the Horned Frogs with very little to actually work with in terms of finding it challenging to get into the end zone, makes all of the efforts the Longhorns defense made seem futile.

For Charlie Strong, who had a disappointing first year in Austin, it’s time to figure out where does this offense go from here. Whether or not Swoopes is the man to lead this school as he tries to shake off all of his mistakes from this season, or maybe it’s time for a change already. For Gary Patterson, it’s now about politicking. TCU still have one more game to play (Iowa State), and their head coach is all about trying to convince the committee to put his team among the top 4.

You want style points? The style points tonight were defense, turnovers, doing the things you needed to do. You know, this team deserves to go home and win a championship. We’ve got one more to do it, and I’m very proud of them. I’m finally going to go maybe smile once, but we’ve got to get ready to play Iowa State. If you didn’t know anything about us, you’d have thought we were a 5-7 team. They were talking about us like we hadn’t done anything. It kind of ticked us off.

Texas suffered two of their worst losses in school history this season: Losing by 34 points to BYU early this season and now by 38 points to TCU. Their only two worse home losses over the last 50 years came in the late 1980’s, with a 43-point loss to Baylor and a 63-point loss to UCLA.

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