By Kevin Flaherty
October 29, 2001
When Baylor has lost this season, the Bears have fallen to teams able to match or better the Bears' offensive outputs. Both TCU and Texas Tech scored 45 in their victories over Baylor.
If Texas is going to become the Bears' third loss on Saturday, the Longhorns will have to go another route. The Longhorns' three best point outputs came in the first three games of the season, when Texas scored 34 against both Rice and Wyoming and 24 against Texas Tech.
Since then, the Longhorns have scored just 18.3 points per game. Not surprisingly, Texas has gone 1-3 over that span. The lone victory came when Texas bucked the trend and scored 17 first-half points against Nebraska. In losses to UCLA, Oklahoma and Iowa State, the Longhorns have scored 53 combined points. The primary struggles came in the first half, where Texas scored just 13 points in its three losses, or an average of 4.3 points per game.
Baylor hasn't had any problems with starting quickly. The Bears have averaged 24 first-half points per game over their last four games, or six points more than the Longhorns have averaged over the last four WHOLE games.
So in terms of offensive firepower, the Longhorns don't have it, or at least haven't shown it yet. But that doesn't mean that the Longhorns don't have their own matchups to exploit.
Baylor's three victories have come over Kansas, Kansas State and Colorado, not exactly teams in the Big 12's upper echelon in terms of talent. And Baylor's lone conference loss came to Texas Tech on a neutral field, a team that Texas defeated by 10 in Lubbock.
If the Longhorns are going to beat the Bears, they'll need to bring the dominant defense that they displayed in victories over Tech and Nebraska. The Longhorns didn't allow an offensive touchdown to Nebraska and completely shut down the Texas Tech passing attack.
Another effort like that would keep the score down to the range that Texas's offense could hit, and would be necessary for the Longhorns to come up with a win.
