5 takeaways from Texas football’s backbreaking OT loss to Texas Tech

This feels an awful lot like last season

For the fourth time since the start of last season, Sark and the Longhorns managed to cough up a double-digit lead in the second half to lose to a conference foe. Last season, it was the Longhorns falling short to the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Baylor Bears, and Oklahoma that all were able to overcome double-digit second-half deficits to beat Sark’s squad.

This upset loss to Texas Tech is even worse than most of those second-half collapses, though. One reason for that is the fact that Sark was expected to be able to put that trend behind him this fall in his second year at the helm.

But this game saw a lot of the issues resurface that we saw out of Sark and the Longhorns in the second halves of various Big 12 games last season. This staff wasn’t able to make the necessary adjustments on either side of the ball to put this game away in the second half.

Texas’ offense fell flat in the final 30 minutes of this game. In fact, Texas didn’t score a single point between roughly the four-minute mark of the third quarter until literally the last second of the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, the defense was having all sorts of issues getting needed stops in the second half, giving way to Texas Tech getting a couple of field goals and touchdowns in the process.

All in all, Sark and his staff are going to have to find a way to get this team ready to play in the second half and make more of the necessary adjustments we saw them make in the last two games. It’s hard to know what happened in the last two weeks compared to this game, where the second-half adjustments seemingly ceased when they were needed the most.