Texas Football: 3 takeaways from frustrating Alamo Bowl loss to UW

There is a lot to say about the performance of head coach Steve Sarkisian and No. 20 ranked Texas football in the Alamo Bowl loss to first-year head coach Kalen DeBoer and the No. 12 ranked Washington Huskies on Dec. 29. Texas did have some positives coming out of the game, but what will mostly be discussed in the next few days are the missed opportunities for this team.

The Longhorns had so many opportunities to take control of the momentum in the second half. But common issues such as drops, freshman mistakes from redshirt freshman quarterback Quinn Ewers, and bad third-down defense ultimately cost the Longhorns when it was all said and done.

Now, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea here thinking that I am saying Ewers played a bad game. We will get more into this later in this piece, but I did like Ewers’ performance in the Alamo Bowl.

But it is true that the Longhorns had too many missed opportunities for this squad to ultimately expect to win this game. The mistakes and inconsistencies on each side of the ball cost Texas in the end in a loss to Washington by the final score of 27-20.

Takeaways from the close loss for Quinn Ewers and Texas football to No. 12 Washington in the Alamo Bowl

Here’s a look at three takeaways following Texas’ frustrating Alamo Bowl loss to Washington on Dec. 29.

Xavier Worthy’s Alamo Bowl embodies his entire sophomore campaign

One of the hot points of discussion coming out of the Alamo Bowl is certain to be the play of sophomore wide receiver Xavier Worthy. Since Worthy didn’t shoot down the transfer rumors during a press conference earlier this week, I’m sure we’re going to hear more about his portal status with the Longhorns heading into the offseason a lot in the coming days.

A side effect of that could be the struggles we saw on the deep ball between Ewers and Worthy on this night. Bad drops were the name of the game in the second half for Worthy without a doubt.

I want to emphasize that there were some solid plays made by Worthy in this game. He was a good outlet for Ewers in the short and intermediate passing game, which is where he did most of his damage on the night. Worthy finished up this game with 84 receiving yards on seven catches, with no touchdowns.

Yet, this night could be so much better for Worthy had he not essentially diminished from having any sort of impact on the deep ball for this offense. Worthy had two bad drops on deep balls that were perfectly thrown by Ewers. There was another pass or two that Worthy wasn’t able to make the necessary in-route adjustment to make the catch.

All in all, this was a similar narrative to what we saw all season long from Worthy. He’s going to finish the season with somewhere in the ballpark of eight or 10 drops. And if you take into account the lack of contested catches on what were otherwise pretty catchable balls, Worthy had at least another dozen passes he wasn’t able to come up with.