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

Quinn Ewers shows progress and enters the offseason on a high note

The way that Ewers played in this game should inspire confidence in what’s to come from the freshman quarterback heading into 2023. Ewers played one of his best games of the season. And I would go so far as to say that Ewers played his best game in the second half of the 2022 campaign.

In this game, Ewers went off for a career-high 369 passing yards, one passing touchdown, and no picks. He also didn’t have many turnover-worthy plays to speak of.

It’s also worth noting that Ewers completed 31-of-47 passing attempts, which led to him posting the best quarterback rating of the season when he had more than 35 passing attempts in a single game.

Ewers had some very nice reads and throws in key situations throughout this game. Unfortunately, it still wasn’t enough for Texas to come up with the win in the end. And if Worthy was able to come up with some of those nice deep balls, we’re probably talking about a Texas win.

If nothing else, that could’ve at least pushed the game into overtime.

I liked most of the reads that Ewers was making on key passing downs. There were some notable flaws in his decision-making on this night, but we need to take Ewers’ progressions in stride as they come.

Ewers is still going to have some growing pains, granted those need to be less and less common assuming he’s still the starting quarterback next year. And from everything we know, there isn’t any reason to doubt that Ewers will be the starting quarterback in 2023.

If we see Ewers make some of the strides he did in the last few weeks during bowl practice, then he should be massively improved at the outset of next season. He needs to continue to get on the same page with his receivers and work on his timing on the deep ball. Otherwise, I was a lot more impressed with his pocket presence and fundamentals even when he had pressure in his face.