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.

Jonathon Brooks overcomes a slow start to have a solid close to the Alamo Bowl

To start this game, redshirt junior running back Keilan Robinson was getting the bulk of the touches over redshirt freshman Jonathon Brooks. But Keilan was having a hard time finding much room to run early on. The same could be said for Brooks in the first half, as neither was able to get an explosive play on the ground.

Although, Brooks was at least able to find the end zone on a nice 34-yard touchdown catch coming out of the locker room at halftime. That helped to get the offense going a little bit after a sluggish start. Texas put up just three points in the first half, its lowest point total in the first 30 minutes of a bowl game in more than a decade.

Fortunately, we did see Brooks make more impact plays on the game in the second half. I already mentioned the 34-yard touchdown catch. Brooks was able to find the end zone a second time, on a short rushing touchdown.

That score from Brooks in the fourth quarter kept Texas in the game, and ultimately nearly saw this team come one drive short of tying things up.

Moreover, there were some real positives to take away from this game in the second half in terms of what we saw from Brooks. He got some chunk plays on the ground and played a role in the receiving game in a positive sense.

The main thing that I would’ve liked the Longhorns to do differently is get Brooks involved in the offense in more of a variety of ways early on in the first half. Brooks has the ability to set the tone on the ground with his shiftiness and field vision to hit the hole quickly. But Sark wasn’t giving him the ball much at all out of the gates.

Coming out of the bowl game, I think Brooks did enough to give the coaching staff something to think about in terms of who takes the RB1 snaps in spring ball between him, Keilan, and incoming freshman Cedric Baxter Jr.

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.