As a bona-fide Longhorn fan thru and thru, I begrudgingly applaud Stoops on using the system to his advantage.  Using an old saying in concerning bad relationships, “Nothing gets you over the last one quicker than the next one!”,  Stoops knew he had plenty of time to make voters and pundits forget about his loss to UT by demolishing a very soft middle part of the schedule leading up to tougher games against TT and OSU.  While I do think it a tad much to overvalue OU’s “quality” wins over TCU and Cincy when the Sooners also played a Div I-AA one win team and a no-win Div 1-A team, the system is the system.  Either way, Big Game Bob had plenty of time to get the wheels rolling again. Heck, Bob probably pulled out the old tapes of Mack in 2004 campaigning for UT to be in a BCS bowl game with their one loss to future BCS runner-up OU being better than California’s one loss to future BCS champion USC and knew he had plenty of wiggle room left.  The truth was that UT’s gauntlet of four games from OU to TT gave Bob the potential opportunity he needed to jump UT provided the Longhorns stumbled, which they did.  In the end, Mack got “out-Macked” by Stoops since OU had 6 games to rebound from their loss while UT had less than 3 games to do the same.  I say that about Mack and Bob half-jokingly as head coaches should do everything in their power to defend their players and their programs even when the best defense turns into a great offense!

For my final thoughts on the BCS matter, I do think Bob has a stigma to overcome this year that will become very permanent or go away depending on the outcome of their game vs. Florida.  While Bob has done a fantastic job of getting to the "Final Five" bowls in the last ten years, he has done a poor job in doing anything with those opportunities.  Since losers like to say it’s better to have lost in a big game than to have not gone at all, the reality is that people do remember losers especially when they appear to lose a lot.  Scoreboard shows Bob and Mack both having 2 BCS wins with Mack batting .1000 in appearances while Bob is a respectable .333 (respectable in baseball that is) in BCS games.  I guarantee that if Bob loses to Florida, then the potential .286 BCS losing percentage will slowly begin to overshadow his .826 overall winning percentage (scary that it’s the same three numbers?).

I will say it one more time, the Texas Longhorns 2009 BCS Title campaign begins in Jan.5th!