 "Photo: Brian Hollingsworth")
DALLAS - He stood amidst the post-game celebration with his arms crossed, the Golden Hat tilted to one side and cameras zoomed in from every direction.
Things were going just right for Brian Robison, who seconds earlier staked Texas' flag in the middle of the field at the Cotton Bowl.
"Let me try this hat on for size," he said before striking a pose.
The gilded Stetson fit almost as well as the Longhorns defense played the run in the second half. Texas held Oklahoma's Adrian Peterson to 38 yards rushing after halftime, and the running back finished with 109 yards on 25 carries.
"I learned that us stopping the run is definitely for real," Robison said. "We knew that we could stop the run. But we knew today would be a big test. We went out today and proved that we are the defense that we think we are."
Robison was a key cog up the middle. He had four tackles - two for a loss - and one sack for a 13-yard loss.
The Longhorns forced six fumbles, recovered three, and intercepted two passes with a defensive touchdown.
"It is a big step for our defense," defensive tackle Derek Lokey said.
Peterson broke several tackles when he scored the Sooners' lone touchdown off of a 29-yard run with 7:41 left in the first half. Oklahoma's Garret Hartley added a 35-yard field goal with four seconds left to give the Sooners a 10-7 lead.
When the Longhorns got into the locker room, Texas coach Mack Brown relayed a not-so-comforting statistic to them.
"Ninety-one percent of teams who score right before the half go on to win," he said.
The Longhorns had already seen that happen earlier this season when Ohio State scored in the final seconds of the half to break a tie and eventually beat Texas at home.
"I told them we can either do the same thing we did against Ohio State and get beat by a really good team, or we can answer," Brown said.
Robison was caught off-guard by the statistic and only knew one way of going about it.
"We didn't know anything about that. We just said we were going to have to change history and get it down to 90 percent," he said.
Co-defensive coordinator Gene Chizik said that he challenged the Longhorns to be more physical, because there were no two ways about it, Peterson was going to be physical. Prior to Saturday, Peterson picked up 62.7 percent of his yards in the second half of games this season.
"They took it to heart," Chizik said.
From the moment they came out of the tunnel and onto the field for the second half, the Longhorns felt they had something to prove, even though they came in as the second-rated rushing defense in the country.
"When critics talk about that and undermined that, they are talking about the lesser teams that we have played," Lokey said. "They seem to forget we played the No. 1 team in the country and played Iowa State which is a really good running team."
Texas beat Peterson to the outside and gave him little room to run up the middle.
"They played with a tenacious attitude in the second half," Brown said. "We knew that he would get his runs. But we had to tackle him.
"Defense on the run and the pass rush against Paul [Thompson] was really the difference."
Linebacker Rashad Bobino led Texas with 10 tackles, followed by a host of secondary players, including Tarell Brown, who had eight tackles and a bone-jarring hit on Juaquin Iglesias that forced a fumble at the Texas 15-yard line in the fourth quarter.
But Chizik said that everything was started with the guys up front.
"Without watching film I can say that they started it," Chizik said. "That's where it all starts."
Defensive lineman Roy Miller's sack on Thompson gave the Longhorns 20 sacks through six games.
"We were playing against strong, quick defensive veterans," Thompson said. "They were disrupting the plays."
Be the first to comment on this article!