By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
There are comebacks, and then there's what Texas did on Saturday night. Down 23-3 in the fourth quarter to top-ranked Ohio State, the No. 4 Longhorns looked finished — the kind of game you turn off and blame on the schedule-makers for even pairing these teams. Instead, Arch Manning and his offense went to work, stringing together scoring drives of 15, 13 and 12 plays, the kind of grinding, clock-eating football that doesn't show up on highlight reels until the very end.
It ended with Hollywood Smothers diving over the pile from a yard out with 25 seconds on the clock, completing a rally from 20 points down and sealing a 24-23 win that will be replayed in Columbus for years, for all the wrong reasons.
"This one hurts," Ohio State coach Ryan Day told reporters afterward — four words that covered three quarters of dominance undone in a fourth-quarter collapse nobody in scarlet and gray saw coming.
For Texas, it's a signature win to build a season on. For Ohio State, a program that controlled the game for the better part of an hour, it's a gut-punch that will scramble the College Football Playoff picture. ESPN's own bracket-watchers are already asking how far the Buckeyes fall from the top of the rankings after Week 2.
Outside the stadium, the win capped a tradition college football does better than any other sport: Texas students and alumni had been camping out since Thursday night just to get through the gates for this one. They got their money's worth.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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