Down 13-0 in New Orleans, Oklahoma wins 28-20 to finish 16-0 and take the belt outright.
Let me tell you something. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING.
Thirteen to nothing. That's where this football game was. Clemson had put thirteen points on the board and Oklahoma had put NOTHING on the board, and if you were watching that and you thought the Campus King Belt was about to change hands, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that you were crazy. You weren't crazy. You were watching what was in front of you.
And then it stopped being in front of you.
Oklahoma 28, Clemson 20. Sixteen and oh. Back-to-back. And the belt belongs to one man, outright, in year two of twenty.
Down 13-0. In the Superdome. Against the one program in this league that has proven it can hang with him.
What Stew did after that is the whole story of these two seasons. He didn't panic, he didn't get cute, he went and took the football game. Twenty-eight points to Clemson's seven the rest of the way. A thirteen-point hole in a national championship, erased, by the guy who has now lost ONE GAME IN TWO SEASONS.
You want to talk about pressure? That's pressure. And he answered it.
Because somebody has to, and nobody's going to enjoy it.
Two seasons. Two national championship games. Two losses in them. Last year 42-28 in Las Vegas, this year 28-20 in New Orleans after leading 13-0.
HOWEVA. And I want to be very clear about this — this is not a man who choked. This is a man who went 8-0 in ACC play, won his conference final by twenty-one, survived a 52-42 shootout, controlled a semifinal, and then led the national championship game. He did everything you can ask a coach in this league to do except the last thing.
Twenty-two Playoff Points. Second in the league. Zero rings. That is the cruelest line in this entire standings table and it belongs to the second-best coach in Campus Kings.
Tayne. In Week 10 he lost 38-7 and produced roughly forty messages explaining that he hadn't started his starters, wasn't at the controller, had his depth chart set for CPU, and would rather play in round one anyway. He got round one. He then went 62-7, shut out a rested Oregon team 21-0, and took the eventual champion to 63-57 in a semifinal. FORTY MESSAGES and then a run to the Final Four. I don't know what to do with that either.
Purp was the hottest coach in this league for a month — 49-16, 38-7, opponents leaving with excuses — and went out in the first round.
TBO won the Big 12. WON IT. And then went out in the first round in a game where his offense produced six points. Six!
Curt beat Michigan by forty, lost the Big Ten final by four, and scored three points in his playoff game. Three points. That's not a season, that's a Greek tragedy with a scoreboard.
Polo beat Alabama, beat Georgia, beat Tennessee, lost the SEC final by 42 and a quarterfinal by ten. Best three-week stretch anybody outside Norman put together and he's got nothing to show for it but respect.
Kewan Lacy won back-to-back Heismans at Ole Miss on 2,342 yards and twelve a carry, and his season ended by three touchdowns to the champ.
And Nas walked out of the building entirely, which put Florida State on the block, which ended with Quan paying $175 for a program he spent an entire afternoon calling worthless. That happened too. In the same season.
Stew — 38 points, 2 titles. Sixteen points clear of second place and the only man with a ring in the accredited cycle. The belt is his outright.
LT — 22 points, 2 runner-up finishes. Closest thing to a rival this league has.
States — 11. Big Ten champion, Final Four, one bad half against Clemson.
Tayne — 9. See above. Still can't believe it.
Eighteen seasons left. Somebody in this league has to figure out how to beat this man in a football game that matters, because right now the road to a repeat doesn't just run through Norman — it ENDS there, and it has ended there twice, and the second time he had to come from thirteen down to do it.
That's not luck. Twice isn't luck.
And that's a fact.
