Big 12 Road Trip: Week 8

Week 8 of the season is in the books and the Big 12 avoided some of the drama seen across the rest of college football.  By this point in the season, every team in the Big 12 has played either 3 or 4 conference games.  We're starting to be able to move on from the preseason predictions and simply let the 2013 results speak for the teams.  That's a good thing because the preseason predictions weren't very good if we're judging from what has happened on the field this year.  Maybe as the year rolls on and each team gets to face the others, they'll look a bit more accurate.  Maybe not.  That's the beauty of the true round robin schedule.

Before getting to the games, lets look at where some of the advanced rankings have the teams nationally.  Baylor is seen as the clear favorite and then not a lot separation for the next five teams, six if you believe in Iowa State.

Baylor 71 Iowa State 7

Baylor returns to early season form.  After squeezing out a win and looking human in the previous week on the road, they go right back to putting up ridiculous numbers against Iowa State at home.  So if there's some semblance of hope this week, Baylor didn't look like this the last time they went on the road.

Our Daily Bears is feeling pretty good right now.  On the overall performance:

My widgets aren't working for whatever reason, so I can't give you a box score.  If I could, it would show utter domination by the best Baylor team in recent memory, perhaps the best in history.  On the same day that so many teams ahead of us fell, clearing a path into the Top 10 for the first time in over twenty years, and with the first BCS ranking of 2013 coming out in less than a day, the Bears did nothing less than serve notice to the rest of the country that they are for real and will not go away.

and on the defense:

Speaking of the defense-- it's easy for a great defensive effort to get lost when you score 71 points.  It's even easier if you're the Baylor defense, and you watch the offense you play in practice every day get plaudits over and over again.  But the biggest thing that came out of tonight's game for me was easily the play on that side of the ball, where the Bears responded to giving up over 400 yards to Kansas State last week by holding the Cyclones to just 174, over a third of which came on the last drive of the game.

And Wide Right Natty Lite didn't have a lot to say:

Oklahoma State 24 TCU 10

I didn't watch more than a couple plays from this game but I'm assuming it was continued offensive ineptitude from TCU.  Lets see what the guys at Frogs O' War think, oh it's not pretty:

I can look back and try and determine which of Trevone Boykin's picks were his fault and which ones were dictated by coverage or pressure or miscommunication, but right now it's hard to feel like there's a point to it.  When every iota of your being should be screaming hurry up offense, the TCU offense got a delay of game penalty for wasting a tenth of the time left in the game between snaps.  How can you analyze that?  You can only say there need to be changes on the offensive side of the ball, and it should start with the two men upstairs in the offensive coordinator chairs.  If they're gone you can talk about areas for growth, things the frogs did well (there were some) and reasons to look ahead to the next game more favorably.  As it is right now, there are less than five minutes left in the game and TCU got a delay of game penalty.  What more needs to be said?

and from the victors at Cowboys Ride for Free, not thrilled and not mad.  Happy to keep their preseason hopes alive for at least another week.

For me, this game boiled down to Stewart and Childs making plays, the defense doing what it should have done, and a hasty QB decision made by Gundy that in the end had little to do with the outcome.

The good things that come out of this?

• Stewart's performance
• Rennie Childs proving that our running game is not dead
• A somewhat "easy" win DESPITE 4 TURNOVERS

How in the world did TCU score 17 on OU?

Texas Tech 37 West Virginia 27

West Virginia had the lead until the 4th quarter and Texas Tech put together two long drives on offense scoring touchdowns while their defense forced four straight punts.  Good timing for the Red Raiders in their effort to stay unbeaten on the season.

The Mountaineers gave it their all, continuing to play well in Morgantown.  From the Smoking Musket:

The schizophrenic West Virginia Mountaineers were their normal abnormal selves on Saturday as they lost a hard-fought 37-27 game to The Texas Tech Red Raiders in a rainy Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown - their first home loss of the year. In a loss that will stick with Mountaineer fans for awhile as one that got away, WVU at least demonstrated that the embarrassment at Baylor was an aberration and it's reasonable to expect competitive play for the rest of Big 12 play - at least in Morgantown.

And from Viva the Matadors about their win:

That play call, the pass play, the one that I was pining for prior to that catch, was the epitome of the difference between Tuberville and Kingsbury. Tuberville absolutely would have run the ball between the tackles. If I were calling plays, I would have run the ball, but that's the biggest difference between the two coaches (and me). I'm incredibly conservative by nature and I would have run the ball because it's safe. Kingsbury won that game because he chose to pass the ball down the field and setting up this team for a touchdown. Here's what Kingsbury said on that play:

"We talk about it all the time. Fortune favors the bold. We're not going to leave it up to anyone else. We knew it was up to him to make good throws, and today he did that."

Darn straight.