2-0: Baylor Drops an Anvil on the Roadrunners 63-14

Author’s Note: I watched the first 90% of this game on my phone in a place that didn’t have the game on TV before I came home, in part, to write this piece. I’ll have more fulsome thoughts later.

When the UTSA Roadrunners woke up at their team hotel and/or got on the team bus this morning, there’s a few things they probably didn’t expect. First, they didn’t expect to play a football game on the surface of the Sun. That is excusable since they, like I, probably didn’t even know a football field could get to 181 degrees, which ours apparently did. There’s a legitimate chance that the playing surface at McLane Stadium was one of the hottest places on the planet today when the game began. Second, they didn’t expect us to return a punt for a TD. This is excusable, too; before Grayland Arnold did it in the second quarter, we hadn’t done it since 2013 (Levi Norwood against Texas Tech). Third, given their hot offensive start last week and the talents of Frank Harris, they didn’t expect to go down 35-0 at the half and 49-0 before their first real drive midway through the third quarter, to give up three first-half TDs to Denzel Mims, or to have fewer rushing yards as a team in the first three quarters (90) than Gerry Bohanon did in the third quarter alone (94). And after forcing a quick three-and-out to start the game, they certainly didn’t expect to give up seven TDs in a row before our next punt. But all of that happened, and a game in which Baylor was favored to win by 25 ended up a 49-point win—both the highest-score game and the largest-margin win of the Matt Rhule era at Baylor.

At this point there’s not a lot of negative about today’s game assuming Charlie Brewer’s came out due to the score and/or for precautionary reasons and not because he’s hurt. The defense held UTSA to 266 total yards on 66 plays and the offense put up 546 on 62. We ran for 394 yards on 39 carries, a remarkable 9.4 yards/carry. 4 Baylor players ran for more than 60 yards each, including Bohanon, who had his first rushing TD this week after his first passing TD last week, and true freshman Qualan Jones. We don’t have the final defensive stats, but I think we had at least five sacks, and Frank Harris threw for a grand total of 93 yards for the entire game.

When UTSA woke up this morning, they probably expected a relatively close game despite the spread. They probably had a plan for how they were going to move the ball and stop us from doing the same, and they probably thought they had a chance. Then they ran into an absolute buzzsaw in the form of the Baylor Bears today, and the rest was history. Now the Bears are 2-0 going into the off week before we play Rice two Saturdays from now, and things are about as good right now as we could possibly have expected.

SicEm, Bears.

A few of the bigger plays from the game for those that didn’t get to see it live: