After a string of convincing wins and sitting atop the college football world for a short while, the Red Raiders lost their swagger somewhere in between a bye week and the 65-21 loss to Oklahoma, better known as the nightmare in Norman, Okla. Looking back, Tech defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeill said he was unsure if the bye week, although Oklahoma had one too, was more beneficial than harmful.
"The week off I thought helped, but I don't know if it helped or not," he said. "After the Oklahoma State game, at the time you think it was a good idea, but maybe it wasn't. We had momentum. We were playing at a high level and then we did have the week off, and I thought it was in the perfect spot."
After that, Tech's season was never the same. First came the surprising comeback 35-28 victory against Baylor in Lubbock, then Tech missed out on the Bowl Championship Series party while quarterback Graham Harrell felt the same exclusion from the Heisman Trophy presentation in New York.
Lastly, the disappointing 47-34 loss to Ole Miss in the 73rd Cotton Bowl Classic in Dallas served as a question mark rather than an exclamation point to Tech's best season in school history.Whether the players wished they were somewhere else other than the Cotton Bowl will remain unknown, but after the game Tech coach Mike Leach could not figure out how that would be the case.
"The thing is if we were that way, then we need to do a better job coaching, because that would mean we didn't reach them as coaches," he said. "Because if you can't get excited about playing Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl, you shouldn't play football. You should do something else.
"I would assume drop off a plane, just have a parachute, extreme skiing may be one. How the hell can you not get excited about playing these jokers, you know?"
However, Leach gave the question some consideration, saying he hoped his team did not "respond to some level of self-fulfilling prophecy."
"I hope not," he said. "But in this day and age with way too much information instead of too little, maybe not. But as I go through my postmortem on how to improve and preparing for a bowl; that's going to be certainly an issue I'll consider."
With the loss, the irony is difficult to ignore. In 2004, the No. 4 Cal Golden Bears, at 10-1, were not exactly ecstatic about being invited to the Holiday Bowl to play a 7-4 Red Raider squad. They expected to play in the Rose Bowl, but quarterback Vince Young and the Texas Longhorns trumped the traditional Pac-10 Conference and Big-10 conference pairing by sneaking in at the last second. Cal's quarterback at the time, Aaron Rodgers, showed his frustration by calling Texas coach Mack Brown "a little classless" when he pleaded for poll votes. In a similar showing of frustration, Tech receiver Michael Crabtree said he "was not feeling" the Cotton Bowl at one point.
So both Tech and Cal were teams who could have been in better bowl games because of near perfect regular seasons, but eventually, neither team could prove it on a national stage.
"I really don't think we overlooked anything, and that we were disappointed in not going to the BCS or anything like that," Tech receiver Eric Morris said. "We were ready to play. They came out. My hat's off to Ole Miss."
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