Coaching can only take you so far.

A fantastic game plan can win a championship, but it’s never a guarantee. All the motivation in the world can make somebody play hard, but not necessarily well.

Well, the game tied and Texas driving through the red zone, coaching wasn’t going to save the Sooners.

The game tied and Patrick laid up on the bench and coaching isn’t going to get anybody from here to there in a flash when here to there is 65 yards.

The game tied again and coaching sure isn’t going to move the ball 94 yards down the field and break Texas’ back along the way.

But a couple or three guys just doing it can.

“You always need that,” Stoops said.

Maybe not against North Texas, Miami, Utah State or Tulsa, but you tend to at the Red River Rivalry and you had to have it this time around, the day Texas found itself after so much aimlessness to play plenty well enough to take down its 10th-ranked archrival.

“I thought it was a great football game,” Mack Brown said. “It’s what you expect out of Texas and OU.”

And lo and behold, there it was.

It wasn’t there last week when any one guy might have changed everything and kicked Colorado’s snowball off course, but it was there Saturday, time and again, on the biggest regular-season stage the Sooners and Longhorns will ever play on, every season.

It was there when Auston English sacked McCoy, chasing him down, finally making it clear, 300 passing yards later, the sophomore signal-caller had finished making things happen; just as it had been there earlier the play before the punt that preceded Murray’s bolt, because that was the play English stopped Texas fullback Chris Obonnaya for no gain while the Longhorns faced third-and-1. Don’t forget that one.

It’s a team game. That never changes. And the pack can do plenty and already has. The pack might get it done against Missouri next week. That’s just not how it happened at the Cotton Bowl.

Saturday at the Texas State Fair it took stepping out of the pack at the precise moment the stepping out occurred.

Stepping out?