This was the game some circled on Dec. 1 to be the de facto Big 12 championship game.
It didn't quite work out that way for the TCU Horned Frogs (but with some breaks it could have). They face the Oklahoma Sooners at 11 a.m. Saturday on ESPN in Fort Worth in a battle of good and evil, take your pick of who is who. (Sadly, the game comes at the cockadoodle-doo hour of 11 a.m. because ABC, ESPN and Big Fox must show the en facto conference championship games.)
Oklahoma and the sons of Mike Leach's offense meet TCU and Gary Patterson's Anti-Leach forces.
TCU's defense was so good and so confident in a 20-13 Thanksgiving victory over the Texas Longhorns that coach Gary Patterson rationed Frogs quarterback Trevone Boykin to only nine passes. Nine.
Oklahoma's Landry Jones threw 71 on Saturday in a 51-48 overtime victory over Oklahoma State. Boykin was 7 of 9 for 82 yards against the Longhorns. Jones was 10 of 13 for 77 yards on one drive Saturday, OU's game-tying, last-second march.
Boykin has thrown for 1,622 yards this season. Jones has thrown for 1,736 yards in November.
Jones has thrown 122 passes the last two weeks. If he were a Little League pitcher, he'd be ineligible this week.
OU co-offensive coordinator Josh Heupel was the OU quarterback under offensive coordinator Leach in 1999. Leach got the head coaching job at Texas Tech the next year. The rest is pirate and football history.
Oklahoma can still win the Big 12 title outright. TCU, however, may well be the one team in the Big 12 you'd most hate to face on the last Saturday of this epic, extravagantly fun 2012 season.
-- Vince Langford
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