Since 2004, the Texas Longhorns have won a BCS national championship, appeared in another one, won two Big 12 titles, seven bowl games and 92 games.
But in that span, they haven’t beaten the K-State Wildcats.
You have to go back to the 2003 season to find a time when the Texas Longhorns upended the Wildcats. In that game, then-Texas quarterback Vince Young led the Longhorns to a 24-20 win in Austin. Ell Roberson was still the quarterback for K-State and Darren Sproles, who had 128 yards in the game, was still carrying the load.
Since then, K-State is 5-0 against Texas. Guys like Colt McCoy, Brian Orakpo, Jamaal Charles, Jermichael Finley and David Ash have been unable to overcome Bill Snyder’s Wildcats. Mack Brown, the head coach at Texas who is squarely on the hot seat after a 1-2 start this season, is just 2-7 against K-State since taking the job with the Longhorns in 1998.
What’s eye-popping about the Wildcats’ five-game win streak against Texas though is that three of the five games have been blowouts. In the three games played since 2010, K-State is averaging 32.7 points per game against the Longhorns while Texas is averaging just 17 against the Wildcats.
In 2007, 2010 and 2012, the Wildcats bested the Longhorns by scores of 41-21, 39-14 and 42-24,
respectively. Arguably the best of those three wins came last year, when K-State sealed up a Big 12 championship with a home win over the Longhorns that sent the fans onto the field.
The streak got started in 2006 when Ron Prince, then in his first year as head coach at K-State, beat then-No. 3 Texas, 45-42. In that game, quarterback Josh Freeman had three touchdown passes on 269 yards passing. Two of those touchdowns and 123 of those yards went to wideout Yamon Figurs.
That win, along with the 2007 win over the Longhorns, in which Jordy Nelson had 116 yards receiving and two total touchdowns, ended up being far and away the best wins of Prince’s three-year tenure in Manhattan.
Overall, the Longhorns have struggled against K-State more than almost any other team in college football. Among teams that have faced the Longhorns at least 10 times, the Wildcats are one of just three teams to have a winning percentage above .600 against the Longhorns. Vanderbilt and Notre Dame are the only other two teams to accomplish that feat.
Simply put, the Longhorns have historically struggled against K-State. Bill Snyder knows that discipline and quality coaching beats five-star talent, and he’s found a way to do it time and time again for the Wildcats. Now, as Texas is reeling from a 1-2 start this season, the Wildcats will start its Big 12 title defense against a team that is pretty used to leaving the field as the losers after facing K-State.
