COCKROACHES RAID LONGHORNS

by Larry Carlson ( lc13@txstate.edu )

It's long been said that cockroaches and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards will be the last creatures standing or crawling on earth. And especially in these dystopic times of outrageous inflation, high crime, Covid variants and TikTok, many folks are not optimistic about the years ahead.

Then again, if you're a Longhorn football fan, maybe the future looks to improve semi-soon. In the SEC, Texas won't have to play TCU, the original creepy spoilers. Decades before fictional gangster Tony Montana weighed in on what he called "cock-a-roaches" in Al Pacino's "Scarface," Darrell Royal compared the Horned Frogs of 1961 -- a motley band with only two wins before taking down top-ranked Texas in Austin -- to everyone's least favorite insects.

Sometime following the surprise assault in '61, Royal, wincing like a man digesting ground-up glass, riffed on the Frog football team's similarity to cockroaches. "It's not what he eats or totes off," DKR explained, "but what he falls into and messes up."

Messes up? You think? The Killer Toads' 6-0 upset in mid-November had again knocked a previously unbeaten (8-0) Horns team out of the national championship picture. The pests in purple and white would respond to their knockout of number one by losing to Rice by three touchdowns the next week. They then managed to tie SMU to close out a 3-5-2 season. Cockroaches.

The 2022 case of Horns v. Frogs reveals a setting that -- compared to at least the past 81 years -- shows the world to have spun topsy-turvy. It's as if a coven of post-Halloween witches have "spelled"

DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium into a nether world of blazing perdition, with all things going bump in the night, or day, depending upon the whims of the TV moguls.

Exhibit A: Gary Patterson will be on the Texas sideline, hitching his pants and tugging at a visor that is burnt orange instead of purple. The biggest UT coaching nemesis not named Bob Stoops or Barry Switzer now strums his guitar in Austin and frets about the damage his former QB, tenth-year man Max Duggan, might do to a Longhorn defense prone to playing off-key in the fourth quarter.

Exhibit B: TCU, not Texas, is the team with everything to lose in this matchup. The Frogs have been one of college ball's biggest surprises and successes this autumn. Regardless of anything the hungover Vega$ oddsmakers might forecast, a Texas win over the Purple People-Eaters would be the upset.

For now, though, let's go in reverse for sixty-one years and back it up to '61. Roger Maris had just bested Babe Ruth, albeit with a commissioner's asterisk, and the Yankees roughed up the Reds in the World Series. In the NFL, Chicago Bears tight end Mike Ditka was en route to Rookie of the Year status but Vince Lombardi was on a path to his first title in Green Bay. And in college football, Texas was numero uno.

The Texas-TCU game was expected to be another lopsided win for the talented Horns, averaging 33 points per game in somewhat of a "dead ball" era. The Steers' offense featured a fleet, wispy jackrabbit All-America halfback, James Saxton.

Link to video to 1961 win of TCU over the Longhorns
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth887054/m1/

On just the fifth play from scrimmage that cool autumn afternoon, he zipped 45 yards with a swing pass from stellar quarterback Mike Cotten. Perhaps another rout was on. But as number 10 popped up quickly, TCU tackle Bobby Plummer came barreling in and tagged Saxton with a powerful knee. In a different era, Plummer would have been "disqualified" for the remainder of the game. Not on that day, when the blow was apparently deemed "incidental contact."

The senior scatback from Palestine in East Texas was out cold. After trainers tended to him, he rose like a wobbly newborn calf, took two steps and collapsed. A horrified Memorial Stadium crowd of 51,000 gasped. Saxton would eventually make it to the sidelines, only with assistance.

The swift Texas star, who posted the highest average per carry in UT record books, 7.9 yards (the mark stood until 2020 when another quick cat named Bijan would slightly exceed that average), later returned to the playing field and picked up 85 yards rushing in limited action. Then he was KO'd for a second time. Three decades later, interviewed by Kirk Bohls for Bohls' and John Maher's book, "Long Live The Longhorns," Saxton termed the late shot that came early, one "that didn't have to be taken." At the very least, the blow cost him half the hearing in his right ear, a permanent disability.

The Horns would have drives die at the TCU 2, 3, 8, 21, and 27 without a score. They missed two field goals and failed to convert other fourth-down plays. A fifty-yard Texas Christian touchdown on a flea-flicker did enough damage for TCU to pull off the upset of the year, and maybe the decade.

Saxton, because of a feature story already planned, would smile brightly on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a few days (and Texas would skunk the Aggies that week, 25-0). He was labeled "Football's Fanciest Runner" by the magazine. But now Saxton would finish just third in the Heisman voting. He and the Longhorns moved on to beat Ole Miss for Royal's first Cotton Bowl championship. Saxton would play one season for the Dallas Texans, winners of the 1962 AFL championship, before a long, ultra-successful career in banking and turns with the Austin Chamber of Commerce and the State Board of Insurance He passed away in 2014 at 74, with dementia listed as a cause of death. The king of long-distance touchdown runs in '61 (80, 79, 66, 56, 49 and 45 yards) became a member of the UT Hall of Honor and the College Football Hall of Fame.

For DKR, losing to TCU squads that were mostly big underdogs was not unusual but insiders said the '61 upset was the toughest loss he ever took. Lest we forget, here is a reminder that many, many years before Gary Patterson's Big XII Frogs beat on Longhorn teams like Astros banging on trashcans -- seven wins in ten tries -- the Purple Haze clouded many a UT season, beginning just before Pearl Harbor. TCU handed the vaunted 1941 Texas team -- featured on Life Magazine's cover -- its only loss.

Eighteen years later, the Steers were 8-0 and ranked second in the nation when TCU -- and the earliest snowstorm on record in Austin -- blew through town. The Frogs got a 56-yard fourth-quarter run into a snow-banked UT end zone and hoisted a 14-9 upset victory back to Fort Worth. November's Frog Princes bested the Steers in three of Royal's first five seasons, something not achieved by any other foe. In fact, Royal's Longhorn teams held only a 6-5 edge in the series before they won his last nine matchups against Texas Christian. Wishbone-era scores featured mostly burnt orange blowouts, the Horns dragging TCU to the woodshed for such whippings as 69-7, 58-0 and 81-16.

Texas coach Fred Akers followed Royal's final nine TCU wins without missing a beatdown. Fred was a perfect 10-0 against the Horned Frogs and the punishment continued under David McWilliams, 5-0 in the series. From 1968-1991, UT had won 'em all. Then the Horns under John Mackovic saw their lengthy win streak end in his initial season at the Forty Acres, 1992. The two teams met only four more times, UT triumphing in each of them, until TCU hopped into the Big XII in 2012 and immediately got a victory over Texas. It's been a wart-laden rivalry for the modern day Longhorns but the '22 burnt orange boys have a big opportunity to sting a team that ranks among the country's best.

If the suits at Bellmont Hall wish to keep a playing presence in the DFW Metroplex once Texas enters the SEC snakepit, they might be wise to schedule SMU or the Mean Green Eagles over at UNT. There's just way too much evidence that those cockroach types scurrying around Fort Worth can leave you spouting profanities like Tony Montana.

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Larry Carlson was an eight-year-old in the Memorial Stadium crowd when TCU upset top-ranked Texas in 1961. He and his family members cried on the long drive home to San Antonio. The Carlsons missed the '63 national champs' 17-0 win against the Purple in Austin and young Larry began to think he was a jinx after seeing Texas lose to underdog TCU in Austin in '65 and '67. At last, in 1969, he witnessed a Texas victory over TCU. The Horns took that one, 69-7. Larry and his Dad stayed for every play.

(TCU's record against the Longhorns is 27 wins, 53 losses, and one tie. )