Football is a game about numbers: points, touchdowns, yards passing, yards rushing, yards receiving, yards allowed – and the list goes on and on. After victories, fans and the media are quick to applaud a team’s most outstanding players, which are typically the ones who post the biggest numbers. After losses, those same fans and members of the media focus on what went wrong, rarely looking for anything that may have gone right. But in every game, win or lose, there are players, or “unsung heroesâ€, whose performances are often overlooked and don’t receive the praise or attention they deserve.
On a night in which the Longhorns suffered their second consecutive humiliating defeat at the hands of the BYU Cougars, it’s even harder to find those unsung heroes. After fans witnessed the Cougars lining up in the victory formation and trotting off the field to chants of “BYU†from the visiting crowd, they immediately began looking for someone to blame and directed their anger towards Mack Brown, Charlie Strong, and Shawn Watson. It was hard to find anything positive in such a devastating loss, the school’s third worst home loss in the storied program, much less anyone in a Texas jersey who deserved praise. But lost in all the post-game angst, blame-fest and even in the debate as to whether or not sophomore Tyrone Swoopes proved that he could be the future of this team, is the outstanding performance of one young man wearing burnt orange.
On a night where nothing seemed to go right for the Longhorns, defensive tackle Malcom Brown put in what could be considered his best game on the Forty Acres, but sadly, this is not what fans are talking about, and understandably so. However, to ignore what Brown did on the field last night would not be fair to one of the most talented defenders to come through this program in a long, long time.
The defense as a whole looked outstanding once again in the first half, holding elusive quarterback Taysom Hill and the Cougars to just six points. However, the BYU offense exploded in the third quarter, the Texas defense crumbled, and players and fans had flashbacks to Hill’s performance last season.
Regardless of the inconsistent and even sometimes flat-out poor play from the Texas defense, Malcom Brown recorded eleven tackles and three sacks, both of which are career highs for the junior out of Brenham, Texas. For good measure, Brown rounded out his stat line with five tackles for a loss and a forced fumble.
As frustrating as the loss was for this Texas team, Brown understands the need to look ahead. As he said in the post-game press conference, “The game’s over and we’ve got to focus on UCLA now.â€
He’s right, and something tells me that we will see many more of these stellar performances from Brown in his career. Let’s just hope the rest of the team joins him.
