AUSTIN — Hollywood Smothers reached the end zone with 25 seconds remaining, and Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium erupted in a roar that carried far beyond its 105,044 seats. The final score was Texas 24, Ohio State 23. Smothers had scored the same one-yard touchdown for the second time.
Twenty minutes earlier, the comeback appeared impossible. Ohio State led 23-3, and the Longhorns had managed only 148 yards against a defence that had spent the afternoon making Arch Manning look ordinary. Matthew McConaughey and Glen Powell were watching from the stands. By the third quarter, neither appeared to be watching with much expectation.
Then Manning scrambled on fourth-and-9 from his own 42-yard line.
That play, not a pass or a designed run, but a quarterback refusing to accept a punt and gaining 11 yards on his feet to Emaree Winston, marked the turning point. Texas had 17 minutes remaining and needed 21 points. Manning finished the third quarter still trailing by 20, but he had suddenly begun running through a defence that had answered every challenge the Longhorns presented until then.
“We couldn’t lose to them again,” Manning said after the game. He was referring directly to Texas’s 2025 loss to Ohio State, the defeat that had shaped the Longhorns’ offseason and, judging by what followed in the fourth quarter, had not been forgotten. He completed 8 of his final 11 passes for 79 yards during the final 15 minutes and finished 23-of-37 for 196 yards and one touchdown.
The full-game statistics are modest on their own. What they fail to capture is the sequencing.
Julian Sayin, the Buckeyes’ quarterback, had been excellent for three quarters: 17-of-32, 278 yards, a touchdown, and a Texas defense that could not stop Ohio State from going where it wanted. The interception came in the fourth quarter when the game had shifted, the kind of mistake quarterbacks make when an offense that has been producing suddenly cannot. Ohio State ran 14 fourth-quarter plays and scored zero points.
“We really played well for three quarters and didn’t play well enough in the fourth quarter,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. He has coached enough games to know the fourth-quarter failure was not random. The Buckeyes stopped running the football when the game was close, Sayin dropped back repeatedly and never put the result away, and Texas had a one-score deficit with four minutes left and a quarterback who had already converted on two fourth downs.
The historical weight is not small. CBS Sports’ data put Texas’s 21-point fourth-quarter comeback against an AP No. 1 team as the largest in 22 seasons. Ohio State had arrived in Austin having allowed just 13 points in its previous game, having moved the ball freely through an early schedule, and carrying a defense statistically ranked among the country’s best through two weeks. The Buckeyes won the first 45 minutes of this game comfortably. The final 15 minutes were not competitive in the same direction.
What Ohio State loses from Saturday is harder to calculate than the ranking. The Buckeyes controlled three quarters and lost the fourth so completely that the final score still looks strange written plainly. What the fourth quarter produced instead was Manning — scrambling, reading, converting — and a stadium that had been quiet for three quarters and then was not.
Texas’s path to the College Football Playoff now runs through a SEC schedule that will determine whether Saturday was a ceiling or a starting point. A week earlier, the NFL season opened with Drew Lock rescuing Seattle after Sam Darnold’s hip injury on the sixth snap — another September game where a backup’s entrance changed the story. The 49ers and Rams had staged their own September drama in Melbourne a night earlier. According to NBC Sports’ coverage of the comeback, Manning’s fourth-down decisions in the third and fourth quarters were the fulcrum the Longhorns needed. College football in early September 2026 is producing more contested finishes than anyone scheduled.
Manning was asked how it felt. He had scrambled on fourth-and-9 from his own 42. He had gone 8-for-11 when nothing else was working. He had watched Hollywood Smothers fall across the goal line with 25 seconds left for the second time. He said: “We couldn’t lose to them again.”
Nobody in Austin on Saturday was arguing.
