SPORTS TAKE: LSU rules game of inches

By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer

It’s often said that football is a game of inches.

But on fourth-and-6, there were perhaps mere millimeters between an Ashtyn Hawkins touchdown reception and a turnover on downs. Five feet away, a referee raised his arms, signaling the former; after a lengthy video replay, the crew chief overturned the call to a chorus of boos.

“Bruh,” the official Baylor Athletics account posted after the call on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It didn’t take long for Hawkins to get back in the end zone. On second down, Baylor safety Carl Williams IV punched out a ball that careened around the field before safety Devyn Bobby ultimately scooped it up on the sidelines.

Senior wide receiver Monaray Baldwin weaved right and left, cutting across the grain of the defense for 46 yards, his longest reception of the season. Five yards out, the Bears lined up a wide receiver screen pass that worked to perfection; Hawkins waltzed into the end zone like a man who deserved to be there.

But Hawkins’ karmic touchdown reception was a rarity in NRG Stadium Tuesday, as Baylor dropped the Kinder’s Texas Bowl to LSU, 44-31, despite outgaining the Tigers by nearly 100 yards.

“We had the opportunity and we just let it slip through our fingers,” said redshirt sophomore linebacker Kyler Jordan, who blocked a field goal in the second quarter. “Too many self-inflicted wounds.”

Every game has its fair share of gaffes. But on New Year’s Eve, the Bears dropped the ball, sometimes literally. After allowing an opening-drive touchdown to LSU, Sawyer Robertson’s dump-off pass to Bryson Washington was tipped — right into the hands of LSU linebacker Davhon Keys, who booked it 41 yards to the end zone, 14-0.

The Bears got a positive ruling to start the second quarter behind Josh Cameron, who bobbled a strike in the back right corner of the end zone. Waved incomplete on the field, another end-zone replay review gave the Bears six points. The reception brought Cameron to 47 catches, 701 yards and 10 touchdowns on the season, the first Baylor receiver to reach any of those marks since Tyquan Thornton in 2021.

Then, LSU emptied the tanks. Chris Hilton Jr. burned Baylor sophomore cornerback Caden Jenkins for a 41-yard touchdown, followed by the first of five failed Baylor fourth-down conversions. (The Bears finished 1-for-6 on fourth downs, not including a fourth-and-10 delay of game penalty on the offense that preceded a punt.) The Tigers answered with another deep bomb past Jenkins to Hilton, this one a 44-yarder. Tight end Trey’Dez Green broke free two plays later to punch it in and extend the lead to 28-7.

“I thought they were exploiting our corners, especially to the field,” said Baylor head coach Dave Aranda, who served as LSU’s defensive coordinator before taking the Baylor job in 2020. “In the early first half, we were playing kind of base stuff. Kind of stuff that fits the schematics, not stuff that protects people. In the second half, we played stuff that protects people, and so then you got more runs because of the lighter boxes.”

Baylor turned it over on downs again, but then momentum seemed to briefly rock back towards the Bears. They blocked a field goal and scored, narrowing the gap to 14 points. Then they watched as Zavion Thomas ran back the ensuing kickoff 95 yards to the house.

“I think that this game [was] just way too many mistakes,” Aranda said. “Hasn’t been a game like this in a while. We’ve played complementary football and this is not that. [If] you take away just one of the mistakes that we had, then we’re going to go win the game at the end of the game.”

In the first quarter, the Bears lost to LSU. The rest of the game, they beat themselves. After the aforementioned Hawkins saga, 6-foot-8-inch outside linebacker Garmon Randolph picked off LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier in the flats, but the Bears couldn’t capitalize. Facing fourth-and-1 on the LSU 17-yard line, Coleton Price’s shotgun snap sailed for 35 yards — right over Robertson’s head. The Tigers’ offense took over in plus territory and extended the lead to 41-24.

“It was a super big blow,” Cameron said. “I really didn’t even know what happened at first. I just kind of looked back and saw that. We were kind of marching down on them, and we were just in that rhythm … Just real unfortunate that it happened. That’s football at the end of the day. You can’t be making small mistakes, little detailed things like that.”

By the 3:46 mark in the fourth quarter, Baylor had burned all three timeouts. After a twice-tipped pass was caught by Green short of the sticks (and a Baylor false start was attributed to the Tigers), they decided to punt.

Cameron, a Second-Team All-American returner, ran it back 84 yards to the house. But a roughing the kicker call brought it back — not that it would’ve mattered, given the holding call in the backfield. It was Cameron’s second return touchdown to be called back this season.

“I looked back and I saw the flag and I was like, ‘Dang,’” Cameron said. “But you just keep on going. At the end of the day, this is a good start [to] kind of propel that into next season. Just remember this hurt, remember this loss, just fix the little details.”

With a free possession, the Tigers ran the clock down to 1:09 and turned the ball over on downs. The Bears promptly fumbled inside the red zone, a ruling that was overturned on video review. They went four-and-out with four incompletions on the LSU 5-yard line, bookending the fourth quarter with yet another turnover on downs.

“This game kind of puts into place how our season was,” said senior fullback Gavin Yates, who appeared to have lost the fumble at the end of the game. “We started low and came back up high, and that was kind of our season. It was a fight every game; it was a fight this game. People thought we were out of it [but we] jumped right back into it till the end.”

After the first two drives, Baylor looked on par with — if not better than — LSU. The Bears dictated the tempo and momentum and served as the active agent on just about every scoring drive for both teams.

Robertson passed for a career-high 445 yards on 51 attempts. Eight receivers caught multiple passes, including five with at least 40 yards. But if shooting oneself in the foot was literal, the Bears’ cleats would look like overworn pincushions.

Five failed fourth-down conversions can only tell part of the story when one was a historically disastrous snap and another was a (controversially) overturned touchdown pass. A punt return touchdown called back. A tipped screen pass returned for a pick-six. A fumble narrowly avoided on replay. A complete inability to capitalize on mistakes.

It would’ve been unthinkable a year ago to see Baylor go toe-to-toe with Brian Kelly’s Tigers and never flinch, but the Bears were fully up to the task, outscoring LSU in the second half and consistently moving the ball against a top-50 passing defense. Rather than back down, the Bears stepped up to the challenge — directly onto a banana peel.

Baylor improved by leaps and bounds from last season. It’s a rare occasion that the No. 101 scoring offense jumps 11 points per game into the top 20, or that the No. 116 scoring defense jumps 48 spots. Rarer still is the team that does both in the same season. Aranda’s program turnaround is historic and will go down as a pivot point in Baylor history. The future looks much brighter than it did six months ago.

Stubbing one’s toe in Tom-and-Jerry fashion, only to fall into a Rube Goldberg machine of follies and foibles and fourth-down incompletions, is frustrating. But a step back is important: Baylor just played a blue chip-laden SEC team to the wire.

The Bears will likely enter next season ranked for the first time since 2022. And as the New Year’s ball drops in New York, a new year of possibilities — a conference championship, a College Football Playoff berth, a Heisman-contenting quarterback — rise on the horizon.

Tuesday, Baylor lost a game it should’ve won against a good team. Given where the Bears stood 12 months ago, that fact — more than any Hail Mary or punt return touchdown — is a New Year’s miracle.

“It wasn’t necessarily that we didn’t prep enough, we didn’t scheme enough,” Jordan said. “We had it in our fingers and we just let it slip.”