By Hannah Webb | Focus Editor
Watching Houston play Baylor felt less like a football game and more like a rerun — a four-quarter anthology of the entire season: hope, despair, brief triumph and, inevitably, defeat. Every time Baylor surged, the fall wasn’t far behind. If you’ve watched this team for more than five minutes these few months, you knew exactly how this game would end long before the fourth quarter made it official.
Baylor (5-7, 3-6 Big 12) fell to Houston (9-3, 6-3 Big 12) during the last game of the season, 31-24, Saturday at McLane Stadium, effectively ending the Bears’ season and any hopes of a bowl bid.
“Wanted to win for our players, our team, just to push through and persevere, and fight through the obstacles, and to kind of stay on the path, and to not detour, and to keep the faith,” head coach Dave Aranda said. “So, not to get it hurts.”
This wasn’t how the season was supposed to go. Back in August, redshirt senior quarterback Sawyer Robertson entered the year as a dark-horse Heisman candidate. Analysts circled Baylor as a team that could quietly break into the conference’s upper tier. Even when the losses started piling up, the numbers kept promising something better lurking underneath: Baylor moves the ball, Baylor racks up yardage, Baylor gives you every statistical reason to believe.
And then Baylor takes it all back.
On paper, the Bears should be putting up more than nine points through three quarters — and those nine points came from redshirt freshman kicker Connor Hawkins’ field goals. The game ended with 421 total yards to Houston’s 417 and Robertson threw for 309 yards.
But the same patterns that have defined this season resurfaced against Houston.
Take the first half. Baylor marched down the field on its final drive before halftime with the kind of rhythm that put Robertson in preseason headlines. In under a minute of game time, he completed four straight passes for first downs. It looked easy — too easy, the way Baylor always does right before it isn’t.
Then, instantly, the drop: three straight incompletions. A drive that should’ve been a touchdown shrank into yet another Hawkins field goal.
That’s been the story all season. Baylor creates the opportunity, stares directly at six points, then walks away with three — or sometimes nothing at all.
“I think in a lot of ways, this game is reflective of the season that we just finished, and so tough to swallow, tough to look at,” Aranda said.
The Cougars’ opening three quarters didn’t help. By the start of the fourth, Baylor trailed 24-9 and looked like the same flat, inconsistent team that’s been outpaced in conference play. But then, because this team cannot resist making things complicated, Baylor woke up. Suddenly, the Bears looked like the group that toppled then-No. 17 SMU in Dallas behind a quarterback flirting with national attention.
They converted a fourth down under pressure, scored on back-to-back drives completed a two-point conversion to tie the game at 24-24. The fourth-quarter touchdowns finally broke a six-quarter touchdown drought, stretching back to the first quarter against Arizona.
For about eight minutes, Baylor gave fans a glimpse of the team they were promised in August. A team with swagger, a team with answers and a team that didn’t just survive adversity, but punched through it.
And then — the same ending, the same script, the same familiar sting.
“Kind of par for the course this season,” Robertson said. “Just being in the fight and kind of swimming upstream, it felt like.”
Houston got the ball back and marched down the field on the next drive, chewing up almost seven minutes of game time, stringing together plays and finishing the possession in the end zone. It didn’t matter that Baylor had just tied the game. It didn’t matter that Robertson had resurrected the offense. It didn’t matter that momentum, for once, was wearing green and gold.
The audience in McLane Stadium got one final taste of hope in the final minute of the game, with the ball on the 13-yard line and a minute on the clock. But nothing connected, and Robertson ended his college career with an incomplete pass and the end zone on the horizon.
“I think everyone on our sideline felt we were scoring,” Aranda said. “Very, very frustrated at the end. I think — like I say — I think the game was kind of illustrative of our season.”
Chalk it up to coaching issues, numerous players out with injuries or missed referee calls, but the seniors walked off the field for the final time green and gold with a 31-24 loss and a hard pill to swallow.
The loss and the record stung, but as seniors move on and portal chaos ensues, there’s no doubt this team was special.
“You always want to leave places better than when you found it, when you get here, both on and off the football field,” Robertson said. “And even though the season was what it was this year, I’ve tried my hardest to do that. And so, at the very least, just showing that fight, showing the grit, toughness, no matter what the result.”
