Houston beat Oklahoma State 35-32 on Saturday night. Look only at the scoreboard and it reads like a program finding itself: Conner Weigman threw five touchdown passes, Houston improved to 6-1 and 3-1 in the Big 12, and TDECU Stadium got its first meaningful ranked home atmosphere in a decade. What actually happened on the field was messier.
Oklahoma State scored touchdowns on five of its six second-half possessions after Houston took a 14-3 lead into the break. Drew Mestemaker threw for more yards than Weigman did. The two offenses combined for 505 and 499 total yards, and a game Houston led by eleven at halftime turned into a coin flip for the next thirty minutes. Houston outscored Oklahoma State. It never stopped them.
This is a team getting away with something.
Willie Fritz basically admitted it after the game. He credited his offensive coordinator for going for it aggressively on fourth down in the second half: three points wouldn't help a whole lot, you need touchdowns. That's a head coach saying, out loud, that he didn't trust his defense to protect a field-goal lead, so he had his offense chase touchdowns instead. It worked. It's also an admission of the exact problem everyone celebrating this win wants to ignore.
A game this even, with Oklahoma State closing to within four points or less three separate times in the second half, could easily have gone the other way. Change one fourth-down conversion, one Weigman throw, and Houston is the team that blew an eleven-point halftime lead at home to a ranked opponent. A win that thin proves one thing: right now, Houston's offense is better than its defense is bad.
Weigman's night was excellent: five touchdowns and 343 yards against a ranked opponent, the kind of performance that should land him in Big 12 player-of-the-week conversations. He bailed out his own defense three different times in the second half. That matters. But a quarterback playing out of his mind is covering for a defensive staff that let a team pulling within one score, over and over, keep finding the end zone almost every time it got the ball back.
Oklahoma State deserves credit. A team that can hang 29 second-half points on the road, against a defense that had limited it to a field goal for a half, is dangerous. Houston's lead was never as safe as 14-3 looked.
Progress after a rough season means fixing the flaws that caused it. The question for this Houston defense is whether it can hold a lead against a good offense without needing Conner Weigman to bail it out every time. Saturday night, the answer was no. Houston should enjoy the win. Nobody around the program should be fooled by it.
