Charlie Strong | "There's No Reason For Us Not To Get It Done Again"

With the 109th meeting between Oklahoma and Texas less than a week away, Longhorns head coach Charlie Strong and a select number of players met with the media to discuss the event that takes place at the state fair each October. When asked about his expectations going into his first Red River Rivalry game, Charlie Strong made no reservations on his expectations.

"Well, it's an unbelievable atmosphere, which we know," Strong said.  "But, what's really good is it is not so much for me, but that the players have been in that atmosphere. I told our players, a lot of you guys sitting here sitting in this room played in that game last year, and you went up and got the job done. So there's no reason for us not to go back and get it done again."

I'm not for sure that the players are fully buying into that line of thinking though. Senior defensive back Quandre Diggs sounded much more reasonable in stating that each year should pretty much stand on its own. "You really can't, you know, just lean on last year, because this is a totally different team, totally different staff," Diggs said. "And you never know how things will go. But we always can kind of pull back some things from last year and know that those things work throughout the year and know that it's a chance that you can turn this all around and things can balance your way and you can get the right balance here and there and maybe things go right."

Neither team will come into the Cotton Bowl with an unblemished record for just the second time since 2007 but if you listen to Charlie Strong talk it sounds like he's picking up right where Mack Brown left off. The Longhorns don't lose games, they just fail to win them. Listen to what he had to say about the 28-7 home loss to Baylor last week.

"What I do is I just go back to the game and I just show them game tape and show them plays. It's nothing that Baylor did, It's what we did to ourselves. It's not what someone else is doing to you. It's what we're doing to ourselves. You look at the center-quarterback exchange right there; you're on the one foot line. Baylor had nothing to do with that. You look at the blocked field goal. We blocked, Baylor has nothing to do with that. We give up plays on defense. Either we're out of position or somebody didn't get the right check. But it's all about the little things that we do. It's just some minor details, and that's why you can't ever lose your focus in a game. It's play-by-play. If you think about just winning every play, you have to win every play."