Texas can smell the Rose Bowl

The No. 2 ranked Longhorns need only a win over Colorado on Saturday.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- The No. 2 Texas Longhorns can smell the Rose Bowl.
They can feel a Big 12 title and a chance to play for the national championship. They've been waiting for their return trip to California ever since their victorious walk off the Rose Bowl field 11 months ago.
"We're one game away," senior safety Michael Huff said.
One victory away from glitzy Los Angeles, strolls on the star-studded Hollywood Walk of Fame and the feel of the cool breeze of the Pacific Ocean. Yet Colorado could spoil it all. The Buffaloes have done it before.
Saturday's Big 12 championship game in Houston features one team believing its destiny is to play for the national championship against another trying to bust up the party and create Bowl Championship Series chaos.
Happened before
Flashback to 2001: Texas was one win away from the league title and the national championship game when Colorado stunned the Longhorns 39-37. The 'Horns, who beat the Buffs 41-7 earlier in the season, tumbled all the way out of the BCS while Nebraska snuck into the BCS title game.
Colorado would love to ruin Texas' season again.
"If they are going to beat us," Buffs senior linebacker Brian Iwuh said, "they are going to have to earn everything."
Won earlier meeting
Just like 2001, the Longhorns (11-0, 8-0) already beat Colorado (7-4, 5-3) in the regular season. Vince Young passed for two touchdowns and ran for three more, and Texas led 35-3 in the second quarter of a 42-17 victory. Young had a career day passing, hitting 25-of-29 for 336 yards.
"That's hard to do against air," Colorado coach Gary Barnett said. "It's hard to believe he would do that again."
Young has made believers out of those who used to say he couldn't throw.
He's had a dazzling season, passing for 2,576 yards, rushing for a team-high 793 yards and accounting for a school-record 31 touchdowns.
Young's only bad game came a week ago in a 40-29 win over Texas A & amp;M. His two-turnover performance solidified Reggie Bush of USC as the front-runner for the Heisman Trophy. A big game Saturday could make up some lost ground.
"I wasn't thinking about the Heisman and different things like that," Young said. "As a leader of this team, I didn't think we were playing how we were supposed to be playing."
Started national mission
It was Young who started Texas on its Big 12 and national titles mission last summer by ordering his teammates to attend players-only workouts. He said he'll remind them again of how far they've come.
"I'm just going to get in their face [again] and tell them what's at stake," Young said. "We're so close we can smell it right now. We want to just go out there and dominate the game like we've been doing."
Texas leads the nation in scoring with 49 points a game. The Longhorns are a four-touchdown favorite, the biggest spread in a conference title game since the concept first came to pass in the early 1990s.
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