The Pate podcast was a pretty depressing listen and hard to argue with much of it. People try to compare this to the Texas/USC game but it's not remotely the same. Sure, the media talking head predictions may be the same but for those of us that watched every snap that season there was a ton of confidence based on actual X's and O's. That Texas team flat out dominated damn near every week including destroying Colorado in the Big 12 championship game. If anything USC was similar to Texas in that year in that they underachieved much more frequently despite winning (although they, along with Texas, played their A game in the Championship).
This Texas team hasn't put a complete game together really since Michigan (well UTSA/ULM if you want to count poor competition). Starting with MSU we fucked around and have done it every game since. Florida was the best performance and even that took a 4th down conversion inside our own 25 YL to wake the damn offense up. I think it's absolutely fair for talking heads (and everyone) to wonder if Texas has an "A" game in them at this point as it really isn't "recency bias" as much as wondering if this is just who Texas is. That being said, for OSU, I think the jury is definitely still out whether they really are the team we saw the last 2 weeks (i.e., as Josh Pate stated, have they turned into LSU 2019 buzzsaw that is just that much better than anyone) or will they revert to the mean.
I'll be fascinated to see how Sark coaches this game given the dynamics in play and given that we don't have a ton of matchups on paper that we love. There is absolutely still a path for Texas to win but going to need to somehow put it all together for 4 quarters. I don't disagree with Pate's assessment that we either have to be able to run the ball consistently or win the turnover battle by 2 or more to win.