HOUSTON — The play itself was perplexing.

With the game tied at 37 and under a minute to go, the one thing SMU could not allow was a kickoff return for a touchdown.

Yet, having all but completed a 17-point comeback in what might have been one of the program’s most important games in years, Brendan Hall kicked the ball to Houston’s first-team All-American kick returner Marcus Jones. And Jones proceeded to take the kick from the middle of the end zone, sidestep multiple SMU defenders, and run 105 yards into a walkoff, 44-37 win over No. 19 SMU.

“It was a mis-hit. We wanted to pin them in the corner of the endzone,” SMU head coach Sonny Dykes said.

Jones himself seemed more surprised.

“I didn’t think they were going to kick it to me. I’m not one of those guys who says you can’t kick it to me. But I was happy when they did kick it to me,” Jones said.

And it was in this fashion that SMU, for the third-straight year, lost a game that could have positioned it to be in a conference championship. Houston, at 6-1, was the only team remaining on SMU’s schedule that could have directly kept it out of second place and on the path of a conference championship game appearance.

SMU talked all year about getting to meaningful games in late October and November — where it has lost three games in the last two years. This time — like Tulsa a year ago and Memphis in 2019 — was the 2021 iteration of SMU stumbling in a must-win game.

“It is hard to win every football game. Especially when you are not one of the elite teams in college football in terms of a talent standpoint. There are only nine teams that do it,” Dykes said. “We are good team but we don’t have 15 first round draft picks. And when that happens you have a small margin of error.”

And the difficult part of this particular late-season loss was that, unlike previous games, SMU had actually positioned itself to overcome the proverbial hump on the road.

It got down 17-0 early and slowly clawed its way back by halftime. Tre Siggers had a 50-yard touchdown. Bryan Massey added a 105-yard kickoff return for a touchdown and SMU eventually tied the game at 20.

And after initially getting back into it, SMU continued to stay in the game despite turnovers and penalties.

Tanner Mordecai threw an interception in the fourth quarter, with SMU down 37-34, that could have ended it. But the defense came up with a stop.

Throughout the game, too, SMU’s defense gave up yards and committed penalties that extended drives. Houston quarterback Clayton Tune threw for a career-high 412 yards and four touchdowns. At one point as well, Trever Dendow committed a pass interference in the endzone. It allowed Houston to score three plays later on a Nathaniel Dell touchdown. He finished with 165 yards and three touchdowns.

But even that offensive output did not prevent SMU from tying the game with a chance to go to overtime.

SMU, on its final drive, overcame a fourth down inside its own 20 to commandeer a 10-play, 58-yard drive to tie the game on a 45-yard field.

The drive ended with Dykes electing to kick a field goal on a fourth down and two from Houston’s 30-yard line. SMU thought about going for it and called timeout. However, Houston called timeout right after and Dykes changed his mind, opting for a Blake Mazza season-long kick.

The ending sequence, leaving 35 seconds on the clock, set up what ended up being a fateful play by SMU, to kick it to Jones who Houston head coach Dana Holgorsen called the “best kick returner he has been around.”

Dykes said he thought about squibbing the kick, but worried about field position. He also said he would have running the clock down more before the field goal, but the coaching staff was undecided of whether they would go for it.

“It was a 50-50 decision. It was the last thing we wanted to do, obviously” Dykes said. “In a perfect world [as well] we would’ve let the clock run down more than we did, but we weren’t quite sure yet.”

This game, in many ways, was different from the last two times SMU has fallen in situations like this.

This time it clawed back. It put itself in position to win, despite miscues, when it years past it would have rolled over. It was a game that could have gone either way against Houston, a program that will be ranked and is 5-0 in the American. And it came down to one play in the final 35 seconds, set up by clock management issues.

But at the end of the day SMU finds itself in the same position as the last three years: On the outside looking in and glueing together a season that has to find new legs.