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2020 Texas Offseason Thread: Herman's Hail Mary

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texifornia
texifornia

Jesus, y'all win a title and still have tissue-thin skin to even gentle joking around. Woof.

honolulu horn
honolulu horn

Apex, take it somewhere else. This is a football thread, not a "don't be a pussy, my racist jokes are actually harmless and hilarious" thread.

Vertigo
Vertigo

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markstanco

markstanco 12507

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1 hour ago, Hiphopopotamos said:

Or he knows that every team that has won the Big 12 in the last decade has averaged right around 45 points per game.

 

2010 - OU 37.2

2011 - OSU 48.7

2012 - KSt 38.8

2013 - BU 52.4

2014 - TCU 46.5

2015 - OU 43.5

2016 - OU 43.9

2017 - OU 45.1

2018 - OU 48.4

2019 - OU 42.1

 

Avg ppg:  44.6

Apparently 2013 Baylor wasnt only raping coeds. I do not remember that scoring average, wow. 

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Tex Long

Tex Long 4348

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5 minutes ago, Hiphopopotamos said:

First year at Shippensburg.

Yeah looked up 2011-2012 record - shit;oads of points. Almost 40ppg first year, didn't even bother to count second year, multiple 60+ and a 70+, in playoffs, won first with 59. Seems like a Good Sign.

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Red Five

Red Five 40665

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Or he knows that every team that has won the Big 12 in the last decade has averaged right around 45 points per game.
 
2010 - OU 37.2
2011 - OSU 48.7
2012 - KSt 38.8
2013 - BU 52.4
2014 - TCU 46.5
2015 - OU 43.5
2016 - OU 43.9
2017 - OU 45.1
2018 - OU 48.4
2019 - OU 42.1
 
Avg ppg:  44.6

I knew it obviously, but man, we haven’t won the conference in 11 years. You almost have to try to do that with our resources.
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Slacks

Slacks 6791

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Coach Y requiring 45 points per game seems telling on his thoughts of what he thinks the D will be like.
Greg Davis and Chris Sims put up 40ppg twenty years ago... when we had o of the top defenses in the league.

Greg Davis and VY put up 42ppg when we had the best defense in the nation.

Big 12 is the most explosive scoring conference there is and teams don't get a month to prepare each week...

~44 should be the goal, so... 45.
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Slacks

Slacks 6791

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I knew it obviously, but man, we haven’t won the conference in 11 years. You almost have to try to do that with our resources.
Killing ourselves recruiting QBs and OL will do that.

Last season should have been Sam's best shot... but Orlan_o.
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SwanderedTalent

SwanderedTalent 5761

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1 hour ago, Red Five said:


I knew it obviously, but man, we haven’t won the conference in 11 years. You almost have to try to do that with our resources.

shit, after 1983, we only won the SWC three* more times in its final 12 years, and we've only won the Big 12 three times in its entire existence

we're mostly about winning revenue championships

MOST DOLLARS = BETTER THAN

* counting 1994, when A&M went unbeaten but was on conference probation so we shared it with four other teams

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TheFlyingBoat

TheFlyingBoat 906

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4 hours ago, markstanco said:
4 hours ago, futureman said:
it’s not texas bbq until you add the sweet baby ray’s. 

Liquid smoke dipshit. Thats the key.

And you got to make sure to rub it into the chicken real good, because real texas bbq is chicken with liquid smoke and sweet baby rays.

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LTtxfan

LTtxfan 48977

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https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-Football-Josh-Thompson-in-position-to-make-noise-cornerback-Tom-Herman-Chris-Ash-147669340/

Josh Thompson in position to make noise at cornerback for Texas

ByJEFF HOWE 23 hours ago

Quote

It’s been well-documented that the Texas secondary dealt with an alarming number of injuries last season. Most of the injured Longhorns in the back end were back by the time Texas ended the 2019 campaign with a resounding 38-10 win over Utah in the Alamo Bowl on New Year’s Eve, but Josh Thompson was one of those injured members of the defensive backfield who didn’t return to action.

A foot injury in the team’s Sept. 21 win over Oklahoma State ended Thompson’s season. Since the injury came in the fourth game of the season, Thompson had to remain on the sideline and in order to preserve a season of eligibility, which has headed into the 2020 season as a fourth-year junior.

Spring practice would’ve been the perfect time for Thompson (26 games played, three career starts) to return to the field and make his mark, but the impact of the coronavirus pandemic included Texas not being able to get on the field for a single session. In the meantime, the Nacogdoches product is hard at work while the Longhorns wait for June 15, which is when the Big 12 is allowing member institutions to open their facilities for football players to go through voluntary workouts.

Thompson recently posted a video on his Twitter account of himself working out with a few other Longhorns where he performs five back squat reps. Thompson is one of the players who has been using a weight room set up in the garage of quarterback Sam Ehlinger to stay in shape while the team has been away from campus.

With 47 tackles, 1.5 tackles for loss and two passes broken up in his career, Thompson is a veteran presence the coaches (including Chris Ash) are looking at to be a significant contributor at cornerback in 2020. That’s where head coach Tom Herman said Thompson will work when he discussed in February how Thompson would fit into the secondary mix moving forward.

“He's got elite speed,” Herman said. “If he's not one of our two best corners, in talking to Chris — I actually just talked to him before I came in here and he was really, really impressed with (safety) Chris Brown and Josh Thompson from watching all the defensive films from last year, too.

“He'll find himself on the field somewhere, I'm sure of it.”

Ash said that when he was watching film of the 2019 defense in an order to get a better feel for what the Longhorns were doing schematically, Thompson and Brown were two players who jumped off the screen. In a cornerback group where Jalen Green (seven starts) and D'Shawn Jamison (nine starts) gained valuable experience as sophomores and Kenyatta Watson II flashed big-time ability as a true freshman, the biggest thing going for Thompson is that he caught the first-year coordinator’s eye before ever stepping foot on the field to take a snap.

 

“When I looked at the secondary, I'm looking for guys that, one, have good feet, good hips, had a nose for the ball and those two guys showed that on film,” Ash said at his introductory press conference in February. “I like their physical toughness, their mental toughness. They could get to the ball. They were, not always, but most of the time making good, sound tackles and they were around the football and I really liked that.

“I thought that they played with good energy, good spirit, good enthusiasm,” he added. “I could see others fed off of them and their play and their style of play. They stood out to me on film.”

 

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SwanderedTalent

SwanderedTalent 5761

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11 minutes ago, Bobby_Batronic said:

Or maybe he noticed how many points OU had to average to win the conference the last three hundred years. 

I'm not sure how it would be phrased better. "Our defense is gonna be so awesome that i figure we can slough off on offense, average 28, and get by" or "I'MA CALL THE TOUCHDOWN PLAY EVERY SERIES YOU AIN'T NEVER SEEN MORE POINTS THAN WE'S GON' SCORE"

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LTtxfan

LTtxfan 48977

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https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-Football-DT-TVondre-Sweat-quickly-working-his-way-from-sleeper-to-superstar-147692141/

Is T'Vondre Sweat working his way from sleeper to superstar?

ByJEFF HOWE 12 minutes ago

Quote

Going to more of a traditional four-man front is one of the biggest changes coming for Texas defensively as the Longhorns continue to make the shift to how Chris Ash wants things to operate in his role as the program’s defensive coordinator. Joseph Ossai’s transition to the Jack position should put him more consistently close to the line of scrimmage and in a position to attack off the edge, bolstering a defensive line that was one of the worst in the country at making plays last season.

Mark Hagen’s defensive tackle group is a critical part of the shift in philosophy. One of the newest coaches on the Forty Acres has two lead dogs in his pack in Keondre Coburn and Ta'Quon Graham, who have a combined 28 career starts between them (both started all 13 games for Texas in 2019).

What’s behind them remains a mystery with Moro Ojomo (17 games played, three starts) next in line in terms of experience. While onlookers continue to wait for consistency to accompany Graham’s flashes of brilliance, and while Coburn and Ojomo should be at their best as third-year sophomores due to a season’s worth of experience and the scheme change allowing them to be disruptive as opposed to being asked to occupy blockers, T'Vondre Sweat might be the most important asset in Hagen’s room.

What makes the rising sophomore such a valued commodity? As Malcolm Roach told Horns247 at the Alamo Bowl back in December, a bold claim can be made about the Huntsville product’s talent level.

“He's a man-child,” Roach said. “Probably the most physically gifted defensive lineman in our room, to be honest.”

That’s saying a lot considering the athleticism the Longhorns boast in the trenches, but Roach would know what’s in the room better than most. Considering Roach is a coach’s son who has been around the game his whole life and has a legitimate chance to make an NFL roster, his glowing review of Sweat holds more weight than if it were coming from another player.

“A guy coming in at 320 (pounds), 6-5 and able to move the way he's able to move, you can't ask for anything more,” Roach said. “He's still understanding the game, still adjusting to the speed of college, but he's getting a lot stronger and the offseason is going to be very big for him to get stronger and faster.”

As is the case for everyone in the program, Sweat is currently on his own when it comes to staying in shape due to the coronavirus pandemic shutting down the Texas campus and the Big 12 forbidding in-person team activities until at least May 31. With that said, the fact that the No. 608-ranked prospect in the 247Sports Composite is already emerging as a player of consequence speaks to the Longhorns making a good evaluation when they pursued Sweat heavily, getting him in the boat as one of the first verbal commitments in the 2019 recruiting class.

Listed in the 260-pound range throughout his recruitment, Sweat was around 290 pounds in the spring of his senior year. He gained weight without losing any athleticism, moving around more than well enough to help Huntsville to a deep Class 5A basketball playoff run.

Due to the jump up in competition, it can be tough for linemen to make the jump from high school football to the college game. Nevertheless, Sweat was someone Tom Herman talked about as making an impression on the coaches when the pads came on in August.

Once he started beating offensive line starters in one-on-one drills in practice, it wasn’t too much of a surprise that Sweat wound up playing in each of the team’s 13 games as a true freshman (nine tackles, one tackle for loss, one sack, two pass breakups, one fumble recovery).

With the NCAA allowing players to play in up to four games and still earn a redshirt for the season, the coaches burning a season of eligibility has become a sign that they’re not planning on the player in question needing the extra year (in other words, the Longhorns expect the NFL to be an option for a player in Sweat’s position sooner rather than later). Roach’s words put credence into what the staff’s actions suggest Sweat’s future holds and as Roach himself prepares for life at the next level, he can’t wait to see what Sweat does as he continues to figure things out.

“Getting a season under his belt, seeing what it's like to play college football was big for him,” Roach said. “Now he's going to be able to prepare and know what he's doing when he's on the field, not just reacting.”

 

 

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LTtxfan

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ESPN FPI ranks Texas, predicts every 2020 game

ByJEFF HOWE 3 hours ago

Under Mack Brown, a 10-win season for Texas became a bar by which successful seasons could be measured. Getting to double-digit victories didn’t guarantee the Longhorns a prominent bowl destination or a chance at winning the Big 12, but winning at least 10 games for nine seasons in a row helped the program maintain a high level of relevance on the national scene for a decade.

Tom Herman led Texas to 10 wins in 2018, providing a taste of success not experienced on the Forty Acres since the halcyon days under Brown. After an 8-5 campaign last season, ESPN’s Football Power Index likes the Longhorns to be in the mix to get back to the threshold the program has only reached once since 2009.

The FPI likes Texas enough to rank the Longhorns as the nation’s No. 11 club with a projected win total of 9.5 according to the metric’s recently-updated projections, which included predictions for each of the 12 games on the regular-season slate. Brad Crawford of 247Sports noted while running down the top-ranked squads in the FPI that while there’s pressure on Herman following an offseason where he swapped out both coordinators and brought seven new full-time assistant coaches onto the staff, the Longhorns have the tools to live up to the billing.

“Following a full coaching staff makeover, this is make or break time for Tom Herman, who enters his fourth season knowing all eyes will be glued to Austin to see if the Longhorns are Big 12 title material and then some,” Crawford wrote. “Chris Ash inherits a defense that largely underachieved last season for various reasons and will continue the development of Joseph Ossai and Caden Sterns, two leaders on that side.

“The most important player for Texas is quarterback Sam Ehlinger,” he added. “This team's championship hopes ride on his shoulders. If he can stay healthy, new [offensive coordinator] Mike Yurcich believes the sky is the limit for this offense.”

 

For full article:  

https://247sports.com/college/texas/LongFormArticle/Texas-Longhorns-Football-ESPN-FPI-rankings-game-predictions-2020-Tom-Herman-Sam-Ehlinger-147692026/

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LTtxfan

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Over the hump, the future looks as bright as ever for Jake Smith

ByJEFF HOWE 3 hours ago

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As he was running down which developmental players (those on the practice squad who didn’t regularly travel for conference games) and true freshmen stood out in on-campus bowl practices leading up to the Alamo Bowl in December, Texas head coach Tom Herman mentioned several Longhorns he felt had made strides.

One name in particular that came across Herman’s lips — wide receiver Jake Smith — was attached to one of Herman’s most significant personnel updates.

“(Smith) has had a heck of a few weeks in terms of practice,” Herman said days before Texas thumped Utah, 38-10, to close out the 2019 season with a bang.

“I think he's on the other side of kinda that freshmen hump and really continuing to progress.”

When looking at the raw numbers from Smith’s first season on the Forty Acres, the former Gatorade National Player of the Year delivered. Along with catching 25 passes for 274 yards, only Roy Williams (eight in 2008) has more touchdown catches among freshmen in school history than the six Smith recorded.

With that said, Smith’s memorable touchdown grabs in wins over Oklahoma State and Texas Tech, in addition to one he snared in a loss to LSU, were just as noteworthy as his struggles. Of his 25 receptions on the year, only 10 of them came over the season’s final eight contests and he failed to catch a ball in five of those games.

Even though the Alamo Bowl was one of those no-catch outings, the fact that Smith was able to build on his success in the win over the Red Raiders to end the regular season (three receptions for 51 yards and a 26-yard touchdown) boded well for him heading into the winter.

While the coronavirus pandemic put the kibosh on spring practice (scheduled to begin March 24), Collin Johnson is among those who were excited to see what Smith was going to do when he got back on the field to begin his sophomore season in earnest.

Prior to departing the program as an outgoing senior, Johnson told Horns247 that he and Smith got close since by being travel roommates throughout the season, both in hotel stays for home games and on the road. A California native and a fifth-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2020 NFL Draft, Johnson said he had to reinforce to Smith that the frustration he was feeling from not playing well along with being away from home for the first time were normal emotions in his effort to help the talented playmaker understand that he’d eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel.

“I think he just had struggles being kind of far from home like anyone does their freshman year, being from Arizona,” Johnson said. “I feel like he had to get through that hump and then he just had to get through the mid-season hump of just the grind of the season.

“The college football grind is a little different than the high school grind, and that's normal,” he added. “I was trying to explain to him, 'what you're feeling is normal.' I felt that way. Every freshman that comes through here feels that way at some point. You've just gotta keep going and keep going and now he looks up and he's like, 'Oh man. The season does fly by.'

“I think it's just part of the process.”

The subject of transfer rumors when things weren’t going well for him on the field, Smith is someone Johnson described as always being bought into Herman’s program and way of doing things. Whenever the Longhorns are able to get back to business as usual, Smith will look to continue what he started in December in what was shaping up to be a monster offseason.

“He's an unbelievable talent,” Johnson said. “He just fully bought in and just kept fighting, and now he looks up and he's almost done with his freshman year and I think that's encouraging to him, just [in terms of] how fast time goes and how he can compete at this level and stuff like that.”

With record-setting receiver Devin Duvernay (106 catches, 1,386 yards and nine touchdowns) out of eligibility, Smith could be the beneficiary if the offense under new coordinator Mike Yurcich remains as slot-heavy as it has been over the past two seasons. Asked if he thinks Smith could do in 2020 and beyond what Duvernay did in 2019, Johnson stopped short of putting that kind of pressure on his former teammate.

“I mean, we're talking Devin Duvernay here,” Johnson said. “He has a while to be on that level.”  

Nevertheless, Johnson likes Smith’s chances of getting there at some point.   “Give him some time,” Johnson said. “Like I said, Jake has a really high ceiling and I'm excited to see him grow as a player and watch what he does next year and the following years to come.”

 

https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-Football-WR-Jake-Smith-over-the-freshman-hump-Tom-Herman-Collin-Johnson-Devin-Duvernay-147692082/

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Tom Herman hopeful local Longhorns will be on campus June 15

By  TAYLOR ESTES      4 hours ago

The Big 12 Conference voted to allow football student athletes officially return to campus for voluntary workouts beginning June 15 as the country continues its reopening phases amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The news gave an early glimmer of hope for the potential of having the 2020 college football season start on time, though the situation remains fluid.  The Texas coaching staff started making its gradual return to on-campus meetings two weeks ago, but according to the Longhorns’ head coach, there’s a chance only half of the team will be on campus come June 15 due to on-campus dorm restrictions on the Forty Acres.

“The biggest hope right now is that by the middle of June, we can at least open our weight room doors for the guys who are here in the Austin area, which for us is roughly about 60 guys, so that’s a good thing,” Texas coach Tom Herman told Longhorn Network host Lowell Gallindo.

“We’re not going to have the dorms, it doesn’t look like, for our on campus guys as well as our summer enrollees. They have to sanitize, disinfect and get them ready.  What we’ve been told is hopefully by the middle of June we can at least open our weight room doors and allow our guys to have their voluntary lifts within our weight room itself and monitored by our strength and conditioning staff, not coached, monitored for safety, as well as our athletic training staff.

“We do want to get these guys assessed from a physical health standpoint in terms of physicals and blood work and all of that good stuff. And then get these on campus guys and the newcomers here as fast as the dorms will allow us to move them in.”

While it’s a positive step to have some players back on campus, Herman believes Texas could still be a ways away from having all of the team back together.  “All of this stuff is still voluntary, so we won’t have all 115 guys together until, who knows?” Herman said. “We’re hopeful for the first of July but I think more realistically would be middle of July to give us that six-week acclimatization period and training camp to get ready for our Sept. 5 open.”

Herman enters a vitally important fourth season leading the Longhorns as he returns 16 starters from last year’s team and has arguably the most talented roster Texas has fielded in nearly a decade at his disposal.

https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-football-Tom-Herman-hopes-to-have-half-roster-back-on-campus-June-15-147699665/

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Cross-posting...

Yurcich outlines installation process for Texas amid pandemic

By  JEFF HOWE    75 seconds ago

Quote

College football coaches across the country have faced no shortage of struggles and hardships in order to get their jobs done on a daily basis throughout the spring amid restrictions put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Until two weeks ago, the Texas coaches hadn’t been able to get together for meetings since the middle of March. With players not allowed to use the weight room and other facilities until at least June 15 when the Big 12 is allowing football student-athletes to return to their respective campuses for voluntary workouts, the process Chris Ash and Mike Yurcich are going through to get their schemes installed remains far from ideal.

Head coach Tom Herman has praised the work Ash has done to get the new defense installed and what Yurcich has accomplished in putting his own spin on the program’s pro-spread offense. While the Longhorns have yet to go through physical reps in a practice setting under either new coordinator, the coaches at least got to conduct walk-through practices and position-specific training during winter conditioning in January and February.

Yurcich recently told SiriusXM’s Big 12 Today that he’s enjoyed getting to teach his offense more than he otherwise would. With that said, the absence of spring practice has him constantly reinforcing what he needs his players to digest in order for Texas to be ready for the Sept. 5 season opener against South Florida.

“You dwell on the fact that you're not there being able to see practices and actually seeing the execution,” Yurcich said. “I think you have to be careful because there could be a false sense of what our guys can do and what we think they know.”

Borrowing an adage from William Heard Kilpatrick that you never learn anything until you accept it and go out and do it, Yurcich said acknowledgment from the players when he’s teaching the offense isn’t enough.

“You can head nod all you wish, so there's a lot of head-nodding going on in these Zoom meetings: do you understand? Do you understand? Yes. Yes,” Yurcich said. “You have to have the players spit it back to you. There's constant Q&A. Present less information, ask more questions.

“When you're installing and you're tweaking an offense and you're doing certain things from an offensive standpoint, you're presenting a lot of information, but you also have to ask a lot of questions.”

With the installation essentially done with the exception of certain situations and the players taking what they know to the field for 11-on-11 work, Yurcich said most of what’s being done right now involves testing. That’s the coaches testing the players in virtual position group meetings and players holding their own meetings to test each other on the nuances of the offense to “put the pressure on,” Yurcich said.

That might not sound conducive to the offense to click early in the season (especially considering Texas travels to Baton Rouge to take on reigning national champion LSU on Sept. 12), but Yurcich has found a silver lining on what’s been a challenging first few months on the job. The enjoyable part for him, he said, is the pandemic forcing him to get familiar with technology like putting voiceovers on film, something he’ll continue to do when things return to normal.

“It's embarrassing because the technology was actually there and I could've been using that the whole way, but now we're presenting the information with the voiceovers, matching it up,” Yurcich said. “We've got these really awesome cutups — it's basically a virtual playbook with instruction audio attached. All of the PowerPoints and all of the presentations and the pictures, those are all great things that you really are forced now to get better at, so to me, it was kind of a renaissance from a standpoint of how to become a better coach and how to reach guys when you can't practice and indoctrinate them.”

With no indication when practices will begin ahead of the coming season, the key for the Longhorns in a virtual world is communication. The current situation has forced everyone in the organization to learn effective communication skills, which Yurcich he hopes results in the Longhorns hitting the ground running whenever they’re able to put their knowledge of the new schemes into action.

“It's helped us as coaches and it's helped us as players kind of see it from a different perspective,” Yurcich said. “We all want to be there and touch it and feel it and see it, but it's the next best thing.”

 

https://247sports.com/college/texas/Article/Texas-Longhorns-Football-Mike-Yurcich-outlines-installation-process-coronavirus-pandemic-Chris-Ash-Tom-Herman-147709016/

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