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Tom "the turtle" Herman [Lame Duck or greatest 5d chess player ever?]

Neonmoon

By Neonmoon
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he allegedly stole money from the Cole Pittman memorial golf tournament and someone posted on shaggy about it. He sent me an email saying take it down or else, and oh by the way, I cc'd my lawyer

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Schulz2.0

Schulz2.0 28,951

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45 minutes ago, Spider2YBanana said:

Not sure if this has been posted, or how legit the site/writer is, but he posted this saying a booster was asked by CDC for $1 mil to help buyout TH, and  CUM gave CDC a verbal commitment to coach. Anyway, here's the article for anyone who wants to read it. 

 

https://texastakes.com/2020/11/03/chris-del-conte-called-a-booster-last-week-asking-for-money-to-buyout-herman-and-confirmed-he-had-urban-meyers-verbal-commitment/

Just because we want to believe it doesn't mean it's true.

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hornfromdallas

hornfromdallas 334

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7 hours ago, NTVTXN said:

As it sits right now....Ugh, not long enough.

Lord willing if I make it to 12/1/20, I won’t need but another 8-9mos 😉

if u want beautiful bliss & happiness watching longhorn sports may i suggest you watch horns womens volleyball they are legit & will make you feel like youre watching the heyday of texas football they compete for titles yearly 

  • Hook 'Em 3
  • Fuck You 1
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NTVTXN

NTVTXN 1,432

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9 hours ago, hornfromdallas said:

if u want beautiful bliss & happiness watching longhorn sports may i suggest you watch horns womens volleyball they are legit & will make you feel like youre watching the heyday of texas football they compete for titles yearly 

Hell yeah.  I’m a big Lady Horns VBall Fam. And a big VBall fan In general.

My 18yo plays up here in DFW area. She even took some private lessons from Ebony this summer. (She’s a such sweet girl and Horn fans & alums should all be very proud of her repping the University!)...so anyway/ YES to VBaLL!!🤘🏻🙌🏻👏🏻👊🏻

Speaking of which/ Horns have GIANT matches tonight and tomorrow night!! YUUGE!! 

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satyanash

satyanash 14,478

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(Ian Boyd) Inside the gameplan: How Texas can still make the Big 12 title game

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Texas’ win over Oklahoma State was frankly bizarre. When you’re outgained 530 yards to 287 and go 2/15 on third down typically you don’t feel great about your chances of victory. But Texas did win, thanks to four Oklahoma State turnovers, a Longhorn special teams touchdown, and a lot of veteran decision-making and playmaking by Sam Ehlinger.

They obviously won’t be able to follow that exact formula to success in all of their remaining games, but they may not have to. Oklahoma State was arguably the strongest team in the league and by finding a way to beat them on the road, Tom Herman’s Longhorns may have situated themselves in position to grit out four more wins in their remaining contests.

The remaining slate consists of old Big 12 North teams and West Virginia, all of whom are heavy on size and toughness in the trenches and short on high level skill athletes on the perimeter. The latter has always been Herman’s weakness at Texas, the Longhorns win when their opponents attempt to take it to them with a smashmouth approach in the trenches. When Big 12 teams refuse to play by Big 10 rules and take the game out into space, Herman's squads tend to unravel.

Herman is 2-1 against Matt Campbell with the loss coming via an all-time turtling in Ames last year. He’s 3-0 against Kansas State, 3-0 against Kansas (albeit with close calls), and 2-1 against West Virginia with that loss stemming from Dana Holgorsen’s Air Raid pressure. It’s very possible that this flawed Texas team will drop a game and miss the Big 12 Championship game but their path just got a lot cleaner after that wild win on Halloween and the remaining matchups are less imposing. If they were to pull off a Big 12 title run, here’s how it would happen.

The math

Texas is tied for sixth in the standings right now at 3-2. They're 1-1 against the two Oklahoma schools ahead of them and have yet to play the other three squads (West Virginia, Iowa State, and Kansas State) that are ranked next to them or above.

All of those teams now have a loss and all could necessarily incur another loss because they either play each other or Texas. If the Longhorns win out, they’re almost assured to be into the Big 12 title. They’ll have handed a second L to West Virginia, Iowa State, and Kansas State (who also have some remaining contests against each other) and thus have the tiebreaker over those teams.

At that point the scenarios come down to Texas and the Oklahoma schools. If Oklahoma beats Oklahoma State and each team otherwise wins out, we’ll have a three or four-way tie at the top with the Oklahoma’s, Texas, and potentially Iowa State all holding a 7-2 record. Then it comes down to tiebreakers. If Oklahoma State runs the table then it’ll just be between Texas and maybe Iowa State for two-loss tiebreakers, and Texas would hold that tiebreaker. Everything becomes complicated if Texas loses one more game. A loss wouldn’t eliminate them because these teams are all flawed and will likely drop more games, but if Texas wins out their chances of having one of the two best resumes is a near lock.

As far as location, Texas has three games remaining that are truly difficult. Two of them, potentially the two tougher games (WVU and ISU), are in Austin. Then they finish the year in Manhattan. Tom Herman has failed in these settings before, but again his track record is normally to fail in big games against Big 12 teams that attack his teams in space. Not the midwestern ones that are also trying to gain an edge with physical and disciplined play in the trenches.

The challenge

This week’s game with West Virginia is a good representation of the main challenge that Texas needs to navigate in order to win out. Sam Ehlinger was clearly beat up by the end of the Oklahoma State game, he’s surely accumulated a dozen bumps and bruises of the sort that would probably put most of us on the couch for a week, and he was struggling to hit some throws or make some cuts he would normally be able to execute.

This is one of the easier quarterbacks in the league to keep on the field because he’s so big, tough-minded, and he has skills that translate regardless of injuries. You’re going to get good signal-calling, decision-making, crossing routes and quick outs, and short-yardage running from Ehlinger if he’s on the field. However, Herb Hand’s unit has done their damndest to get him killed and things aren’t getting easier here.

West Virginia’s defensive line features the famous Stills bros in the middle, but between them they only have 5.5 of the Mountaineers’ 20 sacks this season. What that tells you, beyond the fact that West Virginia has other players that can run after the quarterback, is that teams’ attempts to shut down the Stills brothers have not gone unpunished.

Iowa State and Kansas State will both bring defensive lines into the game that can put high level pass-rushers over both tackles. The Cyclones have Will McDonald (5.5 sacks) and JaQuan Bailey (5 sacks) while the Wildcats have Wyatt Hubert (3 sacks) and Khalid Duke (1 sack) plus a third down package that gets multiple defensive ends on the field together. The Wildcats have produced 15 sacks on the year.

Each one will test Texas in different ways. West Virginia can bring four and five man pressures that create 1-on-1 matchups across the front with great athletes. The Cyclones can bring good pressure off both edges while dropping eight into coverage and blow up your weaker offensive tackle. Kansas State will drop six or seven, bracket your top guy, and find a way to game a well-taught defensive end into a 1-on-1 isolation with a weaker offensive linemen.

If Texas fails to make the Big 12 championship game it’ll be because the offensive line failed to protect Sam Ehlinger well enough to stay healthy and make plays in close-fought games that are surely coming. If they had a center that could allow Derek Kerstetter to move back to tackle (assuming he was still up to speed out there) that could be the difference, as it stands things will instead probably hinge on cleaning up their protection schemes and improving on the right side with Denzel Okafor and Christian Jones.

The opportunity

The Longhorns were able to leverage a few of their advantages that made all the difference in the Oklahoma State game. Since July 1st, the Oklahoma State offensive line has lost five members of the two-deep from their roster and their surprisingly good walk-on left tackle was knocked out of this game to make it an even six. For Texas to experience an equivalent that would mean losing Derek Kerstetter before the season, having to suspend Christian Jones and Isaiah Hookfin at the beginning of camp, losing Tyler Johnson and Tope Imade in week one, and then having the best replacement get injured against the Cowboys.

Oklahoma State still had a pair of potential NFL linemen in Josh Sills and Teven Jenkins, who are each about 6-6, 320+ pounds, but the Cowboys just couldn’t handle the Texas defensive line. In addition to those issues, Texas played a lot of man coverage outside with their trio of D’Shawn Jamison, Josh Thompson, and Jalen Green that allowed them to keep Chris Adimora and Chris Brown/B.J. Foster within striking distance against the run game.

Tylan Wallace did his damage, but if he couldn’t punish that approach badly enough for the Cowboys to find a win, how much worse could this go for the Big 12 North schools and West Virginia? Put simply, none of those schools have weapons outside that can reliably generate big plays against good man coverage by the Texas defensive backs. Indeed, that’s why Texas played Iowa State so closely a year ago with a healthier secondary and why Kansas State’s ground and pound approach stalled to a halt. Some may not recall but going into Kansas State last year there was serious panic that the complex Wildcat power run game that had mauled Oklahoma was going to tear Texas apart.

Instead, the presence of tight ends and fullbacks on the field allowed Texas to play some of their big defenders on either edge and funnel the ball inside to Keondre Coburn, Ta’Quon Graham, and Malcolm Roach. Kansas State’s veteran offensive line that had mauled the Big 12 suddenly looked below average when facing multiple 1-on-1 matchups against NFL athletes in the trenches.

Things are even worse here for Texas’ opponents in 2020 with those big boys back and then supported by an improving Juwan Mitchell and DeMarvion Overshown. We’ve all seen what happens when teams try to play in a box against Texas, even squads like Georgia and Utah were stuffed trying to play that game.

The scheme is different now, but the underlying principle is the same. When Texas can force teams to consistently block Coburn and Graham and then get guys like Adimora and Brown or Foster within proximity to take out the trash it makes for very tough sledding. The release valve for attempting to create space to run the ball requires Texas’ opponents to beat coverage outside. Texas' play at cornerback has been good enough to make that a tough proposition.

The adjustment

Texas’ chances of pulling out four more hard-fought wins down the stretch aren’t great if they can’t get more than 300 yards. Part of the reason for that abysmal number against Oklahoma State was the short fields from turnovers and D’Shawn Jamison turning one possession into a non-offensive touchdown, but Texas also ran for just 3 ypc and Ehlinger averaged 5 ypa. That won’t cut it.

Texas needs to adjust on offense beyond just cleaning up their protections to keep Ehlinger clean. They need to improve the efficacy of the passing game and they’re going to need to keep running the ball regularly so that the beat up senior quarterback isn’t accounting for 50 plays a game. The good news for Longhorn fans is that the staff is clearly aware of some of the team’s shortcomings. They had a lot drawn up for Oklahoma State designed to help get receivers open against a good secondary. The best scheme was this pro-spread set up they turned to with the game on the line:

Jake Smith is a maestro running crossing routes in this offense, it’s one of the strongest features they have and this is only the second game in which they’ve even had it. The next strongest feature to the offense is Josh Moore when he has space to get vertical, which doesn’t happen consistently when he has to play outside across from press coverage. The Texas staff used a few sorts of motion to help their receivers beat man coverage but this is the best solution, play Jared Wiley flexed as the X in these “Y-iso” formations and then put both Moore and Smith in the slot where they belong.

This should be their new equivalent of the formations in the past that would move the slot into the boundary and then punish opponents for how they handled that weighting of the passing strength into the short side of the field. Wiley is a good receiver and he’s tough to muscle in man coverage, but if teams keep their safety on him they’re vulnerable to route combinations from Smith and Moore, which should eventually include combinations in which Smith is inside running a crosser like above and Moore is running a post behind him.

Beyond those adjustments, which have already begun to occur and will intensify as the season progresses and they get a bye week to work in plays for the stretch run, Texas needs a better run game. Sam Ehlinger needs some plays where he can avoid hits and to heal up some so the scramble is still a viable threat by the end of the year. Texas running endless crossing patterns with Moore and Smith while Ehlinger picks spots to take off down the middle of the field is a back-breaking combo for a lot of defenses, they need that dimension to pull wins out in the fourth quarter.

One of the bigger adjustments that Mike Yurcich clearly brought to the offense in 2019 was to transition Texas away from being a tight zone/power run team to an inside/outside zone squad. That was a risky strategy for a lot of reasons and has proven to have been misguided.

One problem was that Texas’ line wasn’t recruited for outside zone, which is about lateral quickness and the careful trading of defenders on the move. Junior Angilau in particular has shown clearly discomfort in that scheme. He and Derek Kerstetter are much more effective on inside zone which is downhill and better suited to their size. Each of those two are about 6-5, 300 pounds and better at covering up linemen and moving ahead than moving laterally and maintaining a good, low pad level. Great outside zone lines typically feature short, quick linemen like the 1995 Nebraska crew or some of the Chip Kelly Oregon units with guys like Hroniss Grasu (6-3, 303 pound two-time All-American center).

Another big issue with outside zone is that it’s a rep intensive scheme, you have to major in it to use it effectively and Texas is running it coming off a pandemic-shortened offseason.

Finally, it’s not a scheme that Herb Hand made his reputation teaching. Hand was hired because he installed an effective tight zone/power run game for Gus Malzahn at Auburn and he immediately upgraded the same schemes at Texas in 2018. There wasn’t a major issue with Texas’ run game heading into 2020 other than the need for better blocking at tight end and a consistent RPO threat at X receiver. Roschon Johnson and Keaontay Ingram had a combined 267 carries for 1502 yards at 5.6 ypc with 14 rushing touchdowns. Thus far in 2020 they’ve added Bijan Robinson and are at 124 carries for 623 yards at 5.0 ypc with three rushing touchdowns.

It’s hard to make major changes at this point in the year, but inside zone seems safely intact from previous seasons and should become a bigger component. The outside zone play is good in theory with these running backs and tight ends but the offensive line has not worked it out and they need to spend practice reps on protection. The goal for the running game should be to pick up steady, chain-moving gains that can offer Texas productive snaps without using up Ehlinger. Inside zone is also a play better suited to RPOs because of the angles for the mesh between quarterback and running back. The quarterback can read defenders for opportunities to pull the ball and throw a slant rather than worrying about helping the back get a good angle to the edge. Inside zone could be tough sledding against West Virginia in particular, but at least it won’t ask this line to execute reach blocks on the Stills bros and instead potentially get some key double teams.

Tom Herman’s Texas team has shown up in big games before but they’ve struggled to bring championship-caliber gameplans and execution on a weekly basis. The Big 12 is too deep in dangerous teams for anyone to win it without consistent effort and effective weekly gameplanning. Texas might be able to put together a run at the title game. They have advantages on defense that can help them turn remaining games into lower scoring slogs. Ever since Michael Dickson publicly lambasted the special teams protection as "trash" on social media in defense of his cousin, the Texas special teams have become a difference making unit to help them win games on the margins. Then they have Sam Ehlinger making the difference in the fourth quarter.

It's very possible, but it starts with some further tinkering on offense against West Virginia.

 

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Mikey4

Mikey4 2,476

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There's one ranked team left on our schedule.  Entirely possible.
We have a pretty good record against ranked teams not named Oklahoma. I'm more worried about middling upstarts like KSU and WVU. Hell, if last year is any indication, we could lose to Kansas.
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CfRhTxStBobcats

CfRhTxStBobcats 600

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8 hours ago, Js1 said:

Head fake. Urbs in Austin 

He's actually at chick-fil-a in the Jersey Village area, on weekdays anyway. Dude is the spitting image of Urban and he either owns them or manages them. One day I asked him how often people tell him he looks like Urban and he said way too often. I think he doubled the price of my meal.

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ousux

ousux 5,597

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I still can't get over CDC not tweeting about the past two wins. Even if you're just faking it, Saturday would be a good win to tweet about if you're the athletic director. 
True, but the lack of tweeting bodes well for things happening behind the scenes
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