look at last night’s offensive gameplan. greg davis may as well have been at home sick all week with pneumonia. colt mccoy could have run practice and called last nights entire offensive game on his own. there was zero plan in place other than to run the 15 most frequently run plays in our play book with, as PB points out, no adjustments in response to any number of defensive schemes being used against us.

what is the point in discontinuing John Chiles involvement in the offense after a relatively promising week 1? There is none. It’s laziness. Greg Davis phoned this week in. And guess what? He got away with it because 1) our offense is good 2) UTEP is bad 3) we will win 9 or more games again this year.

Whereas Dwayne Akina was simply an ineffective defensive coordinator who had to be replaced, Greg Davis is a talented offensive mind who has the sad quality of being perfectly content to rest on his laurels, put his team on cruise control about 5 or 6 weeks out of the year.

I’m confident our offense will play inspired, creative football against OU, Missouri, Kansas and (possibly) A&M. Greg Davis will lay turds, however, against Rice, Oklahoma State, Colorado and Baylor.

Offense Fozzy had a terrific game and I agree that he should probably be he starting RB. I really like have the combination of different type of runners. Some running styles just don’t work against some defenses. Quan gets MVP. Awesome game, particularly the 5 foot leap and grab and the TD later in the drive. He was fired up and pissed off that UTEP even thought they could compete. Colt had a pretty efficient game, but he had some poor decision making in Q3. Offensive line was pretty good a run blocking, but I think needs to get a lot better at pass blocking and defending the blitz. This goes for the RB’s picking up the blitz too.

Defense Defensive line had way too few sacks, but nice pressure. If they could just learn how to sack because they had him so many times. I really don’t care if they thought UTEP was going to be passing more, the defensive front needs to shutdown the run. This is freak’n UTEP for crying aloud. Their goal should be to limit opposing teams to less than 3.0 ypc and against teams like UTEP, FAU, Rice…this should be more like 1.5 ypc. One last note on the d-line is I’d like to see Kheeston Randall and Jarvis Humphrey more playing time. We’re thin at DT, and are going to be thin again next year with Miller and Lewis graduating after this season. Secondary has me so worried. They’ve got so far to go to be a dominating defense. Yes, I know no one expects the defense to be dominating this season, but that is the only standard at Texas. Frankly, I thought UTEP’s WR’s bailed the secondary out with so many dropped balls, otherwise I think they’d add another 150 – 200 yards passing.

Game planning On offense it was almost non-existent, but I think it was intentionally non-existent. Other than blitz pickup which needs more work, I don’t think they intended to do or show much else. Very vanilla offense. Q-package would’ve been wasted on this UTEP. Player execution is paramount in a vanilla offense, and it’s being used to develop and distinguish players and the starting line up when the real season starts against CO and OU. It’ll be pretty vanilla against Rice although I’m hoping Colt will get a big lead in the first half and give Chiles and Harris a lot of real playing time. Against Arkansas, Davis may not show much either since they’ve barely beaten Western Illinois and Louisiana-Monroe. But I don’t disagree that Q3 looked looked awful, and it would’ve nice to get a bigger lead earlier and give Chiles some real playing time. If you saw the zoom in on Chiles face in Q4, you know he was annoyed to just hand off the ball. Defense on the other hand has me worried. Muschamp for the most part probably wanted to stay pretty vanilla…moving people around to see how they do coming from a different angles and a few blitzes here and there. The problem is that the run defense was pretty poor against UTEP and pass defense was worse. He blitzed far more often than he probably wanted. You can’t do more complex schemes if you don’t have the fundamentals down. Blitzing and scheming just hides the lack of fundamentals which will get exposed by better teams later in the season. So this has me worried. For a little bit of reflection…Beasley looked awful his first 1-1/2 seasons and now we’ve got a whole mess of freshman in the secondary. Speaking of Beasley he was beat off the line on that one pass. What was encouraging is he was only a step or two behind, but he didn’t leap up to try to intercept or deflect the pass. He would’ve wiffed and compounded being beat off the line by allowing a TD. Overall this defense needs to grow up fast just to compete against the likes of OU, Missouri, TT (last game not withstanding because you know Texas is marked on their calendar every year), OSU, etc. Overall game planning might be interesting further down the season. The offense may need to take a chew up the game clock approach to limit the defense’s exposure whether this means more running (Greg Davis…yeah, right) or a lot of dinking and dunking. If the defense can hold, he can open up the offense.

should not a create a gastrointestinal meltdown.

I read the whole game differently from you, PB. I thought the game demonstrated many positives and the team did many things it wouldn’t have last year. Yes there were still “rookie mistakes,” but those should still be expected at this stage. The whole thing reminded me of an NFL pre-season game in which the Horns were trying different personnel groupings and plays, and, on purpose, not really adjusting to what the defense was doing. Cosby was just so much better than their CB’s that it didn’t matter what the coverage was. I thought that some players just did not play well, and that the coaches had relatively little impact on the game. It wasn’t the plays, it was players. Most of the culprits on bad plays were the replacements for the starters, young players who are still learning how to recognize what they see on the field. So to get the controversy started..

Offensive MVP – Quan. He outcompeted every DB for space and for the ball and made brilliant in-route adjustments to Colt’s passes that helped many arrive on-time and in stride. He showed a burst I never saw last year.

Defensive co-MVP (how could anyone not concur on Roddrick Muckelroy) was Blake Gideon. He stuffed two different screen passes and his recognition got him in position for damage control on mistakes by Norton and Bobino at least six times. His hitting was more ferocious than Thomas, and between the two of them, UTEP stopped running slants and crossing patterns over the middle and, in the second half, settled for screens and passes to the flat, or challenging the corners in one-on-one up the sideline.

Offensive co-LVP’s: Vondrell McGee, Michael Huey. There was something wrong with McGee – he had no speed and never cut hard. I noticed in the MB-TF practice videos that he was practicing with a knee brace, so I wonder if he is injured. Poor Michael Huey. UTEP lined up three guys across from him, let them work out a routine for “So You Think You Can Dance” before every snap and then send 2 or all 3 every snap. Huey was a deer in the headlights for the last part of the second quarter and most of the third, and the consistent up-the-middle push had McCoy checking down too quickly and throwing off his back foot. If there was a flashback to 2007, that was it. The fake bubble screen and pass to Shipley in the fourth put it out of reach and eased up the pressure on Huey, but that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If not, it will be visions of 2007

Defense: First let me say that the secondary played well IMHO, given that the lone touchdown occurred on a blown coverage by Thomas, one of only three of four I saw all night. The defense played most of the night and 95% of the time after the first series in a 4-2-5, which seemed to limit Kindle’s appearances. The corners were playing primarily man-to-man with only rare safety help and only got beat a couple of times, mostly when they turned their heads the wrong way. These mistakes can be fixed.

Yes, the defense was awful in the first quarter and in the last 2 minutes of the first half. But note the zero points given up by the defense in the second half DESPITE the fact that the game was still close (28-13) and one or two mistakes by the safeties could have sent the place into apoplexy and visions of the UCF game would have danced before the Horns. But that didn’t happen. In fact when last year, when the game was in the balance, did the UT defense hold ANY TEAM scoreless in the second half?

Negatives
I concur about Bobino and Norton, in the sense that they still seem to be taking all the wrong angles on plays, which leads, especially on Norton’s end, to poor tackling and shoddy defense against Jackson the UTEP running back. Judging angles and adjusting on the fly is a vision thing, just like a running back. Normally you either “see” the field or you don’t, it’s not really coachable. So I see this as a strong basis for worry. If Texas runs a 4-2-5, they need to get Kindle in some sort of shape to defend the pass (which he is not now – he just chases the receiver rather than anticipating the route) or blitz, along with Muckelroy.

Our other problem, which no BONers seem to have noticed was the coordination between the DT’s and the LB’s. Whe you have small but quick DT’s and DE’s, you can’t just butt up underneath the OL and tie up blockers, hoping the LB’s will make the play. On almost every play, the DL slanted into the gaps, which put Roy Miller in the backfield on every play. The LB’s have to slant into the gaps left behind by the DL to create what coaches call “gap control” but instead, the LB’s often followed behind the DL, getting tied up with blockers instead of filling gaps – hence 10-15 yard runs by UTEP. Muschamp put a stop to that in the second quarter.

I still think the players are still VERY MUCH learning how to play Muschamp’s defense.

Offense. With a rookie in at LG and the dancing Miners blitzing on every play, of course GD cut back on the game plan. WR’s were wide open on every play, and running lanes were clogged. Why not pass virtually every play?
Result: Cosby’s greatest day as a Longhorn, Colt not having a particularly good day. ESPN2 showed scenes of him on the sideline late in the fourth and he looked totally ticked off, like he knew his decision-making was “Not Our Standard.” Despite his 3rd quarter struggles, Colt was making vertical passes with rhythm and precision like I haven’t seen since 2006

I was pleasantly surprised by Whittaker’s blitz pickups – he got pulverized a couple of times, but stuffed the LB’s at least 4 times. This was a major improvement over early fall camp. If he can get better and more reliable, look out!

The day of the Q-package is coming. As PB pointed out, there was a play that, had the center of the line gotten their blocking assignments right, could have resulted in a 30+ yard swing pass to John Chiles. There was another similar unrealized play with Chiles and Whittaker as split backs next to Colt, that also blew up due to a missed block by Cedric Dockery.

Overall, I thought it wasn’t a great performance, but a heck of a lot better than what we would have seen under similar circumstances last year. Sure, it’s not up to the Gold (2005) Standard, but then what team has been. Many things can get fixed as more young players get more experienced. Some, like our headless middle LB’s, may not ever get fixed, but with Gideon around to clean up the mess, that might not be as catastrophic as it would have been last year