nice Mack goes on vacation?
by longhornSTL on Apr 7, 2009 4:17 PM CDT
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PrintSo ever since we lost the most heartbreaking, fml game ever to Tech last year I have been eagerly awaiting the beat down we are going to deliver in Austin this year ( I'm aware that assuming a W over Tech is a bit presumptive). Even still, that game combined with the way everyone's favorite coaches, Stoops and Meyer, ran up the score all the way to the title game has me thinking nice Mack could be headed for a no-show against Tech this year. The game is early in the year, second week I believe, and it could serve as a statement to the country that we are getting our revenge and we mean business. Additionally, its possible the so called BCS gurus who came down to Austin might have convinced Mack that running it up might be necessary.
Generally, I am not in favor of running up the score, I think its bush league. That type of behavior can stay north of the border for all I care. However, I am thinking an exception might be in order for Tech. I'm curious if you guys think we will witness a sea change in how the Longhorns handle the scoreboard next year? Thoughts?
Also, I'm aware that it is hypocritical to be against running up the score and want to do it against x or y team but god damn i just f*cking hate tech so much.
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Real good question to raise
Quick answer: No, we won’t run the score up, because (1) there’s no point; it’s too early to impact the BCS Rankings; (2) Mack doesn’t believe in it, and a great many of the rest of us think it’s low class; (3) the best thing that can be gained from an early verdict (see Missouri last season) is the chance to get non-regular players some semi-meaningful field time.
This game will be awesome
Conference night revenge game in September. I’m checking eBay every other week for tickets to this thing.
There’s always the possibility it turns into the K-State shower sh*tstorm, though.
I don't think you'll ever see
Mack run up the score. However, you will, from time-to-time, see us up 40+ in the third. There’s nothing wrong with that. I would much rather exact revenge by physically dominating our more unsavory opponents.
Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis.
hate running up scores...
and hate even worse a system that rewards that…
I’m kind of hoping we throw that whole “sportsmanship” aspect (and I’m talking merely about the running up of scores on beaten foes here, not a Kellen Heard-like post-whistle head-hunting…) out the window for just a couple of teams. Specifically those whose coaches screwed w/their vote us last year. I’m hoping Mack took names and will willingly kick ass. That should put Mr. Leach and Mr. Briles and… well, we all remember.
3rd game of the year
Garrett Gilbert: 2014 NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year
y'all have short memories
if you think Mack doesn’t believe in running up the score.
It used to be guaranteed that whenever y’all had an upset loss early in the season, or got thumped by OU, texas RUTS on the next opponent.
I don’t have a problem with this, b/c I think too many people try too hard to make football too politically correct. Trying to claim Mack never does it simply isn’t true, though.
Oh go away.
If we need feedback about running up the score, we certainly aren’t going to ask an Aggie.
Now, getting embarrassed when someone runs the score up on your team, that’s another story…
We did score 21 on A&M in the fourth quarter this past season
But it wasn’t our fault that you guys couldn’t stop our short-yardage specialist Cody Johnson.
I don’t think Mack is on the same level as, say, Stoops and Meyer, about running up the score. We could have beaten A&M by more. We could have beaten Kansas by more. We could have beaten Missouri worse. Against Tech, Stoops was obviously actively shooting for 70 in the fourth quarter, only to get foiled at the goalline.
by TheElusiveShadow on Apr 8, 2009 5:42 AM CDT up reply actions
I hate facts. They're inconvenient things.
Dear Beergut, did you know that you could go to UT’s website and verify your claim that Texas regularly ran up the score after losing to OU or after losing early in the season?
So which specific game or games are you talking about?
The only game that looks like it could have been “running up the score” based on the final was the 69-17 rout of Stanford in 1999 a week after losing the opener to NCSU. But I was there and remember we had 48 at the half. We hardly “ran it up” in the second half.
So please, enlighten us? When did Mack run up the score?
Honestly, i dont have a problem with Mack running up the score. Call it classless or whatever, but if it gets us into the BCS title game im all for it.
You can look at it in different ways:
1. running up score embarrasses opponents
2. by failing to continue to play your hardest, you are implying that the other team is not worth your time and its disrespectful.
Im in favor of running the score up, but not keeping starters in for health reasons
Running up the score.
If the other team has their 1st team defense/offense in, then you respect the calibre of their players by playing your best too.
by pleaseplaykindle on Apr 7, 2009 7:03 PM CDT reply actions
"Running up the score"
Let’s face it. The media went absolutely bananas over OU’s streak of 60+ point games. Putting up big numbers next to your name is impressive to the 80% of voters that still wear a bib when they eat, and the reality is that we can’t be seen as a “nice” team, since everyone will look at “big, mean” teams like Florida and OU and expect them to beat us. Hell, everyone has OU ahead of Texas AGAIN this year. They all think it was a fluke that we beat them somehow.
We don’t need to keep Colt and Co. in until the end trying to score 70 against everyone, but what we definitely should do is call some real plays for our second team offense instead of run, run, run, punt. Just use the time to get experience for your QB-to-be running a real offense. I seriously doubt anyone is going to complain about us running up the score with our true-freshman QB and/or Sherrod frickin’ Harris. If you can’t stop our second team then we aren’t embarrassing you, you’re embarrassing yourselves. We should have enough respect for our opponents that, even after we’ve thoroughly beaten them in the first 30 minutes of the game, we don’t just waste everyone’s time for the remaining 30. We’re going to protect ourselves from unnecessary injuries and get some PT for some of our other players, but we’re still playing a football game.
I would tell my second team when I put them in that the score is 0-0, and you’ve got however many minutes left to win the game. Lose or tie and I’m going to treat you like we lost the game next week in practice, and if the first team doesn’t support you guys and pay attention, they’ll be running all week, too. I’d even keep two sets of records and stats for each team, so that the second team has some pride, and the first team can have some pride in them, too. We only get 60 minutes a week to play football and I’m not wasting one second of the most valuable experience that my younger players can have. If Mack took a more serious attitude about this, we wouldn’t have had John Chiles throw less than 30 passes in his career, and he may have even been interested in his job and improved somewhat. If you want the second team to bust their butts and play hard, then you should at least coach them the same way. Not everyone can get all pumped up to run “Zone handoff right” twelve times in front of a dwindling crowd.
My main point is: Playing real football with the second team has benefits:
1.) Players get experience running the real schemes
2.) Players don’t feel like their time is being wasted, now garbage time has value and consequences.
2.) If they take pride in their execution, you’ll likely score some more points and look better to the drooling morons that vote in the Harris Poll. Plus you don’t have to risk hurting your star players to get the big scores.
Playing real football with the second team has drawbacks:
1.) … Um… Some teams realize that we could have slaughtered them with our second team and are embarrassed?
I don’t see how we should feel responsible for some horrible team’s feelings if they can’t stop our second team.
by Horn Brain on Apr 7, 2009 7:13 PM CDT reply actions 2 recs
There are some negatives
By playing a 50/50 pass/run offense and coming to the line quickly, you extend the game time/number of plays and therefor increase the risk of injuries.
Because OU’s hurry up offense lengthened the games they played, I’d like to compare OU’s points per play to the other teams in 2008 to see if they were truely a great offensive team. Or their 60+ point games were more of a function of running more plays.
by Longhorn@Berkeley on Apr 7, 2009 11:22 PM CDT up reply actions
their team being truly great offensively can’t be put into question.
by Displaced Longhorn on Apr 8, 2009 1:04 AM CDT up reply actions
yeah true that
I actually crunched the numbers and its really amazing how many points were scored per play. OU scored .65 points per play and UT scored .57 points per play.
I also looked at point differential/play ((Team’s score – opponents score)/(Team’s offensive plays)) and the averages become closer: .34 OU vs. .32 UT.
I don’t know how that translates nationally.
by Longhorn@Berkeley on Apr 8, 2009 1:25 AM CDT up reply actions
They dont score that 60+ on Tech without a lot of help from Leach
The mad scientist gambled like he was playing with house money and gave up free points. If he mixed in a punt from, oh I dont know, his own 40 yard line, OU might not have made it to 60, and this whole business goes away. If you want to look at one team besides ourselves that was responsible for last years debacle, blame Tech. If they give OU a good game, none of this happens. I hope we take it out of their hides in September.
Plus, most of the media blitz came after the pasting of Mizzou, which had no affect on OU getting into the game, and getting a free ticket to play Florida.
by BoddickerIsClutch on Apr 8, 2009 8:51 AM CDT up reply actions
Well worth the experience gained.
No coach is going to not play someone who needs experience because they might get hurt, that’s a well-known risk associated with the game of football in general.
Isn't not playing the first string
when we are ahead more of a function of not risking injury than getting experience for the second team anyway?
Yes
But only because there’s often little experience to gain for your starters when they’re clearly marching up and down the field against tired Rice DL’s. Sometimes we’ll leave our starters in the game longer than normal so that they can get situational work, like going for it on fourth and ridiculous. I think that shows that if significant experience can be gained, it outweighs the risk of injury. If someone gets hurt, then that happens, but if you aren’t ready for OU, then there’s likely nothing you can do to avoid a loss. Makes sense to me.
As for Tech....
Leach will have them ready to go, I think its a bit presumptive to assume that we are not only going to win the game, but to estimate whether or not we are going to also run up the score. If there’s one thing we should all know about the Tech game, it’s that anything can happen. Sure, we have had a blowout or two in the last 5-6 years, but we’ve also had to come from behind twice and we did lose last year.
On running up the score, if putting up 10-14 more points per game last season would have put us in the MNC, then I say go for it. Didn’t Mack hire a “BCS guru” to show him what he needed to do to qualify? I’m sure Mack now knows the importance of national perception. If he chooses to be more aggressive in the 4th quarter, we’ll see if he’s changed his stance.
Normally, our rough games against Tech happen on the road
As Tech has consistently shown it cannot win big games on the road but can upset teams at home (see Oklahoma twice and us last year). The exception to this, I believe, is 2003 (I think), when Chance Mock led the winning drive in Austin.
The only reason I was afraid of the Tech game this past season was because it was in Lubbock. Had it been in Austin, I would have been very confident we’d win. I was afraid we’d come out absolutely flat against Tech and forced to have to crawl back, and we did EXACTLY what I feared. So frustrating.
by TheElusiveShadow on Apr 8, 2009 5:45 AM CDT up reply actions
By the way
I lost a great deal of respect for Dr. Saturday for deleting a post I immediately made after he tried to argue that homefield advantage meant nothing. I refuted his point about “intangible” factors being useless and then asked him how many big games Tech has won with Leach on the road. No answer; just a mysterious disappearance of that post. This reminded me of that.
by TheElusiveShadow on Apr 8, 2009 5:47 AM CDT up reply actions
Running up the score...
Is a weird way to say it. I believe in the kids playing the game and what happens happens. I don’t think it’s right to be calling pass plays when there is only a quarter left up 30+. I think that is just a bad decision. If the coaches just played with the most sound interest of winning the game, we’d see some ass whippings but we wouldn’t see the absolute ridiculous Hail Marys to the last second finales that have become accustomed of pretty much every top 10 team at one time another.
I’ll close by saying if I were on a team that was getting whipped soundly, I would feel insulted if the other team just let up and basically killed their offense in the name of “sportsmanship”. That’s sandbagging which is extremely lame.
Living vicariously through Deon Beasley
To me, running up the score is about intent. If you remove your starters and let your second string run normal plays, clearly your intent is not to pile on. If you leave your starters in and call for 50 yard bombs, a la Bob Stoops, then your goal is to humiliate your opponent.
Maybe...
… but I don’t think that it matters much. If Sherrod or GG are throwing long balls to our backup WRs, I doubt that we have a much better chance than the other team of coming down with it. Chucking up INTs isn’t a good way to gain experience, anyway, except in the Greg Davis system, where it is invaluable in teaching you to NEVER THROW THE BALL MORE THAN 10 YARDS EVER!
Ahem… My point is, I don’t think you should just try desperately to score, damn the risks. That defeats the purpose of running the real offense with the second team. If our real offense involves taking a shot downfield when the defense sits on our running game or our underneath stuff, then let’s give it a shot. If we’re throwing Hail Marys, then yes, that’s crossed the line, but only because we’re still wasting everyone’s time, just as we would be by sandbagging it. The purpose of running our offense in garbage time is for our players to learn how to run it against live competition. Scoring more is just a benefit of this. Just like having turnovers returned for TDs and making the game look sloppy is a risk.
If you just lob balls up trying to maybe get an easy TD for no good reason (not helping you win the game, your players aren’t getting anything out of it), then yes, that’s unsportsmanlike, because you’re not playing the game, you’re just being an asshole.
The point of keeping the second team
Running Up Score is an Excuse - Stay Classy Mack
I was hearbroken last year as well – but really think the OU running up the score thing is way overrated – consider these facts:
1. Mack’s OOC scheduling left us at a huge disadvantage. OU getting wins against TCU and Cincy had a much greater impact than the score.
2. The 60 point streak which started immediately after the Texas defeat – left them with a season ending win streak of 6 games.
3. The timing of the Tech loss was brutal. Left us with a 3 game streak. Then OU crushes them and the damage is done.
to be perfectly objective
what games could we have piled on?
-Okie St gave us everything we could handle
-Tech is the reason were discusing this
-Baylor was sluggish game and I dont think we would have scored a whole lot more
-Kansas was a struggle and I don’t think we score again even if we wanted to
-With A&M Surely we could have added 10-14 more points but we were up 40…I mean come on
Would running up the score have really helped last year?
The unluckiest aspect to last year was the losses by every team behind us and in front of the dirt burglars in the 2 weeks after we beat OU and before the loss to Tech. OU was immediately behind us going into the Tech game, so when we lost, if we were to drop at all, we had to drop behind OU, who had already begun their 60 point streak of games. We only passed OU in the human poll in the week to determine the Big 12 South representative in the championship game because the implications were made known. Would us scoring more points have changed any of that?
That being said, I think we naturally score more points this year anyway. Our offense will be a little more efficient thanks to a new wrinkle or two, receivers who have a little more game breaker in them, and a defense that will provide better field position, less TOP for the opposing team, and a few more TDs of their own.
Run up the score against: OU, Texas Tech, and the Bob Stoops voting cronies (Mangino, for example).
Respectfully pull punches in games that are already decided against: ULM, Wyoming, Colorado, UTEP, Mizzou, Okie State, UCF, Baylor, and, dare I say it, Aggie.
i say...
..include Baylor for their coach (Briles) voting the way he did last year, but that’s just me
by vy til i die on Apr 8, 2009 10:40 AM CDT up reply actions
Briles…well, not sure about that. I don’t think he voted for the right team, but I don’t think he made his vote based on the wrong reasons like Stoops cronies did. He’s not a Stoops crony, and he’s a clean coach for a program I’m kind of hoping becomes an also-ran (think Okie State 2008) rather than a cellar-dweller, so I would be inclined to just be satisfied with a convincing margin of 20+pts. over Robert Griffin and company.
by burntorangehorn on Apr 8, 2009 10:43 AM CDT up reply actions
then I guess the question would be...
just what in the hell his vote was based on…
I say if you have a chance to pile on a couple extra touchdowns in the 4th you just go right ahead, and if he has any squawk about it, we can ask if he was impressed enough this time around…
and btw..
I don’t dislike him or Baylor. In fact, I’m rooting for them every game but ours. Really like that Griffin kid… still, in my opinion, that vote has to be paid for… and if we’re good enough to exact payment, we should do it.
All this ‘running up the score’ business is based on the notion that we are good enough to do it. We were last year, just hope we are again this year…
OK, OK, I guess you’ve convinced me. Maybe do an end-zone celebration to intentionally draw the penalty once the game is out of hand, just to hammer the point home?
by burntorangehorn on Apr 8, 2009 6:18 PM CDT up reply actions
I concur
Tear the Bears a new one.
-rBr-
by run Bevo run on Apr 8, 2009 12:19 PM CDT up reply actions
In Short, No
Mack will always “play it nice” compared to Stoops + Co. Even when we gave Aggie the worst beatdown in the last 100 years of the series, it didn’t really seem like we were rubbing their face in it.
I wouldn’t mind some 49-7 action in the RRS or vs. Tech, but even if Mack/Muschamp gun for that kind of thing, you’re not going to see it evidenced in the actual playcalling or in the coaches’ demeanor…. In other words, we may score TDs with the 3rd string back, but we sure won’t be tossing bombs to our deep threat in the fourth when the game is already done.
Lol
We did see a lot of this after the Big 12 South fiasco.
by TheElusiveShadow on Apr 8, 2009 2:38 PM CDT up reply actions
No Winners...
The main problem with this argument is there are no winners. Mack and Texas winning 11 games last year, with their only loss coming to a top 10 team on the road, wasn’t good enough. Having the only defense in the Big 12 to hold every opponent under their season scoring average wasn’t good enough. And the only team to beat both participants in the Big 12 title game wasn’t enough. None of that mattered to the computer or the pollsters. We did everything we could to put ourselves into the championship game, but it wasn’t good enough. The point being that until we get rid of the BCS, WINNING FOOTBALL GAMES won’t be enough. There is no true winner.
"Stats are for losers. I like winning games."
-Will Muschamp
Everything…except beating TT. Take no prisoners when they come to Lubbock this year.
by burntorangehorn on Apr 8, 2009 12:04 PM CDT up reply actions
Yaarrrgh!
Bind their paws and send ‘em for a short walk off to starboard. We’ll be takin’ no prisoners, ya see, boys? Ship’s cramped, but the sea… she’s oh so wide and deep as here to heaven. So I’m bettin’ you’ll be findin’ yerself a nice, tender spot to settle down in very shortly.
Har. Har. Har….
Don't bring Meyer into this...
2008 pts/game
OU – 51.14
FL – 43.64
TX – 42.38
Florida wasn’t running it up and was scoring at virtually the same pace as our Longhorns.
--- All roads to the Big-XII Championship lead through OU/RRS. It's not just another game! We're all about championships here. ---
You may be right
But the contention that Meyer runs up the score doesn’t necessarily mean he scored more points per game than Texas. It’s about HOW you get those points, not the points themselves.
by TheElusiveShadow on Apr 8, 2009 2:40 PM CDT up reply actions
UGA
Don’t remember the details, but I’m pretty sure Meyer most definitely ran up the score on UGA to get back at them for the endzone shenanigans. Can’t say I watch enough SEC football to recall any other games like that, but I’m pretty sure he pissed Miami off for similarly running up the score. Like Shadow points out, simply the number of points you score doesn’t even begin to tell the story.
My position
When the losing team pulls their starters, I pull mine. Let the score be whatever happens.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. If they get mad, you're a mile away AND you have their shoes.
GG
I believe that GG plays a huge role in this discussion. If Harris continues to play like he did in the Spring Game. I believe GG will not red shirt and that he will be our backup quarterback. If he is indeed the back up. I believe that when we are up by a comfortable margin, we should insert our second team and continue to run our normal offense. Not the three yards and a cloud of dust offense that we usually use to close out games. GG needs the experience. He will not get it by turning around and handing the ball off every snap. We have a shot to be very special in 2009. And if we develop GG sufficiently in 2009 we have a shot to be very special for years to come after ward. In short we should never “run up the score” just for the sake of doing so. But if our backup comes in and torches your first team. Then the opposing team really doesn’t have a valid complaint.
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