Upon Further Review: Texas Offense vs Tech, First Half

Is our WR’s blocking so poor that a dead former Presidential candidate will be able to help us?

I missed a lot of the first quarter playing bar roulette trying to find seating. The second quarter was just an abomination. This will be greatly helpful on my DVR rewatch.

I’d love to see the chartin’ for the 22 play drive. I’d like to commit to doing it, but doubt I have that kind of time. We were definitely aided by the fake punt and 15-yard penalty, but I’d like to see if we were actually doing things right or things just fell in place due to a tired defense.

Who is the most likely candidate to replace mitchell at the tackle position? We don’t have a ton of depth but I see Mack making the change at tackle before firing a coor., although I 100% agree mac hasn’t earned his paycheck lately

Man, you won’t find more detailed analysis anywhere else. As soon as I’m done typing this comment, I will stand up and applaud your, Mr. Bean.

“we don’t have a coherent approach on offense.” – That sums it up right there – no identity. We are “trying” to do a lot of things. And “trying” too much. I guess this is the year to figure that out, but it better get sorted by December.

This is an AMAZING, THOUGHTFUL analysis. THANK YOU so much for putting so much time and effort into your preparation!!! Hook ’Em!

We need simplify things for our O-Line, by an order of magnitude.

I don’t know how we do that.

These guys can’t even find people to block while Tech is tearing up the backfield.

Holy crap a real, live, well-executed running play! Taking over after a disastrous high-snap turnover deep in Tech territory, Texas lines up in the I, with Greg Smith playing lead blocker as the H-back. Walters gets a great block on the linebacker, Mitchell occupies his man just long enough, Smith makes an excellent lead block to seal the inside lane, Fozzy follows said lane, and then finishes the run with authority. Touchdown. It was like watching an NFL team.

Was that the only time we saw that play/alignment in the game?

Also, regarding the jumbo package on the last scoring drive – did it look to you like the spacing was too bunched up, with the FB and RB lined up too close to the LOS? It didn’t seem like Roberson or Cody had time to “get downhill” on either of the first 2 running plays in that series.

Whether by this in depth analysis, or just by the eye test, you can just tell this offense isn’t executing, and the playcalling is terrible. I was happy to play the GD apologist through the Colt McCoy era, but now it is very clear that the man has no idea how to create packages that play to the strengths of the personnel. I’m never a fan of changing things up in the middle of a season, but a competent offensive coordinator (and what the hell, a change at o line coach) combined with coach Boom on the other side of the ball would put Texas in dynasty mode for the next few years. As it is, Muschamp is having to compensate for the other side of the ball, and will continue to be put in that position unless a change is made.

Simply put, Greg Davis is bad at his job. Let’s find an offensive coordinator who is good at his job, the sooner the better. We can’t do that until Mack stops stubbornly refusing to admit that GD is a hinderance to the success of the program. ]

Really paints a picture of how incompetent our run blocking is when we can’t stop 4 guys with 6.

BTW, the full game replay is available on ESPN3.com, just FYI.

the third game of a brand new offensive face and we’re the worst team ever. check out Colt’s first year at the helm, and that wasn’t even with a new offensive look. we are waiting for the team’s leaders to step up. who are our leaders? malcolm williams? right… the younger guys just don’t have the experience. in this world of instant gratification, and especially concerning longhorn fans, nothing is going to be fast enough. but i am a realist. this will take time, but in the end, we will be an excellent offense.
p.s. don’t devalue Tuberville’s ability as a defensive schemer. he didn’t make it easy on a very inexperienced team.
p.s.s. we won the damn game.

Let’s see, GD is “taking us to chili’s”

But the WRs aren’t blocking well on run plays (as you point out, costing Fozzy a long gain on a screen plus more)

His best “playmaker” is a true freshman WR.

The OL coach has to go and overall, the OL sucked.

The RBs are pedestrian and GG is a work in progress.

I’d say we’ve been spoiled by so many trips to Bob’s (high end Dallas steakhouse) we only think Outback (my favorite ‘cheap’ steak) looks like chili’s.

As Kevin Costner’s character says in “For love of the game”, engage the mechanism, tune out the noise.

As an fyi, thank you for the effort. Just so you know, while more frustrating, I learn more from the mistakes than the good plays. I use your write ups to rewatch the game, that makes these posts even more enjoyable.

1. First of all, doesn´t DJ Monroe deserve a 1 for the yardage on the jet sweep? And didn´t it look very similiar to the run against the MNC Bama defense that went for 20? And doesn´t GD deserve a -3 for the failure to integrate this guy into the offense? What evidence do we have that this kid is not unstoppable. Urban Meyer used these kinds of talent to get to a MNC – GD uses him as a decoy or less?

2. I am a little down on Longhorn fans that get down on GG. With all that is going on in those plays – isn´t it amazing how composed he was? Isn´t he the perfect type of QB to deal with this madness? The kid is an assassin. If the defense gives him a window, he is as freaking dangerous as any QB in the nation – right now! I am very pleased with his performance. He will learn from those mistakes on the tips very quickly.

I may go back later, but watching the game three times now is enough in hoping I see something different.

Great analysis – thanks for doing this again. I agreed 100% with the postgame react and again here. Especially this, with all my heart:

Moving into the specifics: Mac McWhorter has to go. I don’t know that a position coach has ever been fired mid-season, and I definitely don’t know that doing so would be of any use. And I’m still all for it. We saw on TV Mack Brown tear down the sideline looking for McWhorter after the first interception, and after the jump you’ll see this frustrated blogger chart all the other instances that evidenced gross incompetence from our line coach. The line issues run much deeper than McWhorter alone, of course, but if he’s coaching this group at all, it’s to their detriment.

Brian Cook would be proud. He might still call you lazy, but he’d be proud…

By no means am I advocating the following, I just want to throw something out there to cure the GD offense sucks brain vapor locks.
Just imagine Leach running this thing and we roll out 5 wide with Chiles, Kirk, Davis, Goodwin, and Williams. Then we sub in White, Hales, Fozzy, Fitzhenry, Timmons among others as needed. We can go all tall and roll with Harris, McCrary, Timmons, White, and Williams and throw jump balls over everyone since they’re all 6’3’’ and over. Speed team, Goodwin, Hales, Monroe, Hales, Chiles.
Back to normal programming, lets ground and pound.

PB, is this one of your other sites? I came across it while googling all things texas. This site seems to have every article from BON on there verbatim with links to the original articles on BON. However, I did not see any of our authors credited for the great work they do.

I’m sure you’re aware of this site. Just wanted to check and make sure that all you guys who do such a wonderful job here are getting the due credit you deserve.

Thanks!

Which means a WIN. UCLA is simply atrocious. Forget that they were ghetto’ing up on poor Houston last week by throwing the Cougs around like they were mannequins. They won’t be doing that shit to our guys this week. Unfortunately, UCLA’s offense is utterly incompetent — yes, even more so than ours, so the win will be pretty easy, because they won’t be getting first downs, forget about scoring, these saps couldn’t do that in their sleep. The problem with that is Mack and company will still think they don’t have a problem on their hands, which, leading into the big games against OU and Nebraska, is going to be disastrous for us.

unbelievable. And i would tend to agree with most of it. Having said that, all this criticism of a staff that has gone to two national championship games, won one of them, won 10 games for how many straight seasons, won how many BCS games over the last 6 years, averaged what ridiculous number of points per year and yet every time i criticize Rick Barnes you’d think the world was collapsing around us.

…on the Xs and Os threads like this — I prefer reading those like PB who can analyze and discuss the intricacies much better than I.

One place I have tended to pop up in threads in the last year or two is as a de facto GD defender (a role which I never, ever suspected I would assume after that 2003 Holiday Bowl loss to Washington freakin’ State), at least in the context of defending him against the less well-articulated criticisms. (You know the type: those who bitch about how awful GD is after any play which results in negative yardage.)

Given that, I have to say that this was the first time in a while I was really scratching my head at whatever the hell we were trying to do on offense. There have certainly been times when our offense hasn’t looked as proficient as we’d hope, but I have usually been able to write them off to seemingly reasonable excuses (intentionally vanilla game-planning; GG’s baptism by fire; the realities of a bunch of college kids with the #1 target on their backs going into Lubbock on that particular night). I can’t write off what I saw this week to any such excuses. That was as puzzlingly disjointed as I’ve seen us in quite some time.

GD is being wily. Arrogant even. Maybe, just maybe he thinks that on superior talent in key spots on offense and with a top 3 national defense that it is enough to get through the first four games. I’ll worry after the Oklahoma game like someone reminded above.

To me these guys are playing like things should just happen because they’re Texas. GD will have to show way too much of his hand in the RRR and because some of our guys are playing like they deserve it and not earning it we lose a close one in Nebraska. There will be one loss teams in the MNC game this year and Boise or TCU get left out undefeated. It all works out though, we get revenge in the Big XII-2 Championship Game and go on to win Mack’s second NC with our defense 6th-rounding VY lite.

My take is that we are not as bad as has been evidenced to date. And we are not as good as the talent should be. With that said, specifically in regard to the Tech game plan, Coach Brown confirmed the strategy was to keep the Tech offense off the field. Period. While to us the play calling appeared confusing and illogical, that does jibe with the conservative play calling that occupied the clock.

I think you have to go back and look at the jumbo sets in the first half as possibly too conservative. How do you expect to maintain drives when you show all your cards? But on the other hand, had our offense given up those turnovers on our end of the field instead of theirs, it would have made for a very long night watching the hipster ring that stupid bell.

The critical issue is cohesive execution. The guys are not showing that as a mistake here or there is dooming our potential.

I agree with PB that this is evidence of the NFL style fall camp. And maybe another issue is that our offense was practicing against arguably the best overall defense in the nation and did not have any success at all in camp.

Link