Lessons learned from yesterday's game: Chance Mock is not The Answer, Roy Williams is a big crybaby, and Oklahoma really is that good. OU quarterback Jason White also deserves a little Heismann consideration. Vincent Young certainly scrambles with the greatest of ease, yet needs to figure out how to elevate the ball...and tucking it in while you run isn't a bad idea either. In other news, Cedric Benson can no longer be considered a legitimate rushing threat.
Yesterday's "game" was embarrassing to watch, whether you were a Texas fan or not. Mack Brown has had the opportunity for three years now to prove his worth as a coach, and he hasn't delivered. Even worse, his days of having the best recruiting class in the nation are over. Stoops will have Texas high school players scrambling to sign up with him, while Arkansas can make a legitimate play for our state's talent as well. A&M's Franchione - win or lose this year - can also make a decent case for the decline of Brown's reputation. The 'Horns have crapped out in the big game once too often, and it's going to cost them.
As a Longhorn fan, it gives me no pleasure to say this. It isn't as if I'm looking forward to three more years of mediocrity. Texas may very well win out the rest of the year, but nothing's going to matter until Mack (or someone else) can figure out a way to beat OU, and all the lopsided victories over Rice and Tulane won't change that.
Pete of A Perfectly Cromulent Blog mourn's UT's defeat at the hands (and feet) of Oklahoma. Something needs to change,......
| --Posted to Ones and Zeros on Oct 12, 2003 11:35 PM:. |
Pete of A Perfectly Cromulent Blog mourns UT's defeat at the hands (and feet) of Oklahoma. Something needs to change,......
| --Posted to Ones and Zeros on Oct 14, 2003 2:21 PM:. |
R.C. Slocum beat Mack Brown at the recruiting game last year (Franchione simply held on to them), but if you're finishing in the top 15 or so of recruiting, you're doing fine. You just have to get something out of all those guys, and they have to develop. Alex is right that the lack of development of so many of these blue chippers is disappointing. Mack is going to have to jettison some of the good-old-boy coordinators who have been with him forever and bring in some younger, hungrier, TEACHERS of the game. One of the underappreciated talents of Bob Stoops is bringing in top-flight assistants. Even when coaches of high caliber (Mike Leach, Mark Mangino, Steve Spurrier Jr) leave for better jobs, other guys are ready to step in. Chuck Long and Mike Stoops will almost certainly get a look at some good jobs at the end of this season -- but if they leave, there are people like Kevin Wilson and Cale Gundy and Brent Venables waiting in the wings.
Who is scrambling to hire any of Mack Brown's assistants? I'm guessing the only one who could get hired immediately at a top-flight program is the o-line coach -- and that's based on his reputation as a coach elsewhere, not this team's performance.
Bob Stoops has proven you don't have to have the best talent in the Big 12 to win a National Championship, because he did it in 2000. But those coaches got all they could out of that team. I wouldn't call Mack Brown's team mediocre -- far from it. But their conditioning is highly suspect, and their coaches surely don't get the most out of their talent. They haven't the past four years, anyway.
What is still astounding to me is that Vincent Young took so few snaps in the spring. If those coaches really believed he was the future, he should have gotten almost all of the reps. It really wasn't fair to put him in against that crazy OU defense, and expect much but playground football out of him. He made some plays on pure athleticism, but that wasn't a "system" they seemed to be running. Not quite sure what it was.
So do those coordinators survive if Mack wins the rest of his Big 12 games? Or are they toast? And will he bring in a new strength/conditioning coach?
Over at Pete's blog, I speculated earlier in the comments that I think UT's inability to perform better in recent years despite the extraordinarily high level of talent had to do with: 1) poor cond......
| --Posted to PubliusTX Weblog on Oct 19, 2003 8:52 PM:. |
Not much argument about the horrid game. I would argue with the notion that UT has been "mediocre" under Brown's watch (though he still has the rest of the season to demonstrate that this year). They've been performing below their talent and can't beat OU, but (so far) he does produce 10 wins a season which Macovic demonstrated is not a given.
We'll have to see where things go from here. I think recruiting is going to be hurt, but Brown built his initial recruiting off the Macovic years which truly were at the brink of mediocrity, so it's not like he's relied on the "We're national champions" to bring people to UT to begin with. Note: I think the bigger threat to recruiting is a reputation that talent isn't developing under Brown, not that Stoops or OU has a better program.
In any case, it scarcely matters who he recruits if they don't perform on the field when it matters, and that is the biggest problem. It's something that Brown is definitely going to have to get his hands around. Using his recruiting talent to grap an offensive line that will give the offense a chance to work...