It's the little things. We're a better football team than that. We're close. GAWD!!!!!! I like Coach Strong. I really, sincerely do. He seems to be a wonderful man and he wants to succeed. But listening to this broken record over and over again makes me want to see this entire staff gone. I don't expect detailed answers, but these same fallback answers that obviously aren't true are just maddening.
At some point, you are what your record is. It's like the team that says "if we hadn't shanked those punts, fumbled those footballs and dropped those passes, we would have won the game." Well... good teams don't do that stuff. That's part of the measure of what makes you good. I don't care how fast your receiver is or how sensational he is at making one-handed receptions; if he can't run good routes and get separation, and if he drops half the balls you throw at him, he's not a good receiver. if your defense does great on first and second down but can't convert a third-down stop, it's not a good defense. If your offense racks up 450 yards of offense but commits 120 yards of penalties and three turnovers and scores two touchdowns a game, it's not a good offense. This team is exactly as good as it looks on game day. Maybe we'd see more improvement if the team realized that and got to work fixing that problem.
It's really just the losing that's getting old, it's not like saying different things after each loss somehow makes it better. But he does need to quit using the "the player just need to learn how to compete" line, which either doesn't mean anything at all, or means something but is BS. Whatever the problem is, it definitely isn't "The missing piece of the puzzle is that they haven't been taught competition yet".
I honestly don't know anything positive and realistic he could say that would make sense and provide any hope. His team is very young and poorly coached. That combination means they are a simply a bad football team. At this stage his better players are over-matched by older, well-coached ones. And even his vets aren't improving due to poor coaching. Strong and his staff are being grossly out-coached by superior coaches. It's a sh*t show from every perspective. Not much he could say to sugar coat it.
After the Arkansas game I made some comments about the coaching staff doing a poor job of preparing the team for Arkansas. I said they had this extra time to prepare and they put together one of the worst performances I have ever seen from a Texas team. I was ripped and told that Arkansas had a really good defense and that it wasn't Strongs fault. That was BS then and it is BS now that these butt whipping don't fall at the feet of the head coach.
I didn't hear the presser today, but I could probably sum is up: "we just need to get better" "we just need to compete better" "we just need to get this fixed" "we just ___________"(fill in the blank)
He did say that the FG kicker competition was open and that he told Rose that after the game. He also said internal discipline for Boyd and that he would play against ou. That surprised me a little bit, but I guess Boyd's apology to the team was sincere. And probably not anything like that SID-manufactured apology that was released today.
Strong always explains what happened when answering a question. Q: What is wrong with special teams and what are you doing to improve it? A: We missed 2 field goals, we botched a punt, we had a kick off out of bounds. We can't do that. We know what happened! Answer the question!!
In all fairness, what do you say that's new? It's the same issues. Same limitations. Same youth. What's he going to say that he hasn't already said? Plus part of the problem may be people asking lousy questions. How about instead of "what do you think about how the defensive backs played, asking something like: "Coach, you talk about how you need to fix the issues in the secondary. What are you guys doing differently to try and get the young guys to understand their assignments, because clearly based on last Saturday, they don't know where they're supposed to be or where they're supposed to go."
I actually have some respect for the guy for not calling out individuals in a press conference and trying to stay positive. What's he really supposed to say? "We coached "player" how to play a cover 2 and he just blew it and cost us 2 touchdowns. It's like we're talking to walls and some of these kids can only learn by mistakes. Guess what, they're making plenty of them so I sure as hell hope these kids are learning. Oh, and we just need to play better". Yeah, the dude has started to sound like a broken record. But, it only takes 1 player to blow a coverage/tackle to give up a big play. Right now there's a lot of kids getting on the job training and while they may not all be failing simultaneously, each one failure can be exploited and TCU did that. I still have hope for the press conference where Coach Strong gets to say "This was a really huge win for us going forward".
Structure, the issue is not youthful mistakes. The issue is the same players are making the same mistakes after 5 games.
Kinda funny that this was the team's mantra this offseason... Yet the most excuses is coming from the guy trying to stay on the $5 million pay roll!
This may be true and perhaps I'm not watching the game/film closely enough. I can, however, say with certainty that they have not played the same opponent for the last 5 games. I'm trying to think of how many freshman defenders have been on the field at the same time and for some reason 5 keeps popping in to my head. That's 5 kids who probably had a half dozen base defenses in HS. Now each of those kids is trying to play more/different schemes at a faster pace against better (Doctson being great) players. I still think there's a learning curve and I recall Bedford saying he doesn't like playing Freshman. Why? Because they make mistakes. I'm really not trying to defend anyone. I'm just trying to be hopeful and positive that this not the beginning of a crapfest dynasty.
I'm much more concerned about the fact that Ced Flowers and Taylor Doyle still don't look like they know who to block on blitzes than I am about busted coverages in the secondary. One of those sacks on Saturday was just sad - Flowers watched two guys breeze by on either side of him, then jogged after them and stood next to the play watching them sack Heard. I'm glad he got a good view of the play and all, but...
So true. I repeatedly rewind plays to see what "blitz" the defense just ran only to realize that it really was just a straight up 4 man rush that somehow ends up looking like a jailbreak.
One bit of decent news is that we don't face a dynamic running QB this week. 44 rushes for 138 yards does not remotely qualify Mayfield for Zaire or Boykin dual-threat status. The youth of the defense already has trouble detecting their assignments. When already unsure players are also having to monitor a fleet QB and all the fakes and variations that mobility threatens...it creates mass confusion and huge busts. It's no coincidence the two games against ranked teams that we hung in with didn't have a dynamic dual-threat QB. We got roasted through the air quite a bit still, but I also could see the defense much more organized and competing than ND and TCU. The mobility of Zaire and Boykin had guys running around with their heads chopped off. Not hard to see how a scatback got overlooked while monitoring all the other weapons plus an added threat of the QB. Youth versus a mobile QB with many other weapons is almost always a recipe for disaster. They just aren't experienced or sound enough to handle it all. Mayfield will likely light us up a bit, but it's not quite as demoralizing as covering everyone and the QB bolts the pocket, jukes a LB, and gains 12 yards on 3rd and 11. It's also easy to get young players to cheat off their assignments to provide other help, only to get burned where they bailed from. A talented, mobile QB puts an enormous amount of extra pressure on a vulnerable defense. Without that huge threat, young defenders can actually focus more on their non-QB keys. That being said, we still lose, but OU still sucks!
Can't he say that the coaches aren't coaching very well, and that they will coach dramatically differently starting Monday. The Special teams will run till they drop. And we are taking off the shiny horns from the helmet. Our new core value is to Win. We feel we are going to beat OU because that's what Texas does.
Lord, Please!! If just that. Just that. If nothing more. That! Please! What is the W-L record when using the shiny horns? Huh? Huh? Huh?! Where does the team rank out of 128 D1 schools when using the shiny little horns!! Tell me THAT!
http://www.texassports.com/ Listening to just the first 3 min of Jay Norvell... he sounds more like a head coach than a coordinator. That's the kind of talk, content, big picture, attitude I want to hear. Heard other parts of it on the late news, that I'm just getting to. But I like Jay. That's more what the players need to hear. The 4th minute especially. Man! Jay Norvell gets it. Why doesn't Strong get wound up and talk like that? And talk about the guts of the game. Like Jay just did. Play that video. Listen to the punch in what he is saying. Man!
I'd pay big money just to see Strong actually look the reporters in the eye while he answers their questions instead of staring down at the podium and mumbling incoherencies.
The shiny horns give me the same bad feeling as our gray basketball uniforms. We should take both and bury them and the memories of games played wearing them.
Bury but only after running them through a shredder and then burning the remaining fragments, with a second burning just to be sure...and THEN bury them...preferably somewhere far, far away. That way the scent cannot drift back to infect anyone on the 40 Acres....
Charlie isn't a performer. That has been evident from the presser on his hiring through his first post-game shows to now. That's who he is. It'd be easier to watch, to be sure, if he was an outgoing, charismatic personality ... but I'd rather have a guy who's rebuilding an honest program than a snake-oil salesman. I just hope this program isn't taking too much of his time. I'd rather have an assistant on the TV and a team which is clearly improving on/off the field. It may come to something similar. \m/ Al
I'd bet pretty much every one of the head coaches of the top 25 or so major programs have a once or twice weekly TV show. And also betting that the HC has to go to the local affiliate station's studios to film it with the anchor. DKR would go downtown on Sunday nights to do a 30-minute weekly with Cactus Pryor on KTBC after the 10:00 p.m. news ended. That has to take more time than Strong walking down the hall in Belmont (assuming LHN is domiciled in Belmont) and micking up and rolling. Hell, Switzer had a 1-hour show for OU, replaying every play in sequence, going over them and discussing. Something he has to do anyway.
