Seems like a rather candid Mack Brown throughout the press conference. Clearly, they're breaking out the drawing board for offense next season. Mack Brown on recruiting and next season Brown says they're going to go find new ideas. Who should they talk to?
Well with the defensive recruits they are bringing in, we don't need an offense that can score 50+ poins to win it all. We need an offense that can run the ball, play physical on offense, and not turn the ball over. Win the field position battles, score on an explosive play here or there, and for god's sake....protect the QB.
Great read. It really answers a lot of the questions we have around here on recruiting. The process of evaluating the interest level and the academic status of prospects was the most interesting thing to me. We often ask why Mack isn't going hard after a certain stud player. Now we know.
I found Mack's comments to be refreshingly open, honest, and candid. Quite possibly the best insider's look at big-time recruiting from THE perspective of a big-time recruiter that I've ever read anywhere. While it was all a fascinating read, the parts where he talked about a guy bailing at the last minute and how bad that hurts you... losing two players - not only losing him but the other player you would have recruited, were particularly telling. Thanks for allowing us such a candid view, Mack.
We should go after a selected few 5 star out of state players every year. There may be some 5 star in SC or Virginia from time to time who don't want to play for good old state U and may be interested in us.
I wouldn't mind landing more top out-of-state players, but the fact is that those guys require more time and energy to recruit. Seeing how Texas offers far fewer players than other schools, and hits on more players, demonstrates exactly why Mack and his staff are so efficient in recruiting and it illuminates how they are able to spend so much time evaluating and recruiting classes from the next two or three years into the future, while other schools spend huge amounts of energy simply trying to close out the current year's class. I'd much rather the staff continue using this model, than expend large amounts of energy chasing kids out-of-state who are not as likely to commit to Texas even with a lot of extra attention. Additionally, Mack and his staff know the Texas HS coaches and kids fairly intimately, while there is more risk in evaluating the out-of-state kids, especially regarding grades and character. So I'd rather see them go with the high-probability kids than the low-probability ones, and spend that extra time on next year's recruiting and beyond.
Great presser by Mack. I love the 25 for 25 stat in this year's recruiting. We are not satisfied with 13-1 and we now beleive we can win all our games every year. For someone who was a student from 1986-1991, that is legendary. How awesome would it be to be in school now with all of our sports programs kicking arse.
IMO, the '98 offense was the best model for how to run an offense, unless you have someone like VY at QB. That offense had a perfect balance between the run and the pass. It was pretty much unstoppable. The defense was forced to pick its poison. You don't need a Ricky Williams to run that offense. You can do it with 2 or 3 good backs. Greg Davis only used that offense to get Ricky the Heisman. The next year he converted us into a "finesse" offense, and the result was five years of frustration for fans until VY arrived. C'mon, Mack. Make the change. Give us the power and balance we need. We have the talent to make it work.
i say we go back to the offense we had when major and simms were qb and that is the type of offense we will run next year. the difference being that now, we have one of the best defenses in the country to go with it.
I agree with blongthang. You need to have the talented, star players, but there is something to be said for "glue guys" as well. Aggy basically only gets glue guys. USC doesn't get enough. Texas gets it just right.
not enough emphasis on going two full years without a TE. What really hurt IMO, was losing Finley with two years left. He would have blossomed, been a senior All-American this year. As good as Irby was, he would have been a strong 2nd string TE to Finley. No TE, no running game. Is it a coincidence? Some people might think so, I don't. How many TEs do we have for '10? We need to have two or three ready to go. And junk the zone read, learn to block some way other than jumping straight sideways. Watch closely our sideways runs also. Notice we run up the hill from the side of the formation toward the middle. of the line, while our OL is jumping sideways. Junk that. If you want to run sideways run from the edge of the backfield to the edge of the line. Put a sweep in there, pull two linemen. Put a FB dive in there, oh wait, we don't have a fullback either!! NO fullback, no Tight end, and we can't run the ball!!! surprise, surprise??? nope.
Use the 08 offense? How was it different from 09 excepting we lost Quan? That one player loss caused several ripples in the offensive continuum... Not fair to want 05 offense either, Vince is gone
It wasn't just losing Quan that hurt the 09 offense. That was the biggest blow, but there was also the ineligibility (and ultimate dismissal) of Brandon Collins, there was the horrific mismanagement by deciding to put Dan Buckner in that inside slot position in the 4-wide set (talk about a ripple effect). The 2009 offense was actually very different than 2008. In 2008, we had countless plays where Colt would just catch the snap and immediately throw it to one of the WR's and we'd pick up 6 yards and the defense couldn't do a damn thing about it. In 2009, he had to hold the ball longer because his trust in Kirkendoll and Williams was shaken, Shipley was put on the outside on many plays, Chiles was a superfluous WR, and the only way to actually use Buckner was to send him on post/seam routes. Losing Quan did indeed hurt, but it's not like the staff managed that loss in the best way it could have. But my point was that scheme was far better than that fraudulent offensive scheme that was used between 1999 and 2002. 1998 and 2005 shouldn't be in the discussion (unless we want to just compare the two) because both schemes were extremely talent-intinsive.
Upon closer inspection, we should be including 2008 in the discussion with 1998 and 2005. 2008 was ridiculously more efficient than 1998, in addition to being more productive in simple raw numbers.
08 and 09 offenses did have some differences. One of the biggest differences was that they protected Colt way too much early in the season. They did not seem to let him loose and this hurt the running game. Not only b/c his #s were down but b/c the defense knew he wasn't going to keep it as much. Simply put the 09 offense kind of went away from what worked best of the 08 offense. Late in the season the 09 offense started to utilize Colt more and started to really get into more of a comfort zone. In the NU game our OL just got dominated inside by their DL and that affected everything on offense. The 09 offense made it through though and looked to be ready to damage to Alabama up until Colt got hurt. Then everything changed. One could argue that it was just a matter of time when you put your most valuable asset in your QB at risk that way. If he stays healthy it works and the offense is great. If he gets hurt then the risk is exposed and it was a bad decision to run such an offense. But even then Texas could have won that game IMO if they had let Gilbert come in and just keep running the offense. But for most of the 2nd half they just went vanilla and had him hand it off. Then they only let him throw on passing downs and his chance of having success was dimininished just by that. When they opened it up in the 2nd half Texas came back to within 3. Thus there are argument that the offense was good enough to win the game even with the backup but the coaches made some mistakes in that game going too conservative in 1st half.
