Mack Brown is a mesmerizing dude. It's why he recruits so well and why everybody likes him. In person he's dynamite. It's like listening to Morgan Freeman read the Declaration of Independence. You come out of a press conference and think 'Man, Greg Davis is doing a helluva job at Texas and we're lucky to have him.' Players are ready to run through walls for him, which is good preparation for our running game. But reading Brown's words don't have the same effect on a person that they would if you heard Mack speak them in person, and his comments sometimes do make for interesting reading. Like his press conference on the 20th.
"Christian Scott is playing really well. He’s covering better. We always knew that he could run and hit and tackle. He’s actually toned some down. He hurts guys in practice if we allow him to go full speed all the time. We say, ‘Christian help us. Wait until the games.’"
I'm trying to remember the last time Texas had a guy like Christian Scott at safety. We've had plenty of great safeties, but I'm talking about the kind of hard pipe-hittin', uh, safety that a defensive coordinator calls when he wants to get medieval on someone's ass. The closest one I can think of is Richard Peavy, and I'm chomping at the bit to see Scott hit someone so hard that they go sit on the wrong sideline and then quit the team the following Monday.
Usually when you go to a nickel defense, you're not as strong against the run. Typically teams will bring in a small third corner to line up in the slot. When we go to nickel, we'll have Scott filling an alley like a linebacker and Aaron Williams who also plays as well as any defensive back in the country around the line of scrimmage. We can be a really strong team against the run in the nickel. Something to keep an eye on.
"I would like to see D.J. Monroe and Marquise Goodwin on kickoff returns."
Two of the fastest players in college football returning kicks? Now we're talking. When you have a single return guy who is a threat, you can try to keep the ball out of his hands by kicking to the other guy named Vondrell Ogbonnaya-Geiggar. When you have two guys back there who have both returned kicks for touchdowns, it gets a lot harder. The surest way to avoid them both is to kick it short to an up man. Now named Vondrell Ogbonnaya-Geiggar. I guess if a kicker has a strong enough leg, he can kick it out of the end zone. It's not like he's going to tire himself out making multiple kickoffs against Texas this year.
"What you’d have right now is Britt [Mitchell]’s doing a good job, Kyle [Hix] is doing a really good job and then you’d have Luke that if we played today, he would move back and forth, so you’ve got three tackles that we feel like right now are playing well enough to step up and play."
We've got a career right tackle playing left tackle, and a bulked up former tight end at right tackle. Our chief backup is a 275 pounder who actually had the confidence to walk around without a shirt at one of the seven on sevens I watched. That's not good. You want your offensive linemen to be the kind of guys who wear tshirts when they go swimming if you know what I mean.
But you play the hand your dealt, or in this case, recruited. The only thing that makes me feel good about the tackle position this year is comparing it to next year. See? Don't you feel better already?
Hix will have to go up against Von Miller, and Mitchell will have to face Jeremy Beal. This is where play action and a competent screen game will have to come in. Don't laugh, unless you're still thinking about next year's tackle position. Yes, we don't really have anything in our past to make you think that we can actually screen competently, but. But? But nothing. Hey, I'll be as surprised as you will if we can screen correctly this season. Nothing to cling to at this point other than hope.
September 4th, imo.