Keenan Robinson - Butkus Semi-Finalist

Keenan has another year?! That is great. For some reason I thought he was a Sr. I expected to hear about him making a good bit of money during the draft.

I used ESPN’s player search to look something up and ended up looking at the UT NFLers. Our list of Safeties and DBs going back about 10 years is just crazy.

Keenan is indeed a junior. So is E Acho. Throw in Jordan Hicks next year and we may have the best starting LBs in college football in 2011.
 
Yep -we’ve got a lot of DBs in the league. That number is about to grow. We’re about to put a string of LBs there, too.

Yep -we’ve got a lot of DBs in the league. That number is about to grow. We’re about to put a string of LBs there, too.

…and defensive ends.

I gotta put in a plug for Mason Foster. He won’t win, but the kid is a great player. He has 72 tackles through six games, with two sacks and 4.5 total TFL, 2 FF and 1 fumble recovery. The only area he isn’t excelling in is creating turnovers. Last season he had 6 FF and 3 INT.

The progress of the Longhorns LBs under Coach Boom has been awesome.

One question for people who know the depth better, who are the “next wave”, other than Hicks? Anybody especially promising?

How will we not play with 3 lbs on the field at that point? It is going to be tough losing both Browns and Williams. Are we likely to hold on to Kheeston? For a while I thought Nebraska was going to do for Kheeston what we did for Suh last year.

I’m hoping that SAcho and Jones will be able to grab roster spots next year in the NFL. They each have a ‘feel good’ story.

I enjoy having the problem of hating that we might have to sit someone as talented as Hicks or EAcho becaue we have too many talented players at that position. I wish we had the same problem on the offense.

I think Von Miller has been hurt.

Redmond -
 
I like what I saw of Aaron Benson at open practice. He was bigger than promised, which is rare.
 
Tariq Allen looks destined to fill a Jared Norton role.
 
Tevin Jackson is raw, not that instinctive, and who knows what will happen with his ineligibility situation.
 
Dravannti isn’t a true LB, but an edge player at this stage.
 
Current recruits Steve Edmond and Kendall Thompson should be big time. Edmond is unlike any athlete we’ve had at the LB position in quite a while.

I was more impressed by the number of offensive linemen from the past few drafts. Oh wait…nm.

One question for people who know the depth better, who are the "next wave", other than Hicks? Anybody especially promising?

Tevin Jackson, assuming he makes it back to campus…

Tough to choose between Acho Uno Ocho and Keenan Robinson as my favorite horn linebacker. Keenan has made a ton of stat sheet-stuffing plays but Acho ain’t far behind.

Taylor -

Yeah, he has been battling an ankle injury, but playing nonetheless.

I think Von Miller’s future bank account has been hurt.

RHorn – Reggie Wilson is a true freshman and was highly touted. Some of Freshman and Sophs like Benson, T Jackson, and T Allen (all 4 stars I think) will probably step up and grab a decent amount of playing time next year.

I believe Edmond is our big LB recruit for 2011, but I don’t know if he will have impact the team as quickly as Hicks.

Anybody have any info on why Miller made such a silly move?

Did he actually think that returning to A&M and the associated glory of contending for a possible Texas Bowl birth was worth risking his draft status, or did he just get a bad eval from the NFL Scouting people?

ut06 -
 
I think our friend Redmond may have been asking about LBs specifically. Reggie W ain’t taking any snaps at SLB.
 
Arriviste -
 
I think he got a late 1st/early 2nd grade. Thought he could be a Top 10 guy if he strung together another big year. He’ll certainly test well at the combine.
 
It’s a tough call. Generally, when you play on a bad team and you put in a huge year, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be able to repeat that performance whether because of injury or offenses keying on you.

If we can keep Blake Gideon from knocking him out of games, he has quite a future.

So there have been a handful of “known facts” regarding Texas football circa 1998-2004 that have established themselves around here and other parts of the Longhorn web.

One of those “known facts” is that Chris Simms was a bad quarterback. This certainly seems to be the prevailing view over at BoN and the couple of major BBS sites (I expect more from the former than the latter). This has somehow been decoupled from the endless migraine of the Simms/Applewhite “debate” and become an article of both faith and fact … even though under pretty much every objective measure you could take, there is no possible way that Chris Simms could be called a bad quarterback. And in fact, it would be extremely hard to argue that he wasn’t, in fact, a pretty good one.

So this brings me waaaay around to another known fact – that Derrick Johnson was in fact a great collegiate linebacker.

At the risk of heresy and excommunication, JUAN WILLIAMS-STYLE: Was he though? It’s undeniable that he was an exceptional athlete and a tremendous playmaker. But did he play the position especially well? I simply don’t know enough about the position to say, and I’d love to see someone throw up a MSPaint mashup or animated GIF showing one way or another.

Of course, as Scip hints, it’s not like he got a lot of help from fellow players or coaches (except maybe GERG Robinson) at a position where it’s crucial to have said help in order to succeed.

I guess I’ve always been mystified that he hasn’t had much of an impact at the pro level, though of course that’s no way to judge a guy’s collegiate performance. Especially when you get shipped off to KC to ply your trade as opposed to, say, Pittsburgh or Baltimore. And also, I don’t want to seem like I’m disparaging the guy or trying to suggest he was overrated or anything like that.

I do think that with the current administration on D, we’re in the process of getting athletes of DJs capabilities and going an extra step of actually training them. And so I wonder if we may be overestimating DJ in hindsight given the dearth of skill and scheme around him whereas today, he’d sort of be JAG, relatively speaking.

Put another way, if Keenan were playing then and DJ now, would we be looking back at Robinson and rhapsodizing about what an otherworldly linebacker he was for us?

Thanks Mr. Finebaum, I’ll hang up and listen now.

CJD -
 
I share your Simms analysis. The average Longhorn fan is an idiot in dealing with this issue.
 
Don’t understand in any way the link with DJ unless you’re trying to create your own defensive version of Simms wrongheadedness.
 
The guy was an extraordinary player for us. He’d be nothing approaching a JAG today and he wasn’t even coached for most of his career.
 
Dude, he had nine forced fumbles as a senior. NINE. And a pick. One player on our defense created ten turnovers. That’s Earl Thomas level impact.
 
For his career, he had 9 interceptions, 30 PBU (from the LB position – are you kidding me?), 11 forced fumbles, 69 tackles for loss, 10.5 sacks. And about 450 tackles. Beyond stuffing the box score with game impact, he was the best player on the field for some otherwise occasionally shaky defenses who could cover, blitz, run blitz, and stuff the run. And he did it all on instinct – until he was lucky enough to have Greg Robinson teach him how to strip a ball.
 
What exactly are you looking for from a linebacker? Water-walking?

That’s all well and good, Scip, but could he Mug? I mean really Mug? That’s what I expect of my backers, in addition to leaping Maurice Gordon in a single bound while getting to the proper gap.

He could mug down like an 11th grade girl who just had her braces off.

DJ was Vince Young on defense. What a completely retarded post.

Not retarded.
 
Discussion never hurt anyone.
 
And it’s not like he wrote “OMG DEEJAY WAS SO OVERRATE, WE COULD ONLY WIN MNC WHEN HE GRADUATE! LOL.”

Johnson was the second best defensive player I saw last decade. The first was Suh. D.J. is playing great for the Chiefs now, but he hasn’t exploded like he was expected to because the dipshits played him at MLB for nearly his entire career, essentially neutering every single one of his strongest traits. Remember David Pollack’s words when he was announced (retardedly) as the Bednarik award winner? “I’m surprised. I thought Derrick Johnson was a lock for this award.”

Robinson has busted his ass and it is great to see when a kid’s hard work turns into production. A good deal of that does go to Muschamp, but you hone instincts and not teach them.

Goodness knows how far Texas has come in this area from the triumvant of Rawls, Lewis, and Jones to a far superior group of Acho, Robinson, and a gatorade cooler.

Bad joke, but the level of athletic ability ,instincts, and talent level in this one area of the program is head and shoulders above where it has been at any time in the Mack’s tenure in Austin.

“Edmond is unlike any athlete we’ve had at the LB position in quite a while.”

Gotta agree with this. His HS vids are impressive. You never have to search to find him on his game film; it’s obvious who the man is in the crowd. The proverbial man among boys.

I’d be very interested to see how things might look if Hicks could play Mike and we used 3 linebackers against the spread. If there are 3 linebackers you could do this with, at least on 1st and 2nd down, it would be these guys.
The safeties will have to master zone-coverage though…

DJ was a very good and then great LB his last two years. And he is doing very well in KC. and yes, Simms was a very good QB. I doubt GG reaches his level of performance to be honest. Remember his soph year, Sims lit up ATM in one of the best performances in our school’s history to that point. The program had issues at that point, that it no longer does.

How we wandered in the LB wilderness for 20 years I will never know. Great that that has turned around. This nomination sets him up well for a real run at the award next year.

Thanks for the thoughts on the next wave of LBs, Scipio.

Reggie Wilson does indeed look like he has a phenomenal future, but you were right, I was specifically asking about LBs.

How would our starting LB group look? Hicks is a perfect OLB, but Keenan and E. Acho both have their position locked down.

Flood, when Scipio originally brought this up he had Hicks as the Mike since Emmanuel Acho is a natural OLB himself. I always saw Hicks ending up at WLB but no one is supplanting Keenan Robinson so Uno Ocho or Hicks has to play the middle.

In coverage that’s a lethal enough grouping that we could leave the fifth db on the bench more often. As long as Randall is here you figure even if Hicks or Uno Ocho aren’t traditional thumpers up the middle we’ll still be in great shape against the run. No one is taking the edge unless Jeffcoat and Wilson regress.

I was finally able to watch the replay of the NU game and check out the final play before NU’s last field goal. Hicks blitzes, is cut, somersaults, jumps back up and nearly sacks Lee. Oh, and the whole 10 tackles in a half thing. Our LB’s are going to be lethal soon.

I’ll be more than mildly surprised if we don’t have the best front seven in the country this year. I like the idea of more base 4-3, as Keenan can run with a lot of fast WRs. It also puts less pressure on the new DBs (hopefully only two new CBs, but I doubt it).

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