The House built on Sand

“None of you will convince me we couldn’t have won 10 games this year with the talent we have had it been competently deployed.”

Amen to this. People who are arguing that “we just don’t have the talent” are off the mark. We don’t have AS MUCH talent as we’ve been used to, but we damn sure have enough talent to compete effectively against the teams on our schedule. But the talent we do have is being largely wasted in stupid and silly ways. They are not being utilized to their strengths, coached up to improve over time, or put in position to succeed. They are being failed by the coaching.
And by “the coaching” I mean GDGD.

I have been around a long time. I have seen a lot of football. None of you will convince me we could have won 10 games this year with the talent we have had it been competently deployed. The cuboad is bare except for a few freshmen and sophomores. Better talent would never lose to UCLA, ISU and Baylor in the same year.

That is not to say our coaching doesn’t suck this year. For instance, take our QB. Please. Even an aggy coach knows when it time to give up on a loser and try something else.

One HUGE factor in Pittman being gone is that we no longer have a 300-lb anchor on our attempts to push the ball. Thompson, albeit a bit undersized for the position, has shown me better play at the 5-spot in his first 3 games as a collegian than what I saw the previous 4 years.

It wasn’t at all difficult heading into the season to see that our strengths and weaknesses as a team demanded a conservative run-based approach with occassional deep-lobs to Goodwin, Davis, Malcolm or whomever. We should have been last year’s Nebraska, a team that could hang close with anyone and beat high-level opponents with a few breaks. None of you will convince me we couldn’t have won 10 games this year with the talent we have had it been competently deployed.

And what’s truly maddening about this is that it’s exactly what Mack and GDGD said we were going to do prior to the season and they quit halfway through the first game.

FWIW, here’s the first drive of the season:

1st and 10 at TEX 38 Cody Johnson rush for 1 yard to the Texas 39.
2nd and 9 at TEX 39 Cody Johnson rush for 18 yards to the Rice 43 for a 1ST down.
1st and 10 at RICE 43 Cody Johnson rush for 2 yards to the Rice 41.
2nd and 8 at RICE 41 RICE penalty 5 yard offside defense accepted.
2nd and 3 at RICE 36 Cody Johnson rush for 9 yards to the Rice 27 for a 1ST down.
1st and 10 at RICE 27 Garrett Gilbert pass complete to Marquise Goodwin for 5 yards to the Rice 22.
2nd and 5 at RICE 22 Cody Johnson rush for 7 yards to the Rice 15 for a 1ST down.
1st and 10 at RICE 15 Garrett Gilbert rush for 6 yards to the Rice 9.
2nd and 4 at RICE 9 Tre’ Newton rush for 5 yards to the Rice 4 for a 1ST down.
1st and Goal at RICE 4 Cody Johnson rush for 1 yard to the Rice 3.
2nd and Goal at RICE 3 Cody Johnson rush for 2 yards to the Rice 1.
3rd and Goal at RICE 1 Cody Johnson rush for no gain to the Rice 1.
4th and Goal at RICE 1 Cody Johnson rush for a loss of 4 yards to the Rice 5.

Yeah, I’ll take that, even if we couldn’t pound it for the touchdown in at the end.

Instead, GDGD took that as a sign that something was wrong and he ditched the whole fucking concept.

We’re bad because of scheme. And I agree that the Baylor/ISU/KSU/UCLA losses shouldn’t have happened on talent alone, but those games didn’t occur in a vacuum. They were cumulative and built on each other negatively. The team has quit and that’s entirely fault of coaching.

Shit, now I’m in bad mood.

How does your O-line look for next year? Do you lose anyone? Any capable under classman to fill in the gaps? I don’t see significant improvement unless you get better play out of this group.

I think you could make an argument that OL is the only position on the team that has improved from last year. We’ll have Snow, Allen, and Walters back in ’11. Tackle may be a disaster.

Each one of these articles makes me angrier and more despondent than the one before. I want to stop reading them, but I can’t. It’s as though I subconsciously believe that if I subject myself to studying the failures of this team over and over again, GD & Mack will somehow have to do it too.

Couldn’t agree more that with a competent OC this team wins 8 or 9 games anyway. But then, with a competent OC a lot of things are different.

Agree with most of the comments on football, but roundball? Nah. I’ll pass.

So you’re saying Greg Davis is a fucking retard? Coulda just said that in the first sentence, dude. Save me all that reading.

I get the impression that on several of the football boards out there, the discussion with certain posters begins and ends with “talent”. There is no qualification for it, unless it’s with the similarly vague “athleticism”, or perhaps “aggression” as it jumps out at them from a play or two where it can’t be mistaken. Any further discussion of straight line speed, lateral speed, flexibility, coordination, balance, functional strength, vision, field vision, timing, pattern recognition, situational awareness, tendency awareness, vocal communication, or attention span (cough, ahem) just doesn’t get accounted for. You can have a problem with just one of those that severely limit the rest of your born ability. And yes, aggression is similarly important.

Scipio made an interesting quote once that a large portion of football fans watch the screen and just see a blur of color. I agree, and so it makes sense that a large portion of any fanbase will take a reductive view of our problems, or try to apply a Golden Hammer suggestion to all of them.

What doesn’t make sense to me is that It seems that we have an offensive staff that is looking for Golden Hammer solutions too, one for a each of a few basic situations. There is the talent acquisition hammer for recruiting. There is the overwhelming talent as a strategy hammer (to negate the need for development and coaching). Nickel suggests that we may take a similar approach to selecting offensive sets, insomuch as we bother with testing what we might be good at.

The distinction between identifying a core competency and looking for a Golden Hammer is that you expect one to just work all the time, regardless of what else is going on. I suppose that’s fine when Colt McCoy and Vince Young were living embodiments of such a concept. You literally could throw them almost any play and at almost any situation and move the ball forward. What percentage of offense did each of those guys account for individually? What was McCoy’s completion percentage? And now we appear to have forgotten how to use anything but that type of player.

We need to remember how to apply the whole box of tools, especially when we have some good ones in there. Despite some lapses, we’ve been able to use Chykie Brown to our advantage most of the time, but we can’t seem to get DJ Monroe the same kind of useful output.

Another point. I read and interesting discussion where a poster posed the question about how a program like TCU, who gets talented kids, but not as many as TX/OU, can still look dominant on D and solid on O year in and year out. A very interesting explanation followed:

“A lot of the problem lies with the fans. recruiting rankings have become a mainstay in their mind so they are an easy way to “justify” how good players are. so they come up with all of these little numbers to justify why getting more stars = better teams. and if a coach is lazy and/or pressed for time they take advantage of this.

the problem is that the players coming out of high school believe it just as much as the fans do. and the group it seems to affect the most at the college level are the 4 star players (which make up the bulk of a great recruiting class). these guys think they are as physically gifted as the 5 star guy so they don’t have anything to prove like the 3 star/2 star guy. so they coast.

TCU and Boise fill 95% of their roster with these 3 star/2 star guys and get more out of their players because they have a chip on their shoulder. all the coaches really have to do is find a good colt/sam type of QB (which were both 3 stars btw) and they are going to make waves. their guys are almost always 4th/5th year players who can walk through schemes blindfolded, know all the intricacies of their position, and understand their responsibilities in any situation. our 4/5* guys struggle to line up properly and then take it easy the year before they decide to turn pro early."

This post was, from all places, a Sooner board where they were lamenting sub par play that led them to some scares against Utah State and CIncinatti, and losses to the likes of aggy. I had it brought to my attention by a die hard Sooner fan that I talk football with a lot. However, if you had cut and pasted the same text onto a different colored board, that particular post would look as true. A 4 star freshman thinks he is physically and mentally prepared to play college ball. A 5 star actually is ready. A 3 star knows he’ll have to work to get on the field at all, and they either do it or they don’t. I wonder if the coaching staff has made the same error, or just lost the abiilty to squeeze effort out of any but the hungry three star guys, or the impeccable character guys like the Acho family.

Good post. Basically it really all comes down to coaching, just like in the real world it comes down to which company has the best managers and supervisors. All of the schools recruit from the same talent base, and if you recruit better talent then that is an edge. But now we have all seen that even if you have good talent, but your coaching is weak you are going to lose to better coached schools. They can coach their players up to better performance. I have read on most of the UT boards for years, and all during Macks tenure the lack of coaching has been a consistent topic. Because Mack was fortunate to recruit a known talent like VY we won an MNC. Because he was lucky and a 3 star named Colt whom no one ever expected to be that good, became the winningest QB in UT history. Now if Mack wants to stay and survive he had better surround himself with some people who can coach. We know GD can’t. We know WM can because he produced an excellent D last year even with though we were thin at the DT position. This year the DT position is so thin there is no way that the D could do anywhere near as well as it did last year. Also losing Earl Thomas at S made it even worse. If GD is here next year it will be Macks last year.

50 years of watching: You’re right, better talent wouldn’t have lost 6 games, but the real question is, “could the talent on hand have won those games under reasonable circumstances?” I believe the answer to be yes.

Furthermore, I would identify the following players as NFL-caliber talents:

Kyle Hix: Laugh if you will, someone will take this guy. He’s athletic, he’s enormous, and if not for his consistent false starts he would be having an all-conference season.
David Snow: He’s been excellent in performing every task we’ve asked of him.
Chykie Brown: He would have been the star of the secondary in 2007.
Curtis Brown: Pretty excellent year amidst nagging injuries.
Aaron Williams: Day 1 pick.
Sam Acho: Day 1 pick.
Kheeston Randall: If he stays another year I think he’ll be a day 1 guy.

The following guys could pro potential as well given time and in some instances, better coaching: Gilbert, Davis, Goodwin, Robinson, Uno Ocho, Vaccaro, Okafor, Walters.

That’s not an untalented team, especially on defense.
What people usually mean by “talent” in football is usually outstanding talent at QB, RB, or WR. Texas doesn’t have that, but what they have is much better than what we’ve seen.

BillW: I think losing Earl Thomas has been far, far worse than the problems at DT.

If teams had the opportunity last year they would have revealed the same run defense weaknesses we see this year. Christian Scott is actually probably a slight downgrade in run defense to Earl while Gideon has maintained mediocre status.

Scipio’s formula was that Texas would attempt to cover Earl’s 8 picks with additional forced fumbles. We have done that but not landed on hardly any of the fumbles the defense has forced.

“Limas Sweed, Selvin Young, or Jamaal Charles who would all start on this team.”

That’s an understatement. I think that everyone from the 2006 offense would start for this team. Everyone.

Es the wisest post I have read , with good follow up here since Scipio said CJ should start. Which btw ……what illuminates Greg Davis’s complete fooldom is running hurry up with a running game, especially with Cody Johnson . Can you imagine if we did that with Earll or Ricky, or Wisco did it with Ron Dayne?
U don’t run hurry up and pound the ball, you tire your back too much. It is cardinal rule not to do that.