Mack’s New Strategery: Offense

nice.

i didnt see mention of mj mcfarland tho. i think he’ll be pretty solid for us and im excited to see what he can do.
and i wanna see what wood can do. hes got all the tools and i hope he plays well enough to win the job.

definitely lookin forward to this new era of longhorn football. cant wait til spring.

Outstanding. I absolutely love your shit, man. thanks.

Welcome back, NR. Missed your posts. Congratulations.

Agree on most of this. Can’t wait to see what a competently designed offense can do with our talent though it is realistic to expect some growing pains. Your mention of S&C with the OL is dead on as well.

I don’t think Gilbert can be fairly evaluated based on last season with so much working against him. He is one of those that I am most interested in seeing with benefit of the new staff.

an engagement to the future Mrs. Nickel Rover

Congrats.

Poppping the question in true Boise fashion would have involved a table at the Oasis, five actors disguised as secret service agents, and an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine rising out of the lake.

I am loving the idea of Whaley as an H-back in the Boise offense. I also hope that Dom Jones turns out to be a decent blocker; as a former defensive player he should have more love of contact than perhaps the converted WRs littering the position.

Excellent read, Nickel. Congrats on the new engagement and new laptop. I’m sure they will make you equally happy for at least the first year (totally kidding!).

“Have a talented receiver who can run a few dangerous routes? If you are Harsin you plug him into formations that utilize those routes. If you are Greg Davis you wait until he has mastered all of his reads and/or is a senior.”

This is what excites me the most.

I hope that MB will truly turn Harsin lose and let him run the O without injecting personnel preferences.

Do you have enough guys on campus or coming in to implement or is it going to be a rough season or 2 before you see results?

Dumping B H said in his pressed is very important. Installing the Boise offense and then making it the Texas offense is a process not a discrete event. It will not happen in one season. You will be disappointed if you expect full osmosis by all the players either for the system or the mindset. As much as we wish it were not so, I think it’s a 3 year timeline for full return. Next year will have some rocky spots.

Yes, we may not get to see the same well-oiled offensive juggernaut that we all got so used to seeing under Davis.

We won’t score 50 a game or anything, but it will be nice watching a competent offensive scheme that doesn’t completely shit the bed against a semi-talented defense.

I know it’s more realistic to expect growing pains but this is one of the guys that turned kellen friggin moore into a heisman finalist. I think gg or wood or whoever it ends up being grows at lightspeef compared to whatever it was gdgd was teaching them. I don’t think we drop 50 on the landthieves but we’ll get close a couple times next season based on talent and competency.

My only hope is that there is a true QB competition. If there is and Gilbert wins it outright than I can live with it but I’ll also know it’s going to be a struggle to win a championship unless he makes massive strides in the leadership and mechanics department.

I’m with Nordberg, it may take awhile to successfully install a lot of their offense, although at least we’ve been trying to already in the last year or so, but we are going to be immediately improved simply by virtue of having players who care on OL, our young players a year older or on campus (hey Malcolm!), and an OC who gameplans.

Welcome back, Nickel and congrats on the pending nuptuals. Nice to see some non-coaching search talk for a change.

I tend to agree with the notion that a 9-win season next year is a reasonable target. I think Harsin’s concept blends better with the other coaches (i.e. Applewhite) and the available talent than Chryst would have, and I think the transition will be well-underway by the time August rolls around – especially the changes to the S&C regimen, which should be starting right about last week. I think we’ll get there relatively quickly, and as much as some of our opponents and rivals want it to be so, this won’t be a 2-3 year rebuilding process.

The notions of OL blocking with angles and leverage, pre-snap motion and fundamentally sound plays run out of a variety of formations make me very happy.

The key coming out of Spring is that the Texas offense be able to run 2-3 plays to a level of execution that Texas can run them whenever they need to and be successful. Doesn’t really matter whether the defense knows it is coming or not the design of the play and the execution are at a level the defense really has to focus on taking away that play.

Once you do that you have something to build from and attack the defense.

My biggest complaint with the Davis offense is nothing built off the things Texas did well and last year’s offense was so poorly executed and designed there was never any consistent success to build confidence, nothing the offense could turn to when they truly needed yards, and nothing the defense had to account for against the Horns.

I’ve got a couple of questions as well.

1. Do you guys think Mack Brown will be disciplined enough to let Harsin recruit the best football players for his scheme, or will Mack Brown insist on recruiting the best possible athlete for every position as he has done since he got to Texas? Keep in mind that, while there may be some overlap, those two set of players are not identical.

2. Why wasn’t Dan Hawkins more successful at Colorado, basically running the Boise State offense? He too had better athletes at CU than he did at BSU and should have thus been more successful at CU, but wasn’t.

I’ll hang up and listen.

Scipio once wrote about the same question, Ag.

http://barkingcarnival.fantake.com/2010/03/26/butler-boise-state-can-culture-be-duplicated/

Good piece. I’d like to hear Scipio’s take on the Harsin hire.

Ag in Tex,

Just did quick perusal of recruit rankings from 2004 – the Hawkins era. The athletes at Colorado weren’t much better than BSU, if at all. The only thing that changed was playing against better teams in conference and a brutal non-conference schedule. Harsin is coming to a team with an incoming #1 recruit class. On paper they seem like totally different situations.

The decision to play his son (a marginal D1 athlete) was his downfall. Hawkins took one step forward only to take two steps back. He also had the all too difficult to measure, "weird factor" going on. A dash of Mora, a touch of an emotional Machovic, and all in the coaching style of a gypsy mystic.

Ag in Texas,

Being that Boise State has been so multiple with the talent they’ve had there over the years, I’m not exactly sure what kind of athlete best fits Harsin’s “scheme.” I think this would have been more of an issue had we gone out and hired a coordinator like Wisconsin’s Paul Chryst.

The strength of the Boise offense has been their ability to not have any consistent identity on offense, rather, they’ve designed their offenses around the skill sets of the players they have on campus at that particular moment. In this repsect, Harsin is the anti-Greg Davis, who preferred hammering square pegs into round holes rather than actually taking the time to maximize the output of the talent at his disposal by tailoring his playbook around the individual skill sets available on his roster.

Ag in Tex,

In case one doesn’t want to read the article, the offense was Chris Petersen’s. Hawkins no longer had Petersen, so the successful Boise offense was not installed.

Nickel,

It will take a while to get things clicking, but now we may have a whole new set of devil’s we don’t know. At least with GDGD we knew what was up.

I’m excited to see what happens, but I’m also prepared to be even more perplexed by play calls than ever before.

Hopefully it will be enough to get us through this next season while we watch OU head to another National Title without challenge from Texas.

I just hope no one here is thinking we are going to “kick ass” out of the gate. Or that the style of Harsin is going to work right away.

If it does good, if not……well that should be in our expectations.

Full rebuilds take 2-3 years to yield championship results…..best case

“While I maintain that a spread offense run by a dual-threat quarterback is the simplest way to routinely have championship caliber squads..”

It may be the simplest in the sense that it is like walking in a straight line, but it also the most dangerous. Like walking a straight line across a tightrope with no net. Just a little balance problem and nasty death ensues.

Unless you are very lucky with respect to injuries to that quarterback, or just happen to have a couple of spares in your pocket…. :( And those spares need to be able to jump in with very few practice reps and little game time. As a long term strategy the “eggs in one basket” plan leaves quite a bit to be desired.

“Full rebuilds take 2-3 years to yield championship results…..best case”

Not sure that this applies to Harsin. As many have said he is more about philosophy than scheme. With Chryst, the above would likely have been true as you have to completely retrain everyone, change your recruiting, yadah, yadah, yadah. With Harsin, the idea is you make lemonade out of the lemons you got. And our lemons are pretty tasty in spite of everything. I may take 2-3 years to get to the final state, but with Harsin it won’t be like “rebuilding your swing”. Each step of the way there will be something very functional based on what is happening at the time.

“Full rebuilds take 2-3 years to yield championship results…..best case"

If you’re talking about, say, the end of the Fred Akers era, then yeah. But I’m thinking it won’t take three years for Harsin to figure out how to use Mike Davis, Darius White, Shipley, Malcolm Brown, etc.

GESIS H CRIST !!!!

We better not be saying that last season is like the end of the Fred Akers era. It took three HC coaching changes and as many generations of HS kids to yield championship results after that era. Most guys my age dispaired of ever seeing another MNC in our lifetimes.

Offense is going to be ok cause we has Jerrah Gray!

Texas has always been at its most successful when Mack Brown is more CEO and less coach. (See: 2005; See also: Young, Vince) This concept will need to be applied again for UT to make a turnaround in less than three years. Harsin needs to be given full reign to recruit to his scheme, and not scheme to his recruits. It’s Texas, so there’s no reason for this to be a problem. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with 2007 and 2010 again.

Also, congrats on the engagement, Nickel!

JimboLH: I can think of 2 instances in the last several years in which an injury to the dual-threat QB derailed a potential championship season. The Dennis Dixon Oregon Ducks, and another one that I can’t remember anymore.

Both teams that played for the national championship had dual-threat QBs running spread offenses. Four of the last 6 champions featured that offense.
I’d like to see some evidence that spread running QBs are more likely to be injured, what’s more I think it’s far easier to train QBs into that system.

As far as fitting Harsin’s system, this is a problem no matter who we hired because we have a mish-mash of players that don’t match any existing scheme I’m aware of used in American Football.

However, there is some tremendous talent here that could be molded into a very solid offense by next season.

Everything in that article stressed the ‘lack of scheme’ in the BSU offense. We’ve got plenty of blocking surfaces at the TE position. Peterson may have been the master mind of the offensive system and evaluating talent, but Harsin was the one reading defenses and reacting. I think that skill will translate into offensive success even if we don’t have TE’s with good hands. Greg Davis never seemed to understand what the defense was doing or how to exploit it.

What am I missing?

Nickel Rover: My point wasn’t that the quarterbacks were more prone to injury, my point was that the scheme that lives by the quarterback dies by the quarterback. Any system with a single point of failure carries great risk at that point. And not just injury, a bad day, a cold, anything that causes the qb to play “down” has great potential to kill a game.

The gist of my original comment, albeit implied, is that you indicated some preference for the spread dual-threat qb system over the boise st “non-system.” Because of the single point of failure issue my preference is the opposite. If you can’t tell, I’m an engineer which informs my opinion on this issue.

Regardless good article.

“If you can’t tell, I’m an engineer which informs my opinion on this issue.”

I had already drawn that conclusion, heh.

The camera showed Applewhite and Harsin sitting side by side at the OU game on Saturday. Harsin was listening intently while Applewhite spoke the entire time the camera was on them. Something tells me they weren’t talking basketball… It would appear that the discussion of an “immediate connection” between Major and Harsin at the presser had some truth to it.

We have quite a few Ags and at least one Sooner on the thread. I, for one, am glad that they are happy that our future is bright. Domedriver, good to see you on a Texas thread again, it’s been quite a while. You are a one of the good Ag’s.

May I remind all of you that we are not rebuilding, we are restructuring. We have the talent, at the coaching level and playing level, and the coaches are putting in the hours to streamline the learning process for the players.

Relax, folks. The CEO is in his office, the team is conditioning and in the weight room, and the coaches are working very long hours getting ready for the season and the Spring.

Hook ’em!

One of the things I love most about the Boise offense is it’s determination in winning the information war between the offense and defense pre-snap. If you want to see how losing that war can affect your football team, pop in a tape of the RRS from 2000-2004.

When the defense can key in on what your doing, and you have no tool in your playbook to punish them for it, then you are in deep, deep shit. I think Davis put an all important premium on execution, therefore he ran an extremely simple offense with very little action pre-snap. Boise’s offense, with all of the shifts and motion that go into it, disguises what they plan on doing while at the same time forcing the defense’s hand as to what they plan on running.

Good point Mad Clapper, OU used some motion tricks to earn a free TD just in the last RRS when we left their TE alone in the end zone after he motioned for the 2nd time.

JimboLH: There are few schemes that actually place total emphasis on the quarterback. Much of Vince Young’s amazing success in 2005 came from having an NFL OL, NFL TE, NFL running backs and a decent collection of WRs. You could have plugged in many other dual-threat QBs of our time and seen a conference title with that crew. Especially in the Big 12 that year…

Placing tremendous emphasis on your quarterback to win games is not a result of scheme, unless you are using a worthless scheme that relies on the QB to make half of your big plays through improvisation, it’s a matter of what talent you have.

If you have an amazing RB and only a decent supporting cast around him then you are going to sink if he’s injured. At the college level it’s hard to have more than 1 well-trained QB on the roster because of the complexity of offenses and the limitation of practice time. Most teams are in big trouble if the QB goes down.

In sum, I don’t believe the Spread offense with a running quarterback is any more likely to be crippled than any other offensive system. Oregon actually sustained their championship contending season without their starting QB playing in every conference game.

Java, Domedriver ain’t no aggie! Burnt Orange since I was 8 years old and a UT grad class of ‘84. I was there for James Street, Steve Woster, Johnny Johnson, Ken Simms, Donny Little, Herkie Walls, Eric Metcalf, … Hung with Earl Campbell’s brother Tim was there when Ricky broke the record, was there for Vince and the NC in the rose bowl…. Climbed the DKR on the 100 birthday of the University… was there for both of the UCLA fuckfeasts… Saw Jerry Gray take out Bo. In all my years, Jerry “The Hawk” Gray was the absolute, most lethal, intimidating DB that ever played for Texas!!! Jerry Gray is a BAD MAN!

Hook’em! Dome not an AGGIE!!!!

“Poppping the question in true Boise fashion would have involved a table at the Oasis, five actors disguised as secret service agents, and an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine rising out of the lake.”

Uh no, “true Boise fashion” would first involve kicking OU’s ass on national TV, and then using the spotlight/post game interview to pop the question.

You can see how the actual “true Boise fashion” is far superior right?

Re Hawkins: His recruiting was really poor, some of the guys they ran out of the tunnel weren’t even D-1 caliber much less Big 12 caliber. You know you’re in trouble when Scotty Mcknight is your best receiver. Also, I think taking his own kid really killed him, in perception if not reality.

Hawkins also never committed to running the ball like Boise does. It was weird particularly since it was obviously the strength of CU’s team.

I simply wanted to ask a few questions and see what y’alls collective thoughts were. I have some opinions on y’alls hires and I have made them known to those I care to make them known to.

As I was telling on of the Barkers this morning on the phone, the first two to three games next season will be very, very telling.

"Full rebuilds take 2-3 years to yield championship results…..best case"

So, I’m guessing Auburn represents BEST CASE!.

The Tigers were 8-5 in 2009, losing five SEC games (including Georgia and Kentucky). Auburn was 5-7 (2-6 in conference) in 2008. Why do these numbers seem so (damn) familiar?

Great article. It will be refreshing to see Texas run an offense where even I won’t know what play will be run. GD was so predictable our opponents probably didn’t even have to watch game film. Just the fact that our opponents will not know our offense better than our own players should be worth at least 2 additional wins in 2011.
After watching DeSean Hales in HS several times I really thought he would be a difference maker at Texas. Hopefully Harsin will find a niche for his talents that Davis never gave him a chance to use.

I think the big difference in the Texas offense in 2011 will come from the running game. Better running backs with Brown, Shead, and Johnson should help, but overall a willingness to stick with the running game even after a couple of bad series will help. Davis went away from the running game too early practically every game or never even tried to establish anything.

edsp:

There is no way you just cited Auburn as your example of why Texas could turn it around this fast. It pains me to say this, but Texas plays by the rules. They’re a clean school. They recruit on locale, tradition, family atmosphere, and a quantity of high-quality ass that would make Hugh Hefner stand up and start a slow clap. Auburn, on the other hand, bought itself a Heisman trophy winner and with that purchase, they get a bonus of a thorough NCAA mandated cavity search that will lead to the vacating of wins and bowels.

Roach:

“Uh no, "true Boise fashion" would first involve kicking OU’s ass on national TV”
By “kicking ass”, do you mean surrendering an 18 point lead to a lower ranked team that didn’t step off the bus until halftime? A team QB’d by Paul Thompson that lost to Texas 28-10 earlier that year? Because if that’s your definition of kicking ass, OU must’ve just completely curbstomped Texas this year. I define kicking ass as what OU did to UConn. Or what UT’s men’s basketball team did to OU’s men’s team last week. Anyway…

Bryan Harsin is a hell of a hire for Texas. He brings playcalling unpredictability, schematic creativity, and a damn solid X’s and O’s knowledge of the game to the booth. That’s not to mention the proven track record of wrecking shop, and his ability to not be Greg Davis.

Ag —

Anyone on this board that tells you that the Hawkins example doesn’t plant at least a small seed of doubt in their minds is a fool or a liar. Letting Harsin recruit who he needs for his system is important.

Truth is, the college game is becoming more like the NFL in that respect. You look at NFL head coaches and you have to recognize that to good ones have their “guys” who they bring in immediately on a new job. See Parcells, Ryan, etc. for examples. That’s because you need different personnel for a 3-4 than you do for a 4-3. Similarly, you need different linemen for a pro-style offense as opposed to a true spread offense. Different QBs for a running spread team versus a Mike Leach type spread team. The list goes on.

We have a lot of good personnel on the 40 Acres, but there is not a lot of uniformity w/r/t to skill sets as they relate to specific offenses. It’ll be a real test of Harsin’s mettle to see if he can cobble together something close to what he’s used to with what we have on campus. It’ll be a real test of the program’s mettle to see if it can allow Harsin to go after his guys, even if some of those guys are undersized 3 stars rather than road grader 5 stars.

Never in my life have I been so excited about having no idea what our first play from scrimmage will be come September. Although if it’s a bubble screen for -2 yards, I’m jumping the hell off the West Side Upper Deck.