jones Top Ten - Week One 2011 - Labor Day Edition

Look forward to this every week. Happy Labor Day!

Can’t quibble much. Has anyone identified the source of Miles’ voodoo?

It’s the hat.

Boise State was even without the services of two starters and a reserve from the Netherlands because, well, I don’t know, the NCAA hates the Dutch?

Don’t get them started on the Belgians. Mark Emmert sits in his office just hating on Tintin.

Kern Tips! Wow what a blast from the past. He was the most colorful play-by-play broadcaster in the history of the great game. He was great on the Humble Oil SWC radio Broadcasts. TV seem to limit his creativity. The reality was much less colorful than his imagery.. I can still remember phrases that I heard as a kid. “He ran into a barbed wire fence at theTexas 23 on that carry..”

That imagery fired my imagination and love for the game of football long before I saw my first game.

It was great meeting the BC and ’Cosm guys at the tailgate. Did you float the keg by the time it was over? I got a reallly good tip on a play to watch for during the game. Sure enough, the Horns ran it.

You guys were on top of the rift with OU.

Great stuff guys.

Thanks for the post. Good stuff. Sorry to hear about LRS. Been a tough summer for Sooner Nation. Peace and grace to the family indeed.

I’m very interested to hear about this weekend. The OU stuff was like WTF? All the games. Did UT play? I am desperate to hear if that is what the coaches expected and if we were holding anything back etc.

I posted this on the Rice thread, but if you are desperate for bad second hand info:

I went to a friend’s in law’s house to watch Bevo D 2 taped. Looked much better than I thought. All professional and crap. Thoughts:

We did not look good. There were times when we weren’t terrible, but I was hoping for a lot of good with some bonehead, and I got a lot of blah. We were soft up the middle, left receivers open (they dropped as many balls as we did) and I was excited for LB play that was at best forgettable, and at worst actively taking steps away from their assignment (causing me to WTF several times during replays). LB is the group I am most frustrated with.

On offense Gilbert was hot and cold. There were lots of drops by the receivers and Rice got in the backfield early and often. A couple of times GG actually had PTSD from last year and tried to outrun a defender backwards and tossed the ball randomly backwards in hopes someone else would step up. Lots of balls were too hard or too low and a couple wide open receivers were overthrown. Later on he looked better, throwing some nice long balls and hitting some open guys.

The running game was persistent. This is the area in which I saw the most improvement. Even when it didn’t work, we kept at it. It often got 2-4 yards, and a couple of times it got more.

Receivers dropped several balls, but I hope it was just young hands. If they could start making some plays for GG, I bet GG starts to look a lot better. They have a lot of talent, and I could see them growing in leaps and bounds later.

The Oline was there. They made lots of mistakes, but also got lots of push. I could see them growing up some in the game, and I hope they keep improving. They may end up a strength, but if Rice gave us that much trouble, I’m worried when we face better competition.

I am worried about every game from here on out.

Now that I got that out of the way, I can see cause for optimism. GG didn’t thrown an interception. The running game was close to breaking a long one and could be dominant sooner rather than later. The deep ball was on all night, guys were open short, middle as well. The D didn’t give up a lot of points and did a good job of getting Rice in a bad spot and then getting off the field. The back four tackled better than I expected and stayed close enough that Rice didn’t keep trying to attack them.

I think this team has the ability to get a lot better every week, and we could win all of our games. But I’m glad BYU and UCLA looked bad, and that we aren’t playing ATM until the end of the year. We should be an underdog to Baylor, OSU, ATM, OU and Tech, Mizzou, BYU, UCLA are true tossups from what I watched of those games.

I failed to mention how fun it was watching our O attack in a myriad of different ways as a lot of things failed to work early. I hope the D can match that when things aren’t going for them.

I welcome dissent, and I hope we improve so much through the year that I look back at this and laugh at my lack of faith. It will be a fun season to watch.

hook’em

“The Selmon brothers” sounded like a group come down from the hills not to be messed with. Sorry they’re a brother short now. Nobody will forget that name and that player who went to Texas-OU games back in the day. RIP

1. Besides the comments from the OU president, what else is being said about all of that?

2. This game was just the first step, boys. First time either side of the ball really got to implement new schemes against real opposition. The guys around here have been saying for months that this season will be a process. I mean, we played, what, 18 freshman? Let’s all back away from the ledge for the first few games. If there is no improvement within the next month, then we can go back to screaming about the sky falling.

Sorry to derail this thread (loves these by jonestopten), but will there be a Good, Bad and Ugly? Doesn’t seem like I’ve seen Eyes on here in a long time.

Fortunately, I found a bar in Addison with the game and a seat at the bar next to another Texas Ex who shared same interests like the longhorns, motorcycles and we both were lawyers (though I quit that some time ago).

I still have reservations about the QB situation though there was some improvement. Can you coach him out of throwing the ball low on the shorter routes? We can’t expect YACs that way and some receiver could get hurt. I wish he could see the field better.

Are we going to see some changes in the defense next week? Some of the subs looked like they should be playing. Expected strong areas looked weak. Expected weak areas looked stronger than expected. I liked that they did bend but not break.

I loved the innovation of the offense. It was like rain on parched earth. More Ash and wild(???). We have a lot to work on but we have the coaching staff to do it. We seem to have an excellent bunch of young talent. Too bad we don’t have a lot more old talent to go with it.

Apparently there is some pent up demand for Longhorn analysis. I surrender!

You did well Jones. I think Longhorn fans are thinking about survival, not taking a loss and still making the MNC. I thought what you sai was spot on, and had nothing to add. I’m looking forward to your next writeup.

I’ll bite. First off, how good Texas is now is largely irrelevant. Second, I didn’t actually watch them play. I listened to them (which was cool, everyone should just listen to a football game every now and then). I also went through the stat sheet and drive charts and whatever commentary was out there. The best commentary on Texas, of course, comes from here and from BON (Peter Bean was up early, kudos to him).

I did watch a lot of football not involving Texas.

Today, Texas would get beat by more than one touchdown by LSU or Oregon, by Wisconsin, Mississippi State, Boise State. Texas A&M (sorry) and most likely Oklahoma/Alabama/Florida State, but I didn’t see enough of any of those three to express a decent opinion.

Texas would give plenty of fight to Georgia, USC, West Virginia, Michigan State and either South Florida or Notre Dame…and, imo, Ohio State. None of these games would necessarily get away from us. But we might not win any of them.

I do not want to see us play Stanford.

But Oklahoma State? Maybe.

I am not real thrilled about our match-up with Baylor…but we don’t play them tomorrow.

I think that’s about where we are. We have better talent and better upside than most. We should enjoy it.

What matters? BYU

Can we beat BYU on Saturday? Yes.

Easily? No.

Call it Texas minus 3.5.

It’s Texas -6.5 officially.

Good right up. Poignant rememberance of the Selman’s. The downside of football is that the heroe’s die to young and often suffer the rest of their days as a result of the hits they take on the field. On the A&M front, we had a lot of 1st half issues stopping the run, and they made it uncomfortable when it got to 20-14, but then the tide turned and the 2nd half was a much better effort from the D. The offense looked good from the 1st quarter – the 3 short fields only let us have about 3 minutes of possession time in the 1st quarter. Demontre Moore had to sit this game out due to his summer extra curricular activities, and Michael Lamothe suffered a concussion. We don’t play next week and have a bye vs Idaho the week after that. Several blown coverages by the secondary. The icicing on the cake was Colin Blake’s committment today. Devante Bourque attended the game but I don’t really think he’ll switch back to us at this point.

As for Texas, I don’t think you take the 1st game and extrapolate too far. You’ll definitely be better than last year, but you’re not world beaters yet so any decent team can give you a game. BYU doesn’t seem to have any big play makers, but they’re fundamentally sound. You should beat them and I heard the line was up to about 6.

I’ve rarely seen a game delayed due to weather, but this weekend it happened 3 times. I think tonight game of Maryland vs. Miami should the dubbed the Leach bowl – as each team could have/ should have hired him but chose a more conservative route.

This might be a stupid question, but jones do you write anywhere else?

For the first time, this Saturday I wondered if Boise State is on it’s way to being the modern day FSU. Obviously ID isn’t FL from a home-state talent perspective, but if Peterson stays they have a chance.

Where in Addison was the LHN being shown?

RE: South Carolina

Told ya’ so.

If you didn’t watch OU, you can catch the highlights here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYmrFdWcW4I

Guy does a pretty professional job, and he catches most of the big plays you need to see. Worth mentioning also is that free safety is a complete fucking void. About a third of Tulsa’s total yards came in three plays where this same guy blew his coverage and got roasted accordingly.

Not sure you told me anything about South Carolina, other than that Garcia is a head case, which is true. But they are not asking him to be Secretary of State. When he was in, the Gamecocks scored at will (yes, yes, against ECU…). We shall see.

Thanks for the link. Nice to see OU. A few weapons on that team (sigh).

You knew going in your safeties would be interesting.

awesome for UT site to honor Selmon and his contributions. appreciated.