Texas Bowl

[CharleyHorse46]

All the sports talk radio guys like to talk about coaches creating a culture.  It's good, they say, to have a tough, no-nonsense coach who won't tolerate slackers.

Sounds great until you see two HCs run off all of the OL depth twice in four years.

What good is creating a culture if you're not even going to be here in a few years and some other genius is going to come in and do the same thing all over again?

If you need bodies on the OL, don't run them off.  Or if you're bound and determined to run them off, don't whine about a lack of depth afterwards.

A good coach ought to be able to get the best out of anybody they get and nobody should ever excuse their inability to do so by saying they don't have their players yet.

Let's say you buy your teenaged son a ten year old Chevy.  Do you want him to be grateful he has it, take responsibility for it and take good care of it?

Or do you want him to treat it like crap and say, "This ain't my car.  Wait til I get my car.  My car will be a new Honda Accord."

I'd kick the little brat's butt.

You have to play the hand you're dealt in life.  Football coaches are paid millions of dollars to make the best of what they've got.  Any coach who thinks he's too good to coach the last coach's players should never coach again. 

[Mr Tulip]

Well, yeah. But what if the previous coach looked at me, graduating from high school (for reference I was 5' 10" and weighed 135 lbs) and said, "That frame has potential! He gets one of our OL scholarships!).

It turns out despite being outrageously light, I'm also gravity bound and slow. No amount of footwork, film study, weight training, or motivation is going to keep me from getting blasted into the backfield the moment the football twitches.

Obviously, that's reduction to the absurd, but it emphasizes that some guys are just misses. It's tough to project powerful, fluid, flexible collegians from large high schoolers. Texas has an OL who's 6' 10". Guess what? He plays high. Getting underneath him just topples him over. He isn't fast enough to get out of that huge stance and into pass protection. He wasn't that big when we started, but now, no matter how much film he studies, he's gonna get blown by.

I believe that, right now, Texas does have sufficient raw material. Not in abundance, not dominant, but sufficient. They have to heal, improve both strength and recognition, and get enough reps together without replacing injured/failed members to be cohesive.