Someway, somehow, Texas football is 4–0.
But that doesn’t mean the team is playing perfect football.
Against the Volunteers, Texas largely struggled in the run game, lacked explosive plays and was weak in pass protection, as senior quarterback Arch Manning was sacked six times.
Texas has yet to play a full four quarters of complementary football. Although the Longhorns have been able to pull off scrappy, messy wins against ranked opponents, their schedule only gets more demanding after this week’s bye.
Texas doesn’t have to be perfect right now, but to get the job done over the next couple months, the team needs to maximize its talent.
And that has been the issue for the Longhorns, mostly the offense. The unit has the weapons — an experienced quarterback and a great playcaller — but has largely failed to successfully build and sustain a rhythm through a game. Simply put, Texas is not playing to its potential nor skill level at the moment.
While head coach Steve Sarkisian said he can’t point to a single cause or position group that is leading to the team’s offensive woes, he has noticed that he feels a different person or position group took turns not doing what the team practiced all week. Sarkisian called this a “simple fix,” getting the group to trust in its training throughout the week. He can do that by showing the athletes film from practice and then comparing it with film from the game when they were in the same situation but failed to execute the play correctly.
“Why are we not taking Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday to Saturday?” Sarkisian said. “It starts there. Let’s at least just do what we practice, and that will start moving the ball forward on a more consistent basis.”
That consistency piece is important, because it’s exponentially harder to move the chains if a negative play happens on first-and-10 or even a short gain, because then the offense can very easily find itself in third-and-long situations, which puts virtually everyone in a tough spot — it’s harder for the offensive line to block pass rushers, the receivers have to deal with a variety of coverage and it puts unnecessary pressure on the quarterback.
While Sarkisian has no plans to simplify the playbook, he does feel like the team needs to be better at doing the simple, fundamental tasks. He said players sometimes feel like they have to make plays, make an impact and do more than what they are asked, calling it “chas(ing) ghosts.”
“I think we need to settle down a little bit as a team, not try so hard and just do the simple,” Sarkisian said. “And if we can do that, that’s not going to make us perfect, but that at least is a starting point to start moving in the right direction.”
One of the biggest, most tangible areas of improvement is penalties. It has been a throughline with this team, especially on the road last season. Texas has mostly cleaned up its pre-snap penalty problem, but against Tennessee, the Longhorns committed 11 penalties for 115 yards, including numerous mistakes like junior edge Colin Simmons’ unsportsmanlike penalty.
While the margin of error has grown a bit because of how good the defense is, if Texas doesn’t at least clean up the penalties and little things over the bye week, those mistakes may eventually catch up to the Longhorns.
