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Fall practice starts this weekend in a make-or-break year for the Texas Longhorns. By late November we will know whether Texas is headed back to square one or if the Charlie Strong hire was a success. Or something like that.
Hype is a preseason tradition, and the least-honest of the storylines to excite fans is that this season is do or die. For Texas, however, there exists a number of wins — maybe seven, probably eight — at which Strong would secure another year without signaling beyond a doubt that Texas is on the upswing. Getting that straight is the first key in this season preview.
The second key is that we shouldn’t use Strong’s personal success or failure to gauge the status of the rebuild of the Texas football program. The days of "[Head coach's name] Texas Football" are over. Whatever happens on the field this season, the coaches who turn on the lights in the football offices in 2017 will be looking at a very different program from the one Strong inherited in the spring of 2014.
Experience matters, and the 2017 Longhorns should have nearly as many career starts under their belts as anyone. When at least 12 and as many as 17 of your starters from the previous season won’t even be eligible to enter the NFL draft — players need to be three years removed from high school to clear that low bar — that tends to happen.
And though the sample size is small, early returns suggest those returning starters could be pretty good. To state the obvious, Texas players are all studs on paper, and a returning starter, almost by definition, was the best available player at his position the previous year.
Texas also had three players make freshman All-American lists last year. Two made the Football Writers Association of America list, more than the Longhorns have had in a single year since 2001 — and that’s only if you count kickers. Just looking at the FWAA Freshman All-American list over the years is instructive: Texas had a player make the list every year from 2001 to 2006, and then once more in 2008. After that, there was one freshman All-American in 2011, and then no more until 2015. Success is a lagging indicator here, but good young players turn into great older players, and great older players win more football games.
The biggest holes Strong needed to fill when he got to Austin were at quarterback and offensive line. It’s taken longer than it should have to seriously address the quarterback position; targeting two projects -- now Michigan tight end Zach Gentry and eventual wide receiver or transfer Kai Locksley -- was the wrong approach. But at least one of Shane Buechele and Sam Ehlinger should pan out. Both are already better passers than anyone else on campus.
The situation on the offensive line was somehow even worse. Experience was the only thing the 2014 unit lacked more than talent. Some bad players transferred, other bad players stayed, and the only guy with any experience broke his ankle so badly in the season opener that he quit football. (To borrow a great line from a Washington Redskins fan, the offensive line was just Kent Perkins and four cardboard cutouts of fat people.) The typical starting line consisted of, from left to right: a 278-pound converted defensive tackle, a 320-pounder with one career start and few assets aside from taking a while to run around, a fourth-year player with zero career starts, Perkins, and a tall guy nicknamed “No Contact At All.â€
The offensive line in 2017, by contrast, will include a couple of former freshman All-Americans entering their third year, the top guard in the nation from 2016 according to ESPN, and plenty of blue-chip and ESPN 300 recruits. A healthy 2016 season would mean that 2017 Texas has at least 58 returning career starts between Connor Williams, Patrick Vahe and Zach Shackelford. That number could climb above 70 if one of the freshmen — Patrick Hudson or Denzel Okafor, most likely — wins a starting job during fall practice. That’s 68 more career starts than the offensive line had in Strong’s first year at Texas; in fact, the 2014 offensive line hadn’t even come close to seeing the field in 68 total games.
If Strong doesn’t meet expectations and is gone this December, there will be claims that Texas is starting over. They’ll be wrong. The new coach will likely have his quarterback and a young but experienced offensive line. In the backfield he’ll have human buffalo Chris Warren. John Harris, a player who hid so well on the roster for four years that it’s little wonder secondaries lost track of him when he finally saw the field in 2014, will have been upgraded to John Burt, who competed in the 100m hurdles at the NCAA Championships and led Texas in receiving yards as a freshman. The defensive line is an unknown, but the linebacking corps is so talented that a few players may just crawl out from Malik Jefferson’s shadow. And the secondary will be the first in a while to deserve the DBU moniker.
Strong himself said Friday, “Physically, we’re going to look as good as anybody. When we walk out there [for fall practice], we’re going to be a good-looking team.†He also said the team has a three-deep, with some bodies to spare, for the first time. And reports by Texas paysites have indicated that this was the first offseason under Strong in which the team didn’t struggle to meet expectations for conditioning — and neither the conditioning coach nor the standards have changed. Rival fans have commented in recent years that, on the field, Texas just doesn’t look like Texas anymore. That is about to change.
Yes, if Strong fails, the athletic director — whoever that’s going to be — will need to hire a competent replacement. But with the roster and locker room the coaches are building right now, the task of getting back on top will be a lot easier than it was a short time ago. This might be a make-or-break season for Strong, but it isn’t for Texas.
