Texas Longhorns spring game: “Pride” and “Tradition” v. football
Last night I watched some of the Texas Longhorns’ spring game on the Fox College Sports channel. It wasn’t uplifting. Longhorns run a variation of that awful West Virginia offense which is basically little more than pickup basketball with a little bit of blocking and tackling thrown in for the heck of it. Almost every play the Longhorns ran looked the same: Three wide receivers, one tight end, shotgun and a runningback, with the quarterback showing a handoff - fake or actual - to the runningback before running in the other direction.
I saw two different reverses. On one the quarterback lateraled the ball to a slot receiver who took it around the corner and almost scored a touchdown thanks to great blocking downfield by a wide receiver. The other was a hilariously stupid play where the quarterback handed off to the runningback before rolling right, the runningback then lateraled it to the slot receiver who was promptly slammed to the ground by the left defensive end who had - as one could have foreseen - been led to the point of attack by the quarterback rolling out (since the fake hand-off rollout is standard fare in the West Virginia offense defensive ends tend to guard against the quarterback roll).
I assume the execution will get a lot better as the season rolls around and progresses, but fundamentally the Longhorns’ offense strikes me as laziness that will be camouflaged by athletic superiority ten times. Ten times. Not eleven, not twelve, not thirteen and sure as heck not fourteen times. Ten.
The player who impressed me the most was a kid named Kirkendoll, a sophomore wide receiver who caught an ill-advised pass on a third down and long situation. The right guard on first-string quarterback Colt McCoy’s squad showed good mobility, power and balance on one of the running plays (I don’t remember whether McCoy played for “Pride” or “Tradition”, as the Longhorns spring-game squads are known).
To me organized sports should be about practice and preparation augmenting talent, but the West Virginia offense and its off shoots are more or less just displays of talent. Read one guy and run. That’s pretty much it. Not terribly impressive, but perhaps all that can be handled in today’s Division-1 football with its draconian restrictions on scholarships and practice time.
