AUSTIN, Texas — Mama, there it goes through those hands.
Texas Longhorns junior wide receiver Ryan Wingo spent the offseason working on improving his pass-catching ability after dropping seven passes in 2025.
After some signs of hard-fought redemption in the season opening win over Texas State, Wingo regressed against Ohio State, stymying an early chance at forging some momentum in the second quarter when he dropped a would-be, 30-yard touchdown catch as head coach Steve Sarkisian dialed up a nice
concept from the green zone.
The play worked as designed and quarterback Arch Manning delivered an accurate pass to Wingo despite having to reset his feet, but the ball went right through Wingo’s hands.
“We worked really hard with Ryan and a lot of our receivers of, when we catch the football, we catch the football in front of our eyes, and we don’t let the ball pass our eyes, and in that instance, the ball passed his eyes. That’s a much tougher catch to make,” Sarkisian said on Thursday.
“That wasn’t the reason that Sark recruited me,” Wingo said of his drops after the season opener. “It wasn’t the reason that C Jack [Chris Jackson] recruited me here. I felt like I was doing them a disservice.“
But it’s still a problem that Wingo hasn’t fixed.
Despite the lack of execution, the concept is one that Sarkisian will likely return to at some point this season and a prime example of how the Texas head coach takes a popular concept, in this case the “shallow sting” adopted from Lincoln Riley’s offense, then adds his own take on it.
The two most important actions are the post route from the boundary to clear the deep safety on that hash and create the room for the primary target — in this case, it’s Wingo operating from a tight split to the field running a crossing route that turns up the seam once he hits his landmark at the hash marks.
Sarkisian refined the concept by employing play action while operating from a two-back set that draws the attention of the linebackers and the hole player in the inverted Tampa 2 favored by Ohio State defensive coordinator Matt Patricia, his own take on the three-safety flyover defense popularized by Iowa State.
The motion man is fifth-year running back Raleek Brown across the formation and then in orbit motion to the field to create extra misdirection on top of the play-action fake by Manning. Brown is a check down for Manning, who also has senior running back Hollywood Brown on a check release to ensure a clean pocket. The run fake is further improved by the Power bluff with junior right guard Brandon Baker pulling to pick up any blitzers trying to impact Manning’s delivery.
Some versions of the concept use the Y tight end running a route up the middle, but because it’s a long-developing play, Sarkisian kept senior Spencer Shannon in the backfield to provide extra blocking and take advantage of his best skill instead of asking him to be a pass threat.
So while the drop by Wingo is a disappointing continuation of that trend, how Sarkisian tweaked the concept and chose the right time to call it gives some real insight into why the Longhorns head coach is so respected by his peers — Roadrunners head coach Jeff Traylor said this week that Sarkisian is one of 25 coaches whose touchdowns he watches every week.
“I think all of us that coach offense — and I spend most of my time on the offensive side of the ball — we all have a little bit of Sark’s offense in our offense,” Traylor told Horns247. “We we all copy Sark. I mean, Sark does a wonderful job of disguising his stuff, his play-action pass, his sell cuts, his post game, his RPO game, his screen game, his protections. Sark is on another level for play calling.”
