AUSTIN, Texas — On Tuesday evening, the Texas Longhorns mark an important milestone in preseason camp — practice in full pads for the first time.
After Monday morning’s practice, the fifth of camp and the final practice in half shells, head coach Steve Sarkisian met with the media and commended his team’s physicality, a necessity to survive a nine-game conference schedule and an early-season tilt against preseason No. 1 Ohio State.
“I think I think one thing that this camp has been it’s been very physical,
and I give our give our players a lot of credit on both sides of the ball for playing with a level of physicality that’s needed for us to be the type of team that we want to become,” Sarkisian said. “When I think about the style of play in which we want to play the game — and that we have to recreate it every year — it just doesn’t happen.”
Recreating that style of play requires Texas players to take pride in playing fast by understanding their assignments, combined with the mental and physical toughness honed long preseason practices in the heat that are operated with at pace.
Through five of those practices, the Horns have installed the base offense on first and second downs and have begun to work on situational football, starting with third downs and high red zone before moving on to low red zone, goal line, and two-minute situations starting on Tuesday.
The offense and defense have both had their highlights.
“I want to commend our team. I think they’re working extremely hard. As I said, this has been a very physical camp,” Sarkisian said. “There’s been moments of one side of the ball doing really good things, then the other side of the ball doing really good things. I talked about that today about the start of practice, team run, the offense was really physical, ran the ball well. By the time we got to team, the defense really started to take over, and so the balance of our roster, the competitive nature of our practices is showing up, and that’s a good thing for us.”
For the coaching staff, the challenge is in balancing the spacing of practices with the amount of contact involved in those practices.
“I can’t just keep banging on them, banging on them, banging on them,” Sarkisian said.
But the Texas head coach does have to figure out what type of team he has, and he’s been impressed with the demeanor of his offensive line.
“I think our offensive line is playing a really physical brand of football right now, and I think that’s a byproduct of some experience with like Connor [Robertson], with Trevor [Goosby], with Brandon [Baker], guys who have been in the system,” Sarkisian said. “I think Melvin Siani’s playing really physical, and he’s going for it.”
The mentality has extended to the skill position players, with Sarkisian citing the physical running style of freshman back Derrek Cooper and the blocking of wide receivers Emmett Mosley and Ryan Wingo.
It’s a consistent enough trait across the roster that Sarkisian said the players who aren’t bringing that mindset are the outliers.
“The guys that weren’t as physical as they need to be, they’re standing out more so than the guys that are being physical because there’s so many more guys being physical that the guys that aren’t,” Sarkisian said. “It’s like, ‘That ain’t it, that’s not what we’re looking for,‘ and and now we’re bringing more and more guys over to this physical category, which is a good thing.”
On Monday, the team run period featured 16 consecutive runs against a defense that emphasizes “No Thud, No Play” under new defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, introducing a hard-nosed edges that represents a physical challenge for the running backs when they have the ball, and when they don’t in trying to pick up blitzes in pass protection.
Especially for the offensive line, the physical mindset will have to continue as the Horns put on full pads on Tuesday and go through the first scrimmage of preseason camp on Saturday. For now, the tasks of improving the running game and the ability to stop the run are trending in a positive direction.
“I think the level physicality they’re playing at is probably the most encouraging thing for me,” Sarkisian said.
