Last regular season game of the year, Brent, can’t hold anything back now. The No. 3 Texas A&M Aggies travel to Austin for the first time since 2010 for the Lone Star Showdown against No. 16 Texas Longhorns. Certainly this is a team everyone is already pretty darn familiar with, but we still wanted to hear how the Texas faithful are feeling heading into this one, so I reached out to Wescott Eberts, Site Manager for Burnt Orange Nation, the Longhorns’ SB Nation team site.
Good Bull Hunting: While Texas still has an outside chance at a Playoff spot, I think it’s fair to say this season hasn’t gone as swimmingly as many in Austin had hoped in the offseason. Based on that, what’s the current pulse of the Longhorn fanbase?
Wescott Eberts: With the much-hyped
transition to the Arch Manning era, there were hopes that Texas could compete for a national championship again this year, if not have a chance to win it, in order to set up a legitimate title shot in 2026 with Manning as a second-year starter. Increasingly frustrated, the fanbase has turned its attention to questions like whether Steve Sarkisian should remain the play caller, whether there needs to be shakeups with the coaching staff, and whether Sarkisian needs to change his philosophy about emphasizing high school recruiting over portal recruiting, especially along the offensive line. Fans are also trying to figure out if there’s any credence to the noise swirling about Sarkisian potentially leaving Texas to return to the NFL, so the vibes really aren’t great around the program at the moment, especially after a third loss to Georgia in the last year. A few months ago, the idea of losing Sarkisian would have set off a meltdown among fans; now I think a reasonably significant part of the fanbase wouldn’t even mind it, which is quite a swing.
GBH: Arch certainly seems to have figured things out over the back half of the season after struggling mightily early on. Is that simply a result of experience, or do you think they’re doing different things schematically that have helped him get comfortable?
WE: Probably both. Arch was clearly uncomfortable and sped up early in the season, which was causing a lot of mechanical breakdowns for him that was impacting his accuracy. When the offensive line was really struggling, he was losing his eye discipline and dropping them to the pass rush because he was under pressure so quickly so frequently. The first schematic change that Sarkisian made after the loss to Florida was to focus more on the quick passing game, significantly reducing Manning’s average depth of target for several games. As Texas improved its perimeter blocking, they were able to get more yards after the catch, then used the threat of those throws to open up downfield opportunities against Arkansas on fake screens, allowing Manning to look like the deep-ball passer everyone thought we’d see more quickly this year. From a personnel standpoint, when Cole Hutson returned from injury, that allowed the staff to move Hutson to the leaky left guard position and keep Connor Robertson at center. Since making that change against Vanderbilt, Manning has had much cleaner pockets, there have been fewer penalties, and the offense overall has been able to stay on schedule more consistently.
GBH: The Texas defense, meanwhile, seems to be headed in the opposite direction. After looking like one of the top units in the country yet again this season early on, the Longhorn defense has given up more than 35 points per game over their past four games, to go along with 325 passing yards per game. Is that just a matter of a rise in competition? Injuries? And how do you see that translating to a game against a lethal A&M receiving corps?
WE: Injuries played a role, especially when the team’s best communicator, safety Michael Taaffe, missed the Mississippi State and Vanderbilt games due to injury. With Taaffe and fellow starting safety Jelani McDonald returning against Georgia, that was supposed to fix the issues with busted assignments on the back end. Instead, the communication has still been lacking with Sarkisian suggesting publicly that Taaffe is making checks, then having his teammates run the coverage that was originally called.
There have been multiple instances of those communication issues coming between Taaffe and senior cornerback Jaylon Guilbeau. Considering that Guilbeau has played more than 1,500 snaps at Texas over four years, that’s extremely frustrating, and it’s caused the staff to rotate more frequently at that position, thrusting more inexperienced players into action with mixed results. With Guilbeau only playing 20 snaps against Arkansas, three other cornerbacks were on the field more frequently than him, including freshman Kade Phillips, who seemed to grow up from play to play.
So expect the former consensus five-star prospect to keep playing ahead of Guilbeau on Friday unless the senior has somehow re-earned the staff’s trust. In either scenario, it’s a scary proposition against an excellent group of Texas A&M wide receivers with the expectation here that the staff will live with some growing pains from Phillips instead of coverage busts by a senior who should know better.
But because the staff doesn’t have a high level of trust in the more inexperienced cornerbacks, Texas has been less aggressive playing press man coverage, opting for softer zones that have afforded opposing quarterbacks a lot of easy completions in the short and intermediate passing games.
GBH: There’s been a ton of outside noise about Sark potentially coaching elsewhere after this season. Do you think that’s been a distraction for this team, or has all of that been effectively shot down?
WE: Sark has certainly gone out of way to try to shut it down, including with his lengthy statement last week on the SEC Weekly Teleconference. I don’t think it’s been a distraction — on the day that the first report came out, Texas pulled off its improbable comeback against Mississippi State in Starkville, which felt more like a gritty win by a flawed team than a group fracturing apart. There have been ugly moments since then, like bad fourth quarters in the win over Vanderbilt and the loss to Georgia, and giving up 512 yards of total offense to Arkansas, but, again, those seem more like built-in flaws than outside noise working its way into the program.
GBH: Thoughts on the game being back on Black Friday? Some will say it should be on Saturday, others on Thanksgiving night. As someone whose formative years of this rivalry were in the late 90s/early 2000s, T+1 just feels right.
WE: It’s hard for me to separate my personal feelings from my professional feelings on that one. As a student at Texas and then early in my writing career, I enjoyed the game on Thanksgiving. Now it’s much less appealing. Sarkisian made the argument that the game deserves to stand alone, and I agree with that, so I don’t like the idea of playing it on Saturday — I agree that it should be played on Friday because it minimizes the downsides of playing it on T-Day or Saturday, and allows the focus of the football world to turn to the Lone Star Showdown, which is as it should be.
GBH: With this game returning to Austin for the first time in 15 years, there will be plenty of Aggies making their first trip to a game at DKR. Any recommendations on gameday must-dos?
WE: I think the first thing to understand is that the gameday environment looks extremely different than it did 15 years ago. With the construction of the Moody Center and other state of Texas projects across MLK from the Stadium, there are many fewer tailgating spots around campus than there used to be. So gameday now revolves around Bevo Blvd. and other attractions around the stadium. For fans who don’t have a connection to the tailgates that still exist, it’s a cool scene around the stadium with plenty of food and alcohol vendors, activities for kids, and Longhorn City Limits on LBJ Lawn for music fans. Entrances by Bevo and then the players provide the type of pageantry outside the stadium that didn’t exist at Texas previously and are worth experiencing. Here’s the tailgating map so fans can orient themselves before heading out to the game and the gameday guide isn’t out yet, but should be on Wednesday or Thursday. This is the guide from the Arkansas game.
With the game kicking off in the evening, there’s plenty of time to spend around the city of Austin, and we’ve put together some recommendations for that. Personally, for someone who wants barbecue, I’m a fan of Stiles Switch on Lamar because the lines shouldn’t be too long and it’s reasonably close to the stadium. I’m also a fan of the gameday experience at Scholz Garten within walking distance to the stadium.
GBH: Alright, let me know how you see this one playing out, and give me a Lone Star Showdown score prediction.
WE: Although Sarkisian and Taaffe have expressed confidence in getting the communication issues resolved, if it was truly easy, it would have happened during the bye week instead of bleeding into two games of poor pass defense. So I think it would be surprising to see A&M have difficulty producing a big day passing for Marcel Reed and his wide receivers. Since Anthony Hill Jr. may not play and Ty’Anthony Smith will be out for the first half, Texas could also be susceptible to the running game.
Throw those two factors together and Texas could have to play from behind early, a situation that would make the Longhorns offense even more one-dimensional than it is normally, which could allow the defensive front for the Aggies to put more pressure on Manning than he’s seen in recent games.
That’s assuming that A&M plays better than it did against South Carolina in the first half, but that feels like a pretty easy assumption, so I’ll go with Bill Connelly’s SP+ prediction of the Aggies covering the spread in a 30-25 win.
