Mack Brown on keeping intensity, injury updates, kicking game and more.

With a little more than two weeks until Texas football takes the field, people want to know how this team is going to be better than the previous three years. Earlier this week, Major Applewhite said the Longhorns still have a ways to go to be ready for the season. Mack Brown reiterated those remarks Thursday, adding the team's intensity needs to be consistent every day leading up to the 2013 season.

"I thought yesterday afternoon's practice tailed off a little bit. This team is a team that needs intensity every practice. They were challenged with that last night and they get it. They're doing everything that we want them to do. Yesterday, I thought just at the end, a little bit, it dropped off.

"We're still not good enough to play without full intensity. This needs to be a tough team and an intense team. The only way you do that is you do it every day."

Brown said he had to do a lot of self-evaluating in 2010, when the Longhorns went 5-7 and did not make a bowl game.

"We were at a tough spot at 5-7. When you're there you have to have some really hard self-evaluations of you, your program, your players and I did a lot of that myself. I trusted friends to be very critical as well.

"We put things in place that takes some time. We were ahead defensively two years ago, we were ahead offensively last year of where we were in that 5-7 season. And we have made progress each year."

Outside of the last three seasons, Mack Brown has coached a number of elite, BCS caliber teams. When asked if there was something about the preseason practices that lead him to believe he was going to be coaching a special football team, Mack said he knew most years, except for one.

"The one that we couldn't tell was '08. In '08 there were expectations where a lot of people thought we would win six or seven games. We had two freshmen starting in the secondary, with Earl Thomas and Blake Gideon, and we were playing a lot of throwing teams to start with so that team really developed and turned out to be a great football team. They were three seconds away from probably playing for a conference championship for sure, maybe a national championship. But the rest of (the elite teams), you saw leadership, you saw maturity, you saw some depth and all of that is here now."