1) Winning only cures everything if...
I promise I’m not an outfielder lifting my hand to shade sunshine screaming through the clouds only to remove it at the last second and allow a baseball to plunk your unsuspecting head. But let’s keep it real about the Longhorns.
UT’s win at then No. 6 Oklahoma State was a big deal even if its athletics director couldn’t bring himself to tweet about it until his weekly column days later. If Chris Del Conte wears an Apple Watch, the ‘Breathe’ app notification probably comes up anytime his football coach is mentioned. Awkward. Anyway, the Longhorns recorded their first top 10 road victory since 2010 when they beat No. 5 Nebraska, 20-13.
That was so long ago Nebraska was still in the Big 12; its head coach Bo Pelini still had 42 wins remaining before he was fired, and Mack Brown 26 before his departure; Urban Meyer hadn’t left Florida until a few months later; and Justin Tucker didn’t crush the souls of every Aggie in the world with his kick until a year later. That’s like a century in internet years.
Did the win have a bunch of fluke-like elements? Oh, absolutely. We’ll get to that soon. You’re kidding yourself if you disagree. Most importantly, especially for Tom Herman, it was a win. Head coaches and football programs are judged on winning above everything else and nothing else is that close. Surely, you watched the explosion of emotion and elation from the Texas sideline when Joseph Ossai concluded his all-time great performance with a walk-off sack. Coaches embraced. Players celebrated with each other and Texas fans who made the trip. In the locker room later, a head coach crowd-surfed.
That stuff matters, especially for a team that’s gone through the roller coaster Texas has, and probably more than you think. For Texas, it was one of the most organically awesome, cool moments the football program has enjoyed in a long time.
Here’s the thing about the “winning cures all” mantra: it does cure all, but only if the ‘all’ includes recruiting. I admit there’s a bit of a Michael Scott twang accompanying that sentence. Because even if there’s a chicken-and-egg element – I don’t think there is, but I understand if some do - to winning and recruiting, you can’t do one without the other; okay, you can’t sustain one without the other because we do often see examples of one or two-year wonders in the win-loss column and a few years of recruiting success, especially if, well, not everyone recruits on the same playing field with the same methods.
Back in early May, I drank entirely too much coffee and spent an unusually high amount of time with a calculator and recruiting lists; it’s what I imagine being a scientist or world-class chef is like because the answers I seek questions to are far less important or delicious. But I wondered what the correlation looked like between the recruiting results of the last four classes, including 2020, and success.
I’m not going to go over in detail that gigantic project slammed with an endless amount of relevant data. Rather, I just want to remind you of its conclusion and what I believe is a perfect illustration of college football’s concentration of elite talent with a handful of schools consistently competing for championships while everyone else is at least a tier below:
(By the way, I just realized I used a photo of Joseph Ossai versus West Virginia as the main photo for that column. So, I suppose the football gods are telling me something. Or not.)
“In an very informal way that seemed to make sense after working it through some, I created a quick way to tally the scores to represent the true top recruiting programs; again, emphasis on “informal,” but I did want to try to assign a total score while also giving different values for different prospects. So, five-star prospects get five points, 6.0 prospects four points, 5.9 prospects three points, and 5.8 prospects two points. The results for all the programs 20 points or above:
Alabama – 271 points
Georgia – 232 points
Ohio State – 200 points
LSU – 162 points
Clemson – 160 points
Oklahoma – 145 points
USC – 139 points
Texas A&M – 138 points
Michigan – 127 points
Texas – 124 points (129 counting Bru McCoy)
Penn State – 124 points
FSU – 120 points
Florida – 120 points (125 counting Chris Steele)
Auburn – 117 points
Oregon – 116 points
Notre Dame – 107 points
Miami – 104 points
Tennessee – 100 points
Washington – 87 points
Nebraska – 77 points
Stanford – 73 points
South Carolina – 70 points
UCLA – 46 points
Ole Miss – 46 points
Mississippi State – 46 points
North Carolina – 46 points
Virginia Tech – 44 points
Arkansas – 40 points
Maryland – 39 points
Wisconsin – 39 points
Arizona State – 37 points
TCU – 34 points
Michigan State – 31 points
Kentucky – 31 points
Utah – 29 points Iowa – 21 points
Illinois – 20 points Oklahoma State – 20 points
PPPS (Points Per Prospect Signed tally for 70+ points schools)
Alabama – 2.68 ppps
Georgia – 2.30 ppps
Ohio State – 2.25 ppps
Clemson – 1.95 ppps
USC – 1.72 ppps
LSU – 1.71 ppps
Oklahoma – 1.48 ppps
Texas – 1.36 ppps
Texas A&M – 1.33 ppps
Florida – 1.33 ppps
FSU – 1.32 ppps
Penn State – 1.32 ppps
Michigan – 1.30 ppps
Auburn – 1.27 ppps
Notre Dame – 1.23 ppps
Oregon – 1.20 ppps
Miami – 1.20 ppps
Washington – 1.05 ppps
Tennessee – 1.03 ppps
Stanford – 1.03 ppps
Nebraska – 0.79 ppps
South Carolina – 0.76 ppps
As present in other breakdowns, the tiers of programs are obvious. Right now, it’s Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ohio State and the rest with LSU soon joining that top tier, and USC showing its access to elite talent can even withstand a disastrous 2020 signing class. Plus, the ppps might sum up Oklahoma perfectly – good enough to make the playoff, but talented enough to compete with the truly elite teams winning titles."
This is what Texas is chasing, and it’s not going to be fixed by a single road win as impressive as the road win was. It needs to be fixed by sustained winning accompanied by sustained, elite recruiting. The gap between the programs signing class after class stocked with elite talent and the rest of the pack is widening, and more concentrated than I can ever recall; college football is beginning to resemble the NBA because only a small group of teams with a significant amount of the top talent can compete for championships.. Until the Longhorns recruit at that level or close to it, they can hope for more of these wins, but they’ll only truly matter if the big-time prospects follow.
2) The way Texas defensive backs play the pass drives me nuts…
We’ve seen enough football now to shift a lot – and probably a vast majority – of the frustratingly problematic one-on-one pass coverage to the technique taught.
I simply don’t understand why we continue to see plays like the one above when talented, athletic, fast corners are so often grabbing, holding, chasing players, and completely failing to turn around and play the football, which often results in at least a couple penalties every single week...
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