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The zone read against Nebraska

Posted by HenryJames on October 29th, 2007 under Football

The zone read saved our ass on Saturday, and the coaches are attempting to take credit for something that was dumb luck.

First, how many times are we going to hear the coaches mention that they weren’t prepared for the other team blitzing? At some point the coaches are going to have to expect teams to blitz us. How many times can you be surprised by it?

After Arkansas St: “They were blitzing a whole lot and taking a bunch of chances. The thing you have in a game like this, just like App State, they’ve got nothing to lose. They can blitz every play, and if they get beat by 50 or seven, it’s all the same. They’re coming in with everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

After TCU: “…and they were blitzing a whole lot like Arkansas State, so it surprised us quite a bit. They blitzed Baylor quite a bit, but they blitzed us even more tonight.”

After Rice: “Rice blitzed a lot again tonight. They came a lot so we didn’t even get the ball deep because we are conscious of that.”

After Nebraska: “We did not expect them to blitz every play. To their credit we did think they had enough trouble against the run that they would change something. We thought we would have to makes some adjustments during the game, we didn’t think it would be every play. That was just unbelievable. I have never seen anybody change that drastically from one week to the next.”

Nebraska blitzed every play because we never punished them for it. No running back screens, no vertical routes to Finley. Instead it was a steady diet of our usual outs and slants with the occasional fade route called for one of our possession guys.

Now Greg Davis talked about the halftime adjustments he made. “We had to make major adjustments at halftime” and “We went in at halftime and made some adjustments, and we talked about being able to run the ball.”

So they came out of the locker room and ran 9 running plays out of either the I or offset I for a total of 21 yards. That was the adjustment in the running game. The Nebraska corners even started blitzing. It was so bad that even the ABC announcers were surprised and began talking about Texas’ lack of motion and pre-snap shifts to try and slow the blitz.

Then McCoy gets hurt, and Chiles has to come in for a play. Because about the only play Chiles is allowed to run is the zone read, that’s the play he ran. Charles picks up 25 yards. Eureka!

Brown says they came in planning to run the zone read, and they did on the second play of the game. Nebraska blitzed, and the linebacker managed to grab a hold of Charles stop him for a 4 yard gain. If he hadn’t, Charles would have been one on one with the safety in the open field. You’d think our coaches would have picked up on that. Instead we have to wait until our starting quarterback gets knocked out with 13:00 left in the 4th quarter to run it again.

Now had McCoy not gotten hurt, I have no doubt in my mind that we would have continued to bang our head into the wall for the rest of the game. And we would have lost.

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12 Responses

  1. tropheus said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    I was only half watching the game because I was so disgusted, but after the 86 yarder, I turned to the person I was watching with and said, we got lucky. The zone read to Charles with Chiles in, then the keeper on the zone read by McCoy followed by the Charles touchdown turned the game and how it took 3+ quarters to figure out how to beat such a shitty defense is beyond my comprehension. Must have been something on tape…

  2. tropheus said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

    and that is meant as no disrespect to Charles as he is the ONLY reason we won. \m/

  3. echeese said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 1:20 pm

    You would think that a coach wouldn’t tout halftime adjustments which were dismal failures.

    You would think.

  4. jimmyjazz said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    Caught in my own web of deceipt . . . that was my post, not echeese’s. (No, I’m not the echeese impostor, with the execption of a post or two.)

  5. jimmyjazz said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

    who are you, I’m the real jimmyjazz?

  6. McLovin said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    Davis actually said in public Nebraska only blitzed 19% of the time prior to Saturday.

    His and Mack’s love for stupid little data points like this and their complete inability for independent thought has just about driven me over the proverbial edge.

  7. RomaVicta said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 1:47 pm

    This reminds of a New Mexico State Game five or six years ago when Davis explained a play failure by saying the NMSU defender had “lined up in the wrong place.” Not the wrong place in NMSU’s scheme, but the wrong place according to our prediction of where they would line up.

    Sometimes I get the feeling that the coaches have this idea of “playing fair” where you do exactly what you always do or you are cheating.

    As far as NU’s blitzing Saturday, I heard Mack talking about it, and I wondered why we didn’t adjust earlier. Did we think they were limited to blitzing only 19% of the time so they would have to quit doing it once they reached their quota?

  8. Woody Bombay said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    My father had an interesting theory UT’s offensive game plan and Nebraska’s blitz:

    “Mack Brown is trying to get that quarterback killed.”

    What the fuck did Colt ever do to Mack?

  9. MilkmanDan said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 3:41 pm

    “Mack Brown is trying to get that quarterback killed.”

    That was our takeaway from A&M’s Nebraska gameplan.

  10. ATX HornsFan said:

    October 29th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

    The upside of the zone read with Colt is that we don’t put Chiles in and split Colt out to block. I pity Colt McCoy. He should just ignore GDGD.

  11. BrickHorn said:

    October 30th, 2007 at 6:27 am

    “I pity Colt McCoy. He should just ignore GDGD.”

    That was the strategy of Mack’s two most successful quarterbacks.

  12. Uncle Rico said:

    October 30th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    I truly feel sorry for Colt.

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