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Mack Brown’s Press Conference

Posted by Scipio Tex on August 8th, 2009 under Football

Here’s a transcript.
Video link is there as well.

I missed the first part, but here’s a quick summary (more down at the bottom after being able to rewatch)

Mack Brown promises “not to leave a stone uncovered” in his season-to-season adjustments. Bob Stoops agreed that this was water under the dam.

During summer drills, we have a slogan every day that the coaches read at position meetings. We also have a slogan for the year. There’s also a theme for each game. I etched Bitches Must Be Kicked on some Livestrong bracelets and sent a box to John Bianco. He wisely ignored me.

Michael Wilcoxon and Josh Marshall are medicals. If we count our current commitments, that places us at 86. Still plenty of time to turn some over.

Setter Greg Smith lost 30 pounds during the summer and now weighs 250. He has been as high as 295 in his Longhorn career. Losing weight won’t help his hands though. He’s our jumbo package guy.

Ahmard Howard, Ian Harris, DJ Grant are all healthy now. We’re looking for a guy to grab the job. Barrett Matthews and Trey Graham could be in that mix.

DJ Grant will be a valuable guy in the passing game, but he regards blocking the way Parisians view soap.

We want to find depth in our DL and separate the young LBs (this is a direct reference to Robinson/Acho, IMO). I also think you’ll see Tariq Allen as our #2 MLB playing heavy minutes in blowouts.

We’re going to develop packages with 4 DEs on the field at once for pure passing situations.

Sherrod Harris and Garrett Gilbert will split snaps at #2. The winner of that competition plays in ‘09. Sherrod tweaked his knee and hasn’t been able to do all of his offseason work. I hope Sherrod will have the revelation that this summer will determine the rest of his Longhorn football career.

Some transcript comments:

We will not have a depth chart. We will kind of start guys where they finished in the spring. But, we do feel like it’s a great advantage for us to change the depth charts each day based on how a guy performs. I know that gets frustrating sometimes for our fans, but it’s the best way to motivate our team, and that’s what we’re going to do and we’ll continue to do it.

Practice hard or we will take the OR/AND away and replace it with a MAYBE!

So, if you have more man coverage guys one year, you may put the emphasis on man, and that has changed since the early years here.

Carl Reese, holla. Nice to see us going to some mix and match zone coverage.
Hopefully, we’ll be a little more complex this year without two freshman safeties.

We found with our self-studies over the summer that in the past eight years, the scoring offense and the scoring defense were the two most important things that happen.

Hilarious. Coincidentally, we also found the same trend in basketball and baseball! We’re asking Johns Hopkins to publish a white paper.

Interesting rule change here:

The tackle box will be from the center out now instead of outside your tackles. So, the tackle box will be cut down and shorter than it used to be, so the quarterback doesn’t have as much room to scramble and throw the ball away, and the defense will be able to hit him when he gets out of that tackle box more readily. This is the same for your rugby style punter. Since so many people are rugby style punting now, when your punter turns to run and starts to rugby punt, he is treated more like a runner instead of a punter.

I think that’s a good rule change for the game though it plays against us.

When I was in Iraq, the General told me that our jobs were very similar, because in both football and the military, you both want to beat the other team down, you want to gain ground, you want to take territory away from the opposition, you don’t want the opposition to get back up, you want to have good body language and be positive and you want to fight. The difference is that the young people over there can die, and in football, we don’t fight. So, we don’t call this war and we don’t call this a battle.

I want to high five Mack on this one.

We’ve done a lot of the team building stuff and we’ll continue to do that. We did bring a guest speaker in and we’ve given them some books to read. Our coaches and staff are being taught more about leadership. We were on the plane going to Big 12 media days, and I saw Jordan [Shipley] reading the book, which I thought was a very positive thing that he was taking it seriously

Sally is making the team read Eat, Pray, Love. Mad Dog read the first part.

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17 Responses

  1. dick said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 1:42 pm

    Did we know that about Josh Marshall already?

  2. kenneth said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    What about Eddie Jones? If we’re working on 4-DE packages, he must be at or near 100%.

  3. SizzleChest said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Eddie Jones is supposed to be golden.

  4. anonymous said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    Four DE’s? How would that work? Not tackles I assume?

    And as for Sherrod, didnt he hurt his knee in the past, I wonder if its the same one.

  5. Scipio Tex said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    anon, I would pick one side and line all the DEs up in a row, one after the other. Yes, two of them would play DT.

    Dunno on his knee.

  6. USMC said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 4:48 pm

    “but he regards blocking the way Parisians view soap. ”

    And self defense..

  7. GoHornsGo90 said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 8:31 pm

    “The difference is that the young people over there can die, and in football, we don’t fight. So, we don’t call this war and we don’t call this a battle.”

    People should get over this, nobody actually intends to compare sports to war…

  8. Scipio Tex said:

    August 8th, 2009 at 8:56 pm

    Riiiight.

  9. Horncasting said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 6:55 am

    Scipio – weren’t you the one who was high on moving D. Jones to TE? Is that and the Drav. Johnson experiment already over?

    Also, any word on Russell Carter? I figured this would be his year to breakout, but it seems we’ve heard nothing about him since he signed in ‘07.

  10. Horncasting said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 6:58 am

    “Four DE’s? How would that work? Not tackles I assume?”

    I doubt Houston comes out. Acho probably slides inside and either Jones or Okafor line up opposite Kindle.

  11. hopefulhorn said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 7:10 am

    Horncasting,

    I am hearing that it isn’t so much that Carter and Johnson aren’t playing well but Okafor and Acho are coming on.

  12. Scipio Tex said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 10:03 am

    Horncasting:

    I love D Jones as a football player in general. He’s a pretty devastating blocking TE but he doesn’t have great receiving skills. Unfortunately, we don’t have a complete TE on the entire roster.

    I’ve heard zilch on Mr Carter. I figure if he’s going to make his move, it will be this August.

  13. ed said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Thanks, Scip. Fun as always. Love the Parisians, John Hopkins, and the and or maybe (probably should add “if” for some of the players).

    I wouldn’t mind seein E Jones and S Acho at DT and Okafor and Serg at DE every time Tech or Mizzou face second-and-10 or the like. This is a great way to give Houston some plays to catch his breath and reduce the chance of the handful of DTs wearing down and getting beat up.

  14. Art Vandelay said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

    we need to leave no dirt unturned for another DT.

  15. STM said:

    August 9th, 2009 at 5:15 pm

    Booklist addendum: “Hello Vodka? It’s me, Sergio”

  16. Kafka said:

    August 10th, 2009 at 3:12 am

    “Setter Greg Smith lost 30 pounds during the summer and now weighs 250. He has been as high as 295 in his Longhorn career. Losing weight won’t help his hands though. He’s our jumbo package guy.”

    It is kind of amazing that Greg lost 45 pounds in less than year and something like 30 pounds just since spring practice.

    Mack sounded positive about Greg: “Greg Smith has lost 30 pounds. He was around 285-290 pounds in the spring and now he’s down to 250… They felt like he has had a great summer. We brought him in at tight end, he hurt his knee, he was thin, and then he moved into the interior line and played all five spots and got to 290-300 pounds. When Blaine [Irby] got hurt last year, we shoved him back out to tight end quickly and he didn’t really have a chance to prepare. Being thinner and being back at the position for a year will really help him at tight end.”

    Greg was an excellent basketball player in high school so there might be some hope for his hands to get better.

    Mack sounded serious about wanting to run more effectively. Regarding the key question marks he wants to see answered this fall from spring camp: “They would be the balance of the running game, because we were so effective last year that we do not want to take the ball out of Colt’s hands. He needs to be our featured player. Our receivers are really good, and we need to continue to play on that and not get stubborn and slow the game down with running the ball. We have to do what we do best, but be more efficient when we are running the ball. Secondly, we need to find a tight end and find two or three more guys who can help us there and get us back to where we can have more flexibility. After mid-season when Blaine got hurt, we were pretty much locked into wideouts, and we had to figure out how to run the ball with people spread out all over the field. That’s different from having a 250-pound tight end. We also need to try to make sure we are more efficient in our four-minute offense at the end of the game. When we want to kill the clock and whether we’re going into the wind, it’s raining or snowing, we need to be able to kill the game and be able to do that and not punt and have to play defense and hang on.”

    The hurry up offense is going to be emphasized more by the horns this season and a major point of emphasis in the hurry up is to be able to run with power and to pass efficiently with the same personnel. OU was able to use its big TEs to be able to run downhill with power while still being able to split those big guys out and force little DBs to cover the big TEs.

    Anyway, maybe there is still hope for Greg Smith as a TE who is not just limited to the jumbo package.

  17. jimmyjazz said:

    August 11th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    “DJ Grant will be a valuable guy in the passing game, but he regards blocking the way Parisians view soap.”

    You owe me 80% of a rocks margarita.

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