By Steve Habel/Senior Editor
Texas football coach Charlie Strong met with the media Monday to discuss plans for the Longhorns’ upcoming spring drills, which begin Wednesday and culminate with the annual spring game on April 18.
Strong said the team’s offseason conditioning workouts have gone well and that he would spend the spring practices putting together a squad that believes and trusts in each other and developing the Longhorns’ leadership.
“We didn’t play together as a team [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]last season,” said Strong, describing the 2014 campaign when Texas finished 6-7 and lost to Arkansas in the Advocare T-100 Texas Bowl in Houston. “We had too many cliques. We have to get past that and learn to trust each other.”
Strong has repeatedly spoken in his 14 months on the 40 Acres of the Longhorns’ need to rekindle the pride and swagger the Texas program carries for much of the past three decades. He said Monday that he wants his players to understand that the pecking order from those days – when the Longhorns were considered one of the teams to beat each year – has shifted and it’s up to them to shift it back.
“We are no longer ‘the big dog on the porch,’” Strong explained. “We’ve been booted off the porch and bitten a little bit so we have to fight out way back up there. The players have to ask themselves ‘when are we going to rise up?’”
Even with the loss of a nine of their best players from last year’s team, the Longhorns have plenty of experience on both sides of the ball. Strong said the competition for positions and playing time will be intense in the spring and continue into the fall in advance of Texas’ season-opener Sept. 5 at Notre Dame.
“We have bodies that have played – now we have to go develop them and that’s our job as a coaching staff,” Strong said. “This spring it’s all about competing against ourselves and building team chemistry.”
Strong said the loss to Arkansas in the bowl game still “burns” him and he wants it to burn the players, to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again.
“It will burn me probably until the first game this season,” Strong admitted. “We were embarrassed by the bowl game because we didn’t compete.”
Other items that were addressed by Strong on Monday included:
The battle for the starting quarterback position between incumbent Tyrone Swoopes and redshirt freshman Jerrod Heard will be a major point of emphasis during the spring. The two signalcallers – the only scholarship quarterbacks on the roster – will get equal reps in spring drills and Strong thinks both will be better from the competition. “I’d like to say that we’d have a real idea of who our starter will be on Sept. 5 when we finish spring drills,” Strong added.
The Longhorns will employ more of a spread attack on offense in 2015, mostly to accommodate the fact that it’s the offense of choice for most Texas high school teams. “Ninety percent of the teams in Texas run the spread and we want to pull our players from that pool,” Strong said. “We are not going to pass the ball 60 times a game or get into any 60-59 games – I don’t think I could take that.”
Strong said one of the Horns’ most improved players is senior wide receiver Daje Johnson. “He’s come a million miles (since last year),” Strong said. “He told me last July that he would never be in my doghouse again, and he hasn’t. He can make plays and do so many things with the ball in his hands.”
Strong said that sophomore guard Darius James, who suffered a season-ending knee injury in practice last November, is still working his way back into form and is dealing with academic issues.
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