By Steve Habel, Senior Contributing Writer
AUSTIN, Texas — If ever there was a team in need of a bye week, it was No. 11 Texas after the Longhorns endured a bruising preseason camp and four weeks of hard-nosed football that featured a win against a sound and dangerous Oklahoma State team and a close loss to LSU.
UT head coach Tom Herman looked rested and ready Monday as he addressed the media after enjoying the first Saturday of the season without either a game or a scrimmage.
Texas [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] (3-1 overall, 1-0 in Big 12 play)s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] returns to action Saturday at West Virginia. The Mountaineers also are 3-1, and 1-0 in league play, and like the Longhorns, were off last Saturday.
Herman said his team will be rejuvenated by the time away, a period during which some of the Texas players had a chance to lick their wounds and the Longhorns’ developmental players (read: true freshmen, guys buried on the depth chart and non-scholarship players) got a chance to work and impress the coaching staff.
“I’m pleased with how they handled the open date,” Herman said about his team. “We got our developmental guys quite a bit of scrimmage work, about 60 to 70 snaps between Tuesday and Wednesday of scrimmage work, and I felt like our older guys got better as we asked them to.”
Even though Herman looked as if he just got back from a three-day weekend on the beach, don’t expect the UT players to be any less intense, and focused, because of the bye week.
“We’re not far enough along in the development of our program to have any sense of enjoying prosperity,” Herman said. “We’ve got to come to work every day to get better, to go 1-0 every snap in practice. It’s unfathomable that anybody at this stage we’re in could feel anything resembling comfortability.”
The methods and buy-in the Longhorns have adopted and adhered to since last season and over the past two years resonate with this year’s team.
Herman was asked about what he has learned about his team heading into the season’s fifth game.
“I know that we can stop the run, and I know that our quarterback is as good as there is in the country at managing the game, getting us into good plays and out of bad plays,” he said. “I would like to see us defend the pass better, whether it be man or in zone, and some consistency in the run game. We have had back-to-back weeks where we felt pretty good about it, so I think we’re headed in the right direction there.”
[/s2If] [s2If !current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] [habeabk] [/s2If]
Discover more from Horns Illustrated
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.