What Kind of Coach is Charlie Strong?

From the way he talks, to his demeanor, to the expectations he has for his players, Charlie Strong screams Football Coach. He demands that each member of his football team give maximum effort. He couldn’t care less about a recruit’s star rating … he is after the hard workers with football intangibles that can not be rated.

(Also Read: Why Charlie Strong Fits For Texas?)

Trust me when I say that he is about to shake up the program from the[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] bottom to the top. He is going to reshape the culture to fit his image of what a successful program should be, and that all starts with two words — hard work.

With Charlie Strong, Texas gets a great defensive coach and someone that understand Xs and Os very well. Scipio Tex from The Barking Carnival explains Coach Strong’s offensive and defensive philosophies.

Defense

Strong has solid defensive schemes and was one of the early innovators in the 3-3-5 nickel at South Carolina, but he’s mostly about keeping things simple, teaching fundamentals, getting everyone on the same page, and getting great effort. While everyone is always seeking the perfect schematic scrawlings on a napkin to contend with spread offenses, the reality is that hitting hard, tackling reliably, being sound, providing autonomy within a team construct, and actually matching recruiting requirements to the task rather than just randomly taking guys, is a lot more important than the magical schematic bullet.

Strong gets that. It will be very refreshing to watch. It’ll take a little time though, because our team is more or less an aggregation of athletes on islands trying to win individual match-ups. For that reason, I’d place the likelihood of him retaining Duane Akina at 0.3% unless he defers to reputation and throwing a former staff retention bone.

Offense

Offensively, he chose to make Louisville a fairly traditional pro-style attack with a moderate tilt to the passing game. Mostly because Bridgewater is a stud. They’ve never really recruited dual threat QBs (Bridgewater is not a dual threat, despite the contentions of lazy college analysts), which I find odd given that Strong the DC understands how they can challenge game planning and he saw Tim Tebow up close for several years. They run a lot of stuff that you’d find in the 1990s NFL. They don’t use pace much and not many high school or college coaches are beating down the doors at Louisville to learn how they do things on offense.

Charlie Strong has promised that Texas football will be hard-nosed and fun to watch. In 237 days, we will see if he can make good on that promise … I believe he will. Texas has hired a winner, and I for one can not wait for the season to start. Hook’Em!

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#HookEm