Texas Longhorns Offense Evolution | Portal Strategy Exposed

0:00Welcome back to Holland Texas football. I'm Jeff Howell, joined by CJ Vogel today. We're gonna take a look at a piece CJ did over at HollandTexasFootball.com and that's been making its way around social media about the makeup of the Texas offense going into Sark's sixth season in CJ. We'll go ahead and put the graphic up that you curated. Thanks to a Matthews got this graphic ready for us. And this is basically how the Texas offense is built. CJ, I won't go through why you wanted to do this and any conclusions you reach while putting this together. Yeah, really it's a lot of, you know, you watch a lot of college basketball and you see graphics all the time about starting fives of teams in the elite eight, starting fives of teams in the final four of the sweet 16 or even in the conference championship games and you say, okay, how did they get there? How did they construct that roster to the point of contending for a conference championship or a national championship? And a lot of times you just see the five boxes of the starting lineup and well it's very difficult to determine which team is which due to turnover. And now, you know, I kind of get me thinking given the portal action and activity this year from Texas,

1:05you know, what might that look like in Sart's tenure? And so I went with two, you know, contributing running backs, three wide receivers, you're tied in, obviously a quarterback in your offensive line. And you know, it was pretty interesting, you know, just kind of the evolution of Sart taking over, working with what he had at his offensive room and now getting into year six after a disappointing year five where you missed out on the playoffs saying, hey, this isn't going to be what we do here anymore. We're going to make sure that every piece of the puzzle is something that we have in our repertoire one way or the other via the portal. Yeah, CJ, my initial reaction was, I think if you balanced out it, there's a little more balance between 25 and 26. I don't know, you know, the ceiling for this team might be different, it may not with arch. Maybe you wouldn't have gone as all in, quote unquote, as you did this year. But maybe you would have been in the playoffs last year. I don't, I'm trying to find the right words CJ

2:06because I don't want to say it's an over correction, but it does seem like they left way too much stuff to chance last year. And look, they had every reason to trust their in-house development because for the first four years under Sart can have been really good. And last year, not to say that it wasn't good, it just wasn't good enough to get you back to where you wanted to be. So CJ, I don't, I don't want to, it's not fair to call it an over correction, but it does seem like Sark went from one off season of thinking, hey, let's trust our in-house evaluation, trust our player development to saying, you know what, we've, we've got a window that we've got to maximize and you can't afford to look more than 12 months down the road at building a roster. Look, I think if Sark had his way, it would be the way of what we've seen over the last five years. You know, you go in, you spend time on these kids' recruitment, you get them in-house and you develop them. You know, we've seen it for five straight years and the first five years of Sark's tenure, there weren't, no, weren't any offensive lineman taken, right? Your running backs came from within the house

3:08and now you've had a very talented group of running backs, but you've also seen years in which, okay, the in-house talent that you are putting out on the field maybe isn't up to snuff with what you had, what others are currently trotting out and maybe developments just don't go the way that you hope. So that's why you're starting to see more and more of these portal additions on the offensive side of the football for Sark. And again, wide receiver, I think with tight end, the recent success, it's very easy to go out there and say, yeah, hey, we've got plenty of reason to think that this is an offense that suits you. Now it's a very desirable destination given the quarterbacks at hand as well, Jeff, to now jump, ship and come join the Texas onwards in that same, same breath. Which one of these positions surprised you the most? Because the two that you mentioned, the two that stand out are running back where there's a couple of B-John and Rojo years in there. There's Jonathan Brooks here in there. Obviously, Troy Weissner in the last couple of years and then the offensive line where you've gone from exclusively homegrown talent to,

4:10clearly there's been a shift in the way you're building the roster. I think it's running back, really. And I say that because look at your main two contributors over the last five years, have all been guys that signed with Texas out of high school. Now you've had some contributors, right? Keel and Robinson was obviously an important piece when injuries hit a couple of years ago. Texas did go out and had a Velt and Gardner right before the fall camp. Now, all that to say, you go five consecutive years of your top two backs being guys that you signed out of high school, that you can parade around and say, hey, we've had four draft picks in the last three drafts. Five draft picks, when you include Keelan and Jaden Blue and Jonathan Brooks and Roshan and Bijan. I mean, that's an easy sell, but Titan has been really interesting, Jeff. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this because molding a developmental Titan out of high school, it's a tall task. And in the today's age of when now, when now get a product on the field that can compete at the highest level, you don't have that luxury of sitting on the idea

5:13of this kid will be there in a year or he'll be there in two years. Do you have to have the plug and play? And I think we're seeing that right now at the Titan spot. Yeah, you've got early on before you've had this radical shift to where the portal has now been kicked into overdrive for everybody. Early on, you could develop guys. I mean, remember, Jatavian Sanders didn't register in 2021 as a true freshman. He was getting special teams reps, but it was exclusively a developmental year. And then he obviously had a major role in 22 and 23. If you think about it, CJ, even if you include Jared Wiley, who they inherited and was here in year one before he transferred to TCU, they've had a draft pick at Titan on the roster every year. And in some years, it was multiple draft picks at Titan. Obviously, Andrews was a guy you recruited last year. I just think you're in, Titan, to me, is similar to offensive line where I think you got into maybe this false sense of security of, I mean, we've had a really good class. It's been a mix of guys you recruited with guys you inherited and it's been really good

6:15and it's been productive. Then you look up and all of a sudden say, oh, we probably needed to address this a little bit. I mean, think about it. If the portals conditions, or like they are now last year, Jack Indries isn't on this roster. Sure. Because Indries was a spring portal ad. So I think those are the two positions. He's, I think, Titan a lot like offensive line. Like, take a look at offensive line. If you look at 23 and 24, you basically had six primary starters over those two seasons with Christian Jones at right tackle in 23 and then Cam Williams at right tackle in 24. Although six primary starters, five of those guys got drafted. And Jack Nader's was on the Eagles practice squad last year. So basically, you went six for six in terms of guys that have NFL value on the offensive line. And considering where you were in about the, almost two decades before that, yeah, it was a start difference to what Texas has had on the offensive line. So, yeah, I do think you probably got lulled into a little bit of false sense of security.

7:15I just think to me, I think there's two things that play here, CJ. I don't want to get your thoughts on this. I think one, it's you've got this window with arcs. And you've got to look at it as a one year window that you've got to maximize, where you've got a special quarterback. You've got a quarterback that's got the potential to go number one over on the draft. You better make a run at winning a national title. Like you owe it to yourself, you owe it to the kid, you owe it to the program, everybody to do that. I think the second thing is, there's no way Sark ever wants to go through a first half of the season offensively like the one he went through last year. And that wasn't just arch, it was an experienced quarterback with injuries and offensive line issues, everything compounded to where it took you way longer than you thought to get off the ground. I totally agree. And you have the resources, you have the means to go out there and ensure that you're not putting that position once again. You know, I think we heard that from Sark. He said, look, we're leaving no stone unturned this year. We're making sure that every single position, whatever it is, whether it's quarterback,

8:15all the way down to Ad Drusker, back to safety. He said, if there's a player that can make our team better, we're gonna give him a look. Yeah. I think that's what they did this year in office. I think that's the lesson learned from 2025, CJ, because you know, you're theory on special teams, which you've been an advocate, hey, kicker plumber, you should take one of the portal every year, like there's no reason not to be. Were you young and inexperienced on offense last year? Yeah, you are. And we've talked about the growing pains that went with that. But to me, CJ, I think the lesson for Sark is in the portal area. There's no reason for you to be inexperienced and young when you've got the resources Texas has to go fill needs in the portal. No, that's exactly it. I went through some of the numbers from 25 to 26. And what I mean by that is career snaps about this time of the year. So going into the year, the 2025 roster had 8,036. That's not a bad number, but you start looking at where those numbers, where those, the bulk of those snaps really came from. You had 1,500 from Jack Andrews, who you got out of the portal.

9:16And you had 1,300 and 1,800 respectively for Cole Hudson and DJ Campbell, both of which started on your offensive line. So look, you had zero from Connor Stroin or in the year, I believe Connor Robertson had about 200 going into the season as well. So it was a very young team in, you know, relative terms towards what we're seeing in this year. You only had those three guys, that were over 700 snaps in their career. This year, and where the big drastic difference is, every single player that you're seeing right now on that bottom row, in the starting 11, 12, 13, however many boxes are there, Jeff, every single one except for Michael Misunis, that tight end has over 750 career snaps played. It's pretty drastic change. In total, you have about 1,200 or 1,400 career snaps combined. That is a 450, yeah, 450 snap difference, 4,500 Jesus numbers difference

10:17than what you saw a year ago, entering the season. Last thing I want to bring up, CJ, is you look at how this 26 roster is constructed. And the advantage Texas had, why they were able to go attack, running back and receiver and tied in quarterback and left tackle. Those are homegrown positions with archmaning and Trevor Goosby. If you can continue to do that, and there's a reason why Sark had no problem, let an arch rest his foot take his time back and giving KJ Lacey those snaps to figure out, hey, is this the guy that can be QB1 in 2027? There's a reason why they're excited about Jordan Coleman potentially, or maybe, hey, if Melvin Ciani comes back for another year, maybe you move him over to left tackle as a single, whatever the case is, CJ, if you could continue to keep those two positions in house, the better off you're going to be, because if you've got to go into the portal to get a number one tackle and a quarterback, those guys are in very short supply and they are very expensive. Yes, they absolutely are, which is to your point,

11:17I think the most important piece, it's why you're seeing kind of the theorization of recruiting, right? You go spend $5 signs on one recruit, $3 signs on the other, you know, two or three guys that fill out the class and you sit there and say, okay, we got a good haul. We got the one guy that we truly believe can prosper into being one of the best left tackles or offensive linemen in general, same thing with the quarterback, and what that allows you to do is that it allows you to have, you know, fiscal flexibility in the portal to go get you an admittal, to go get you a Matthew Golden, right? And imit mostly in this year, obviously you've seen it. Texas went out with a splash to go get Cam Coleman, the best wide receiver in the portal this year because they said, we have the pieces already on the roster. Now we got to supplement it with guys that we believe can elevate the roster and it's entirely. To your point, CJ, if you, you know, if you had to go get a quarterback or an offensive tackle, you may have had the money to go get Cam Coleman still. I don't know that you would have the money to go get Cam Coleman and Relic Brown

12:18and Hollywood's mothers and, and melvincy on it. So, yes, fiscal flexibility. I like how you put that CJ. CJ final thought for me is when you look at wide receiver, you mentioned 80 Mitchell, top 50 picking the draft, Matthew Golden, first round pick. Isaiah Bond would have been probably a top 100 pick, had it not been for his legal issues with Scott Resolve. He's an NFL player. I am not worried about the staff being able to go into the portal and find wide receivers. They've now got a track record proving, if you're at a place and you're productive, but you want to go get some polish before you go to the NFL, Texas might be the right place for you. Yeah, I think so. And again, it's proven year in and year out, whether it's Jordan Whittington, whether it's an Xavier worthy or some of the guys that we just mentioned, it's a desirable place to play because of the offense. As long as that offensive line is figured out, to see some boxes not have a longhorn logo, the very bottom right of this graphic, that shows me that this staff is doing everything that they can right now to ensure

13:18that offensive line is in a good place moving forward and that there's no repeat of 2025. All right, good stuff, CJ. Thank you for the knowledge, Zintel, and the expertise as always. Big thank you to Matthew behind the scenes for producing this edition of On Texas Football. I want to remind everybody, if you're not a member over at OnTexasFootball.com, you still have time to get over the site and take advantage of our spring sale. When you sign up, you choose the promo code OTFOG. And that'll get you one year of access at OnTexasFootball.com for just $30.95. Make sure you hit that like button that you're subscribed to the OnTexas football YouTube channel and that you've got those notifications set. So that way anytime we drop a video or go live, you're not missing any of our longhorn coverage or breaking news. Procedure for Matthew for the entire OnTexas football staff. I'm Jeff Howe. Thank you so much for watching and listening and until next time. Welcome. Hey guys, Blake Monroe here from Coffee and Football. YouTube thinks that you're gonna like this video right here and if the algorithm knows ball, it's a good one. So go check it out and then don't forget, hit that like and subscribe button.