Paul and Ian go through each member of the Texas secondary to discover if this unit will be a team strength. Subscribe to Inside Texas to stay locked in with your favorite team every single day https://www.on3.com/teams/texas-longhorns/join/
Inside Texas Football
Deep Dive: Investigating the Texas Secondary's Ability This Season
Welcome to the Deep Dive Inside Texas football powered by InsideTexas.com. If you have one American dollar, this is the site that you want to join if you're a Longhorn fanatic. It's where Ian and I write our masterful treatises every day, every week, every month, every year, and you're going to learn every in and out of a Longhorn football program and every other sport, by the way. You can link and subscribe on the Inside Texas Football YouTube channel. We are on a push on a drive to get 10,000 subscribers before the season starts. That's my goal. I just made it up. I want you to help us reach it and come join the conversation. It's enjoyable. We are flying in a dynamic duo today. We are sons Justin Wells. That means the ideas may be worse, but the English will be better. So, Ian and I will try to do our very best. Ian and I were doing a little ideating before this, and last week, we talked about the need for the change in the defensive line approach based on the new personnel that we're going to have, specifically on the interior defensive line. You were doing a little blue sky thinking, Ian, which is what the offseason is for, and you were wondering if we might want to change up some approach in the secondary. And that begins with, probably arguably, the most or one of the most important pieces in the secondary, and that's Jade Barron. The nickel from last year, but might Mr. Barron actually be a corner? And if so, what effects would that have on this defense? Mr. Boyd, I turn it to you, sir. Yeah, well, yeah, very much blue sky thinking here, but there is a chance that this or some other things we might talk about could actually happen, which is Barron moving the corner from nickel. The reason for it, from his perspective, would be, hey, the NFL doesn't seem to care about what I do at nickel. And if you're an NFL team, there's a lot of history and evidence to say, the best guys play corner in college, and you can always move them inside if you really need a good nickel. The guy who's playing nickel in college is not demonstrating the same level of athleticism and skill that he would need at corner. So I don't want to take a risk on that guy. Now Brian Branch, who went in the second round last year with the Lions, played nickel at Alabama, and he's been awesome. So the things may change, but Barron did not get the draft grade he wanted, and I think he wants to play corner if he can. Now, the question then becomes, is that good for Texas? Right? I think it actually might be because he's obviously a very, very good player. I think he's the best player in the secondary. And if he's, if he is an NFL caliber player at cornerback, there may not be another guy like that on campus. There might be. Last year, there wasn't, right? Yeah, I'm curious. So would he be paired in the scenario? So first of all, anytime you create a vacancy, a vacuum, that has to be filled. So we're going to have to talk about that. And then we're going to have to talk about who would he be paired with? Do we think he'd be paired with Manny Muhammad? Do you think he'd be paired with Terrence Brooks? What of the two corner positions would you slate Mr. Barron towards? I would put him in the boundary where his, you know, he's good against the run. He's good on the blitz. The boundary corner does that, those things awful lot more than the field corner. Field corner like never blitzes, you know. I would move him there. I think that that would make sense. And Muhammad, I think, makes a lot of sense as a field corner. I don't know why he's fixed in the boundary. It might be because Brooks is less effective there than Muhammad is. But to me, though, that would be a little more natural for both Barron and Muhammad would be if Muhammad is to the wide side. Because he's really good at playing off and seeing things happen and closing Muhammad is. And there's more of that field because he had more space to work in. The boundary, you got to be uptight because the throat gets there so fast because the quarterback's closer. So that seems like the job for Barron. That's like what nickel was like. That's how I would do it. This sends Brooks to the bench, which has maybe two different costs potentially, right? Yeah, let's talk about that. The similarity of the boundary to nickel, things happen more quickly out there, typically. Teams still run a fair amount of their screen game out there, right? And that's something where Barron particularly excels. He's amazing at recognition. He trusts himself. When he sees it, he goes. And that's something that really gets rewarded on the boundary. And then Muhammad, I agree with you. On the field side, he's got length. And that's very valuable when you have length and some lateral quickness and some anticipation because that is your opportunity to play a little off and then hawk the ball. So I think part of the upside of this potential move is you get a little more playmaking, a little more aggression on the ball itself. And as we change the rules on the secondary, you know, it used to be viable back in the day. And I'm an old dinosaur, but back in my day, you could play off coverage and knock the wide receiver out, right? That was a viable strategy in football and in coverage. And now that the rules the way they are and targeting and all that sort of stuff, it's kind of harder to pull that off. You really need to play the ball more than the man. Do you agree with that assessment or do you think that's just a minor aside? Maybe more at safety than corner. But yeah, you're also in space more, like some of the guys that would be like, well, in my day, we just kill shot people. Well, you wouldn't because you'd be in too much space and you'd whiff. Sorry. You tell that's a Robbie lot. Next time you see it, the next time you see Ron a lot, you tell them that. Yeah. Hey, let me let's talk about any time you move jade baron, there's a little bit of vacuum. So who's going to replace him at that nickel position? Are we talking about a Jalen Gilbo and Austin Jordan? Are we talking about Kobe Black, the incoming true freshman? Who's going to fill that void? Because the nickel covers the slot and the slot is the easiest first available read for any quarterback in a spread offense. You want to have a really good guy there. So are we are we robbing Peter to pay Paul here? Yes. I think if you've got an NFL athlete, he's probably better at boundary corner than nickel because you can you pretty much never put the nickel totally on an island and you do with the corner. So on that extent, it is a little more valuable at corner than at nickel, but you can't suck. Right. So the depth chart would go Gilbo Jordan as the next two in line. I would think that Makuba, Andrew Makuba, the Clemson transfer would get a look there if baron is seriously looking at playing full time corner next year. And also maybe a quick aside, it's possible that baron could play a corner back when they're in base defense and they only and they don't have a nickel on the field. And that that would be like mollify him a little bit and like give him some film for the NFL, but then play him at nickel when they're nickel, you know, that could be this is a good point. Because the base defense is not something Texas runs very often, but when they do and there are opponents that will put us in a base defense this year, I've been previewing on inside Texas, the upcoming quarterbacks we're going to face and we're going to face a number of dual threat quarterbacks where teams are going to be maybe run first from the spread. And we might want to be in base more than, you know, in a four, two, five or three, three, five or whatever permutation we play with. Taking jade baron off the field just because we're in a different formation does not make sense. And we did it last year and I criticized it. That needs to be remedied at minimum fair. Yeah. Yeah. And then, okay, so we moved Makuba to nickel fair. He's done that at Clemson and we think he could execute that well. He's quick. He's got good recognition. He's a veteran. I don't know if he'd be quite as good as Baron against the run. But I don't think anyone is, but now you've created a little potential void at safety. If you had Makuba, particularly as maybe your single high guy, if we're going to run more single high, one safety deep. So what are we going to do at safety now where we keep robbing Peter to pay Paul, we're having a trickle down effect in this whole mad scheme of yours. So who are our safeties? Is it Williams and tap? Is it what are we rolling with there? And who's the who's the single high? Yeah, should we just maybe go through like the top 10 names in the secondary and answer it that way or do you want it or should we stop? We can absolutely do that. But I did want to kind of illustrate the knock on effects of one simple move, right? Then you start to have other effects in the secondary. And the truth is the aggregate of the that might be better than what we were thinking, or it might be worse. Let's figure it out. But before that, did any of you get injured as we were doing this? Well, I've got good news for you. There's someone you can call you call Andre the lawyer at 214-444-8808. He's located in Dallas, Texas, but he helps injury long horns all over the great state, car wrecks, slip and falls, 18-wheeler accidents, on-the-job injuries, wrongful deaths. Andre is a proud inside Texas reader. And if you're hearing this, he wants to help you. And if Ian and I were responsible for your injury in any way, we take no responsibility. But you can get someone who's going to be responsible for you and doing the best for you. That's on to the lawyer. You reach him at 214-444-8808. All right. Now we're back to talking about the secondary. We've got a bunch of intriguing names. We've got a bunch of guys with experience in, and we've got a bunch of sort of bright, shiny new faces. And there's going to be a little tension between those two. And then, of course, we brought in a very valuable transfer in Andrew Makuba from Clemson. He started 30-plus games for the Tigers. He's played both the traditional safety and he's also played nickel for Clemson. And he's a guy who, if Ian's blue sky ideations are correct, Makuba might be the key guy that you can make a versatile chess piece to plug the gaps. So let's talk about Andrew Makuba and his role potentially, both in a traditional secondary, but also maybe if we start moving some stuff around. Yeah, he's actually very similar to Baron. Baron was a really good physical corner that they moved to nickel. Makuba was a very coverage-savvy safety that moved to nickel. So it's like tweeners from two different directions. They meet very similar in the middle, if that makes sense in terms of their body types and their skill sets. And very quickly, on tweener, sometimes a word we use is a criticism of a player. But this instance between it positively, we mean they can do both. Yes. Yeah. And not that they're quite not good enough to do both, which is what the typical tweener is, right? And that's what, that's the knock that Baron wants to get off of him to go to the NFL, right? Yes. Is he spent a lot of time in 2023 playing zone coverage? And a lot of guys, you don't have to be an NFL defensive back to do that. So he wants to prove that, you know, I can play man, I can carry guys. So Makuba, I think, is a very similar player, did a lot of similar things. One thing on Baron, that he's also amazing it, is he has this trick for getting off blocks on the perimeter. Because like, we're going to talk about guys like Gilbo and Makuba in a minute, who are not big. And they're actually about as big as Baron is. But Baron didn't let people block him. Because he had this, like, he had this move where when he was facing a perimeter block, he would go, he would like show one direction, get them to like throw their hands in that direction, and then like get, shake their hands and get back where he wanted to go. He just very skilled, like a boxer out there on the perimeter. And it made it's part of what made him so devastating against perimeter screens was that specific little knack for beating blocks. I don't know if Makuba has that. And I know that Gilbo, as of the last time we saw him, does not. Yeah. One thing Makuba might try is if you tell the blocker that their shoes are untied, they'll glance down, and then you can run past them. So it's a it's a viable tactic, Ian. We're trying to do blue sky, big, you know, no, no bad ideas. If you want to throw out a bad idea, you have to indulge it and write it on the whiteboard. Okay. All right. Let's talk about a guy that's not been mentioned yet in this conversation. He was mentioned for good portions of the season. And in fact, played almost co-starter snaps and then sort of disappeared a little bit late. It's Gavin Holmes. Gavin is a guy who was built as being the best man corner, potentially on the roster, just pure man coverage. He's light. He's sort of skinny, but very quick, pretty long, maybe 511, 6 feet tall, but pretty, pretty skinny guy, not, not built like a Terence Brooks. Is he sort of the odd man out, whether we do a switch with Judea Baron or not, or is he a guy that could get a revitalization in the spring and in spring practice with this perhaps greater emphasis on man coverage? Yeah, if they keep Baron at nickel and they play more man, then I think, I think of what Texas did to Gavin Holmes last year, I think is illustrative. Oh, can't say that word. Relustrative. Relustrative of the problems with the design of the secondary last year, which was they had this guy that all his good film at Wake Forest was playing press man coverage in like a college game. And you could tell at Wake Forest, he was not a great tackler, but teams couldn't even throw the ball because he was really stuck to guys remarkably well. Texas plays him in off coverage to the wide side of the field and let Dylan Gabriel play pitch and catch underneath. And then he made how many tackles did he miss in that Oklahoma game that were like devastating. Yeah, he needs to get better at that, but I feel they badly misused him. They probably would say, well, if we have these other guys that are good at man coverage and are not bad playing off, then let's just use those guys, which is fair enough. But boy, yeah, and there was some late season snap where he got to play press man against like tech. And all of a sudden, it's like, hey, look, he was a really good player. Gavin Holmes. Yeah, speaking of potential and he's still a young player will probably really be coming into his own this spring, this off season, this fall. But he had some bad snaps that were noticeable, not necessarily every snap, but there were some things that showed up on the television in a bad way, particularly against Washington. And that's Terrence Brooks. Man, he looks like what you'd want to draw up a corner back to look like on paper. Six feet or over six feet, 200 pounds can run more straight line, maybe fast than wiggle. What's his evolution? And is he a guy that he's certainly in the mix to start? But what's his best use? What's his best utility? He needs some like fine tuning technical skill. I actually noticed our old friend Vance Joseph, the Charlie Strong defensive coordinator, was watching rewatching the Texas Washington game. And Vance, say what you will, knows defensive back play. Yes. And he was critiquing their man coverage techniques against Washington. And he was like, no, like, hey, you know, when they're in this split and they're in this situation, you know, they're going to run the fade. And like, I don't remember the specifics, because I'm not, I don't know, uh, DB footwork and all that, like, that well, certainly not as well as Joseph. But, um, he noted that our players had this really bad technique against Faderouts. And it's like, oh, you don't say because I sure remember Washington completing a lot of them against Texas. And so it, we might say like, our guys are too slow, get someone faster. No, the problem is not how fast they are. It's their techniques in man coverage. We're lacking. And we saw earlier in the arrogance Houston, like they were giving away inside leverage on shallow crossers with no help inside. Yep. It's like, without help inside, you sure can't let them just run as fast as they can over the middle without anyone, anywhere near them, right? Are you referring to Vance Bedford? Yeah. Who's Vance Joseph? Vance Joseph is an NFL defensive backs coach and a long time coach in the NFL and a defensive coordinator. Vance Bedford was a former court defense officer for Charlie Strong. Okay. Isn't he the guy that Texas is always trying to hire though? Vance Joseph? Yes. Yes. The elusive Vance Joseph. Vance, Vance Bedford. I'm sorry, Vance. I got. So, I mean, I think Brooks might be awesome this year. I don't know. It seems like the missing piece might, in part, be some of the coaching is getting. And so we'll see if that is better or not. Malik Mohammed, or Manning Mohammed, as his friends call him, we'll call him Manning. And as Manning got more comfortable, he was a true freshman last year. And boy, by the end of the season, he didn't look like a true freshman. And the Texas coaches were playing him as effectively a de facto starter. Made some really nice plays. And had his moments of growth, but that's to be expected for any true freshman corner. But despite his his skininess and not filling out in the weight room, he didn't lack aggression. You know, he certainly brought it to the best of his ability. And he seemed to have potentially elite coverage traits that could be realized this early this year. Is he just your classic field corner? Let him develop, let him grow and see what happens? Or is there anything else we could do with him? Well, they've been playing him in the boundary. They have. So apparently not. I would have thought so that that would be his best fit. It may be that I think he's might be the best corner on the team. I think Baron is the only guy that would likely challenge him for that. I know that you like the right off season. I think we both think that Terrence Brooks could suddenly make a leap and be like an amazing player. But barring that, I think Mohammed is the most skilled talented corner on the team. Unless Baron moves there, in which case we'd have to see. Definitely, however they can figure things, Mohammed at corner is you know that that's going to be like a starting point. Hey, talk about Jalen Gilbo. We did touch on one earlier. One observation I'll throw out and then you can tell me you can shoot it down or support it or or jujitsu it and make your own point. I like Jalen's quickness in the short area. I like his ability to match a slot receiver on some of those short routes, particularly the little end cuts, slants. Here's the thing, if we're going to try to go more single high and we're going to play Jalen at nickel, doesn't your nickel need to be able to carry the slot? If they're running the slot go, a slot fade, any deep route with the slot over the middle of the field, don't you need a guy who can straight up turn around and run? I'm not sure Gilbo is that guy. Is he capped out? I don't see him as a 440 guy. I see him as a quickness guy. Maybe. I think he may be able to do it well enough. You do have the post safety in single high, so you can play outside and just kind of funnel them into the safety. The dreaded slot fade is your concern. If the guy goes out the line and he's got to carry him, they could just play zone against teams that are really dangerous at that. And give him help from the corner. My answer is yes. I don't know if he's quite the all-around brilliant guy coverage you want for those things, but I don't know if it would really matter too much. I think there could be workarounds provided he was really good at what he needed to be really good at. Hey, there's a guy who played against Washington the first time, the Alamo Bowl. It seems like ages ago, but it really wasn't that long ago where Texas played Washington the Alamo Bowl and had some injuries and some guys going pro and there were some DBs that hadn't played too much against Washington. People were kind of dreading it and they actually played really well. Austin Jordan was sort of the headliner of that group. He had not played a ton of snaps. He didn't play a ton of snaps last year, but against Washington, he showed out pretty darn well. There's been a sense that Austin Jordan is still feeling out his best position or the coaches are feeling out his best position. He's played some spot, I'm sorry, he's played some nickel, he's played some safety. We don't think he's a corner. Where does Austin Jordan fit in any in all of this? And is it a player that just hasn't gotten his his due or has he just gotten passed by guys who are a little more specialized than he is? I don't know. I kind of get a vibe from him that he might be the guy where he's like, he's not really anything and it's a weakness until it's a strength. And then he's a senior and he gets all these snaps because he can play multiple spots and not give you a big drop off. That might be his that might be his future. In modern football, knowing what we know now about the open portal de facto wide open free agency without contracts, NIL, is Austin Jordan going to be that guy? You know, I've lamented the loss and death of the gas camp award, right? Of guys staying to their fifth year and then coming out of the blue and contributing, I don't know if that's going to happen much anymore. Isn't more likely scenario that if Jordan doesn't have a clear path to playing time, he's a starting safety at, you know, I don't know, Texas Tech at this time next year or something or North Texas or something? I mean, are we going to see guys like that anymore? It could be. It's if they really want to keep him, you know, but if he wants to really say, yeah, they also have guys like Michael Taft that kind of fill that spot too. So I guess it's probably more likely he'd end up at Texas Tech than waiting around long enough to seize his moment in the Texas backfield. So Michael Taft, he brought up he was a fifth year senior when he was a red shirt freshman, right, in his approach to the game. He's always underestimated, I think, by the the common fan. But I think a lot of the people who study realized that he was a moderate strength of the defense last year in terms of assignment soundness and actually tackles well, actually will lay the wood if he gets the opportunity. And, you know, if you throw the ball to him, he'll catch it as he's demonstrated. He'll make a play on the ball. Do we think Taft is your drop down safety? If we're going to go single high or is he going to be your safety that's got the back end covered and is keeping everything in front of him? What's his best disposition, Ian? I think he can do either. He's, I don't know if he's like amazing at either, but I think he could do either. He's probably maybe more the guy that you drop back. Because I've noticed this this deal in college versus the NFL. Like here's here's a list of some of the great back end safeties in NFL history that are from like recent times. Ed Reed, Earl Thomas. You know, maybe not quite on that level, but Quantra digs. Let's just go with like Texas guys. Yeah. Ed Reed played in like a quarter's defense in Miami and did not drop to the post like he would with the Ravens. Earl Thomas played to the field at Texas. Sometimes he played in the slot in a quarter's defense. He was more likely to come down to be near the ball than he was to drop back. That's like let Blake Gideon go back, right? Quantra digs same thing, played corner, played nickel, Dylan Haynes, you go back. I think playing post safety in college is like a little easier because you don't want more of like his meaning. Like in the NFL, everybody's got an arm to test you on some of the long throws and the NFL, that's not the case. So the star athletes end up playing closer to the ball. And you wouldn't necessarily have known from their time at Texas that digs and Earl Thomas would be like notoriously good post safeties in the NFL because that's not how they were used in college. So I think that probably TAF is the one that would get sent back more often when they could manage it. And then let like Derek Williams or Makuba get down around the box or they're either like maybe covering a slot, maybe covering a tight end, or being like the first responder if things go wrong against the run, right? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. There's and you're learning that you learn this in the NFL with veterans. But there's fast. Fast is described in two ways in the NFL. And it's the only way it's described differently. In college, fast is you run fast, right? You run fast either in your pads on the field and in a game or you do it in shorts on a fast track getting timed, right? In the NFL, when they say fast, they also mean play fast or recognize fast. And that's one of the big differences of the NFL. Yes, the players are faster, bigger, stronger. In general, they're not so distant from the elite college game in that regard. Yeah, but where they are distant is their play fast. Their recognition is like that. And so you can make up a lot of ground as that single high safety as a Michael Taft. If you see what's happening before it happens, if you understand what they're trying to do, how they're trying to attack us, that's what made Ed Reed so special. And that's how Ed Reed could play as a 10 year veteran. You put Ed Reed on a on a 40 yard field in the NFL combine when he was a 10 year veteran. I don't think that guy was cracking four or five. I don't think he was cracking four or six possibly, but you know from watching them on film, right? His play fast was exceptional. So just a tidbit there for Mr. Taft that he might be able to play a little faster than just his pure speed. And by the way, his pure speed isn't bad. You mentioned Derek Williams, a guy we're all really excited about. He looks the part, holy cow, talk about a freshman just like Manny Muhammad, who was sort of irrepressible. You couldn't keep him off the field. He became effectively one of the most consistent guys that safety in terms of snaps by the end of the season. Is he just going to continue in that vein and level up to be like an all conference guy this year and then his juniors and all American type? Or what do we see? What's the beyond the workstalling the virtues of Mr. Williams? What are the chinks in his armor? What are the weaknesses in his game? You'd hope so that he would make a very linear leap improvement because I would say the main weakness is he was probably the best guy coming down to support the run and make a tackle. Yeah. He made plays in the run game last year. They were like Earl Thomas and Reed kind of like, you got all the way over there and you saw what was happening and he made that tackle all the way over here really. And he was like one of their best guys covering a slot. Like when Houston was killing him with the aforementioned shallows, he was like one of the only guys that actually had a prayer of thinking a play on those balls from a bad alignment. But he also had, so his weaknesses were just things like assignment errors, misalignment, stuff like that, stuff like church refreshment stuff that you would and just can only get better unless they like make big wholesale changes and confuse him or something. Like he's only going to know more about where to line up and how to play things. So I would expect pretty linear improvement. You did note before the show, sorry if I'm stealing your thunder, that he doesn't seem to have gained any weight in their spring roster. So he's listed like 62, 193 or something like that. You kind of like to see that that weight be going up so that when he's making these tackles, he can bring a little more force, but I don't know if that, I don't know what that says, if anything. I'm taking he and CJ Baxter and they have to eat a triple decker peanut butter sandwich and a protein shake right before bedtime after their normal dinner. And they have to show me photographic evidence as the SNC codes that they're doing it. Because we need them to put on some good weight. Hey, let's talk about a guy, we talked about the tweener and the positive sense. And in other words, a guy who can do more than one thing well, not that he's sort of in between two positions and can't do either exactly. And that's Jelani McDonald. This is a guy who looks like a force of nature who might demand playing time, irrespective of our depth chart and who we think is next and who's earned what and who's who's slotted to do this. He might be a guy that just says, no, I'm going to be starting by mid season and we're going to figure out where that is. He's a guy who by the way can play nickel, can play corner and can play safety. He's physical, he's quick, he's over 200 pounds, he's long, he's over six foot two. He's he was the guy in high school who played the win the game position. Right? He was playing quarterback and he was throwing the ball and running the ball and playing, you know, playing the tuba at halftime and cleaning up the field after the game. He was that guy. What is Jelani potentially fit? And if we have enough of these guys that we keep describing Ian, doesn't it suggest that if we have some sort of vision for the secondary, the raw material is there to deliver? Yeah, for sure. You know, I actually found some snaps of McDonald's against tech. He got in the game against tech late because they were, you know, blew him out. And he was at nickel. And I noticed that like he had one play where he had to carry a slot receiver down the field and like a vertical route and he just turned and ran and he was just gliding. It was like, it looked so easy. And then there's another play where he needed to like fit the run from a, from a, like a outside alignment as the nickel. And he's like kind of frozen up and then the receiver comes, he doesn't see him and he just gets blasted out of the way. And I thought that was kind of interesting. Like you look at him on the depth chart now, he's like six, two, two, 11. Yep. So you're like, box safety, right? You watch him on the field. Last time I saw him, he did not look too 11. And I bet you he still probably doesn't look too 11 because he is long and, and lanky and there's a lot of room on his frame. And when he's like, he looks like a fish and water and coverage. And I don't think I've seen enough to say a fish out of water hitting the run around the box, but, you know, less natural maybe, right? So what do you do with a guy like that? Yeah, we're going to find out. And I think not to open up a whole other show potentially, but we need to see someone who sees these guys every day, obviously, who has a vision for the secondary, right? Not just succession of, well, he was the backup last year and the starter graduated. So now he's the starter. We need to say in aggregate, this is what a Bill Beatenbaugh does. This is what a Kyle Flood does with the offensive line. They say he says, in aggregate, this guy can play these two positions. But I know we're better team when he plays center, even though that's not his preference right now. But I know that allows us to play this guy. And then in aggregate, we're a better offensive line. Very similar to the secondary. I want to know that we have someone, whether it's Terry Joseph or Pete Kwakowski or Blake Gideon, who has a vision for the secondary in totality and says, we've got to get this guy on the field. Or we've got to get this guy at this position because here are the benefits. Here's the cornucopia of benefits that it's going to provide for the secondary in Toto, right? And I don't know if we have that to be frank. And I want to see that. That's one of the things I'm going to be watching this spring. Are we, you know, the other part of spring that's useful in spring practice, you may not always see it in the spring game. But this is when you try stuff. This is when you shouldn't be scared to say, hey, Giovanni, go line up a corner. I just want to see how do you do against Isaiah Bon? Because that's, you got to give a player the ability to surprise you, right? Now, what may happen may be what exactly what you expect. And then you go, okay, go, go get back over safety. But you have to be willing and brave enough to try stuff and upend your own little apple cart, right? The worst thing a coach can do is anoint people and have a calcified depth chart. And I thought we showed in some ways that we were not last year, right? You saw the freshmen make their move. And we'll end with this. There's some really talented incoming freshmen guys like Xavier Colsame, Kobe Black. We didn't even mention Warren Roberson, who redshirted, who coaches have raved about, who could be a solution at safety or, or nickel. Do we expect any of these guys to make a push? I mean, Kobe Black is, he's not going to come in looking like a freshman. I think Xavier Colsame is going to need some time to fill out. Are there, is there a potential for impact of these guys? Or have we layered the talent and depth sufficiently that we're not counting on incoming freshmen anymore to be incorrigible? I think it's pretty layered now. Like Brooks is basically in a contract here, and he's going to be feeling the heat from these guys beneath him, or from Barry. And if he moves over, Muhammad is, I mean, that guy's, I don't even really worry about him. Safety is another question. You know, it would be funny. I mean, he might be Namdi Osamua, right? Yeah. Like maybe he's just a corner. And even though he really doesn't look like one, just let him go play out there and dominate. For them, Namdi Osamua, if you're more of a college fan, he was a dominant cornerback for about seven or eight years for the Raiders. I think the Oakland and LA Raiders, I can't recall, but he was about what 62 to 10 to 15 playing quarter. Yeah. And he had quite a run in the NFL. He knew how to, he was very smart. I think he like wanted to do like theater or something. And like, he was like very smart and like a weird Renaissance man, but like, but also like just jam guys up in their outs in a race then. What a guy. Yeah, I'm with you. I think a lot of this just comes down to vision. Terry Joseph, I know that he's very good at recruiting. I think he prepares guys for games really well. I think he scouts opponents really well. I don't know that the main vision Texas has been coasting on for the secondaries come from Gary Patterson. Right? And so that's just, that's the remaining question mark for the staff is whether or not they can, they can, they can thousand foot view the secondary and it's fit in the defense and it's fit with Pete Quicowski. I might be the biggest question mark of the season other than like Quinn Ewer is making the leap into Heisman caliber player. Yeah, I think everyone tends to look to the offense for our ceiling in 2024. What could it be? What could Jaden Blue be? What could, what could these new receivers be? Right? I think it's actually going to be the defense and the secondary specifically. If they really hit and guys develop not just individually, but as a coherent unit with this vision that you and I have talked about and cultivating our best five, right? The best five approach. That's the upside of this defense. Along of course with some of the interior defensive lines that we talked about, if we look back on this season, it's a disappointment. If it's a nine and three and eight and four, something like that, I guarantee you a good portion of that will be talking about the secondary and our inability to marry it to a larger system in a coherent fashion. So I think there's a lot of potential there. I think there's some downside there and that's what makes football fun. And that's why we have horse races, Ian. Differences of opinion and we get to find out on the track who gets it done. You can find out who gets it done in the world of reporting on Texas sports and you're going to find that the best place out there is inside Texas. Like and subscribe to the inside Texas football YouTube channel and come join inside Texas. Do you have an American dollar? I think you do. I think you should go through your couch cushions right now and you'll find it and change and you can join inside Texas for a month and feel us out and get a sense of what we're doing, the kind of content we're producing. And then of course, like and subscribe here, as I've mentioned. Hey guys, if you love this YouTube channel, if you love this content, share it with others. They'll appreciate it. They really appreciate your curation, your curation, I should say, and your recommendations. With that, I am Paul Waddlington and for Ian Boyd, saying thank you and hook them.