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Inside Texas Football
Spring Practice Report 1: Ewers, Manning Working With New Receivers, Defensive Players of Note
Welcome to the Inside Texas football YouTube channel powered by Inside Texas.com. I'm Joe Cook joined by Eric and Lane. We are live on campus at the University of Texas. We just got to see Texas' first practice of the spring, first of 15, for the orange white game on January 20th. I don't know if you noticed this, but there was a guy with an SEC camera crew tee shirt on. So that was the first thing I saw when we walked in, but a lot of things to take away. You saw a lot more of the defensive side of things. I got to check out the offense and you got to see some of the top not only transfers, but freshman prospects and even some top returners come back as well. And the first day, not in pads quite yet. Just comments. Yeah, I drew the short straw. I got defense. The defense, the viewing is not nearly as good for defense. That's okay. Really, I wanted to see the defensive tackles. That's probably the biggest concern. I think everybody has. Especially the fans, but you know, one thing that assuaged any concerns I had is Jerry Blood. So it finally looks like a defensive tackle. A real defensive tackle, not a guy that's going to grow into it. He might be carrying a touch of bad weight, but that's good. It's going to make it harder to push him around. He looks fantastic. It's easy to believe his listing at 290 pounds. He's athletic and as flexible as ever. Who else really caught my eye? I had to do a double check on the roster with Alex G. Anyway, number 97. He does not look like a true freshman. It's not just the size, it's the way that he carries his weight. There's tons of, there's plenty of muscle definition for him being a bigger plus-sized defensive tackle. He's just coming in with a very good starting point. He's technically refined, more so than a lot of players his age. And that's, you know, just seeing him looking like that got me really excited for him having a chance to play this season. You got to see a lot of defensive tackles in. You got to see new defensive tackle coach Kenny Baker from observing him. What were some of the things you noticed during the Texas, the brief about 15 to 20 minute viewing portion of the game? Yeah, he seemed like he already had a pretty decent relationship with the players. He's calling Alfred Collins AC, you know, he's an energetic guy, pretty encouraging. I don't think I heard him cuss, most of the coaches I heard. Now I'm not to say he didn't, but you know, I heard a few of them use some blue language earlier in the practice. But he seemed like he already had a pretty decent rapport with his players. I noticed that he's calling on him by nicknames and so far already, but yeah, he ran a tight ship for sure. What are some of the other just depth chart notes? We posted a lot of these different things. On insidetexas.com got a great March Madness promo, spring practice promo, but what are some other things you noticed, just some viewing defensive drills? Well, you know, Jalen Gilbo was out there with the ones, at least some that I saw. I don't know what, you know, maybe Barry was working at corner and I missed it at that time, but he looked like he was out there a little bit more front and center than we'd seen him in the past. And we know that's right in line with what we've been reporting for the winter off season is that he's worked extremely hard. He was mentioned numerous times unsolicited throughout the last couple months. So I think that was probably just a little reward for the hard work he's put in. You know, Anthony Hill looked like Anthony Hill, just, you know, bigger, stronger, faster. You know, he's going to be, he's going to be a menace this year. Physically, the defensive backs, there's a, there's just a huge difference between the true freshmen and the upperclassmen. You expect to see it, but it's just really noticeable. You know, Kobe Black and Ward L. Mack and Xavier Filson, he should have pretty good confidence of what they're going to look like in a couple years, because they can look at the guys like Terrence Brooks. And Jalana McDonald, even one year in the program, looks physically developed and ready to go. One other bit of news on defense was Colton Vosick was full go from what I saw. He participated in every drill. Obviously, he didn't play at all last year. He didn't even suit out for much of the season. He looked good and ready to go. He's physically in good shape. You know, it's got, because that's his good size and it did strength already. The only other injury note I could think of from the offense is I didn't really see Peyton Kirkland go through a lot of drills. We know he had a knee operation last year, but everybody else seemed like they were full go. Savion Red had a brace on his right hand, but other than that, looks like the team's pretty healthy as they started. Savion Red looked pretty big, didn't he? Yeah, that 5'11" to 40" may not be too far off. Kendrick Blackshire had to do a double take on the roster for him too. He just does not look like a modern football body type because he's about 6'2" and 260 pounds. That was a nose tackle 30-40 years ago. You know, he still moved pretty well, but you'd like to see him drop some weight. He's a tank out there. One of the things that I obviously got to watch a lot of the offensive practice, and I've seen Steve Starkisian even at these first days, he will be on players. And it's whether it's a quarterback like Quinn Ewers or a quarterback like Cole Ward. He is on players. Maybe that changes in the viewing window they're going on right now or outside the viewing window that they have going on right now, but he seemed pretty content. And there was a moment I saw where Quinn Ewers hit Chante Cook on a deep ball and Stark goes over to Quinn and goes bottle that up, take that, put it in the drop top drawer and we'll save that for whenever. But he seemed like he was pretty happy with his team. The assistant coaches were pretty animated. Deshard Joyce is always high energy. Chris Jackson and Jeff Banks, you could hear across the field. But we wanted to see what the wide receivers looked like. And I think we had Chante Cook, Matthew Golden, Isaiah Bond, and Ryan Wingo, kind of in that top four at the outside spots, we know that they'll probably move them around to all three over the course of spring and then in the preseason. But right now, those guys were at outside. And then the order behind them kind of was varied. A lot of it is walk-ons. DeAndre Moore and Ryan Niblett were the mainstays at slot. They were the top two guys. The constant at the top for Tiden was Gunnar Elm. And then from Juan Davis on down, it was a big mix, a lot of mixing and matching. You can see Amare and I Black go last. You can see Amare and I Black be the third Tiden. So a lot of different things were going on. And of course, it's the spring. The depth chart does have a great amount of value for trying to make sure a lot of things were verified. We're right. But they're still trying to build reps. They're still trying to build rapport just with quarterbacks. Even Trey Owens, I thought he had the longest of, I guess, the releases, which you can come to expect when Quinn Ewers and Archmating are in front of you. But when you're 6'5" and you're 2'36", he was able to put a lot in the throws and looked like a quality power five quarter back. I saw an interesting rep from him too, because he dropped the ball. They were doing deep outs. And he dropped the ball, which meant he had to hurry everything up, including putting some heat on the pass and he ripped it up there, man. It was one of the, it was a bullet. So he's got plenty of arm when he needs it. How did the quarterbacks look accuracy-wise? They look fine. I think Owens was the only one I saw who had like a touch of accuracy issues. Whenever they go through these drills, one of the ones that we get to see is option routes and it's man or zone, I don't know if that's it. But basically, they have to see the defender and it's SART calling out the option route. Everything looked fine there. They were hitting a lot of deep passes. And I think that may have been what had SART pretty encouraged, just all those deep passes that for the most part were getting completed. We've seen practices where everybody's got the drops. It just seemed like it was a practice. It didn't. There was nothing that concerning. And we saw some interesting guys at punt returns. Sometimes we've seen some defensive players back there, but it was all receivers. It was John Tane Cook. It was Isaiah Bond. One wide receiver that stood out to me was the last addition to that wide receiver class was Aaron Butler. Like, there is some quickness there that I think when we see recruits come on late in the cycle and they don't show up, you may not be as excited about them, just because you're not as familiar with them. And I think there's some athleticism there and some quickness there. Not saying he's going to see the field early, but he looks impressive and looks like a SART receiver. Yeah, he's got the speed. And you know, if they're adding somebody late, he's going to feel something on that roster that they felt they were missing. He's definitely got the speed element. Ryan Wingo, I saw him in a workout a couple of weeks ago, man. That guy is, he's a total package. John Tane Cook, I think John Tane is going to be the punt returner to start the season. He seems so natural back there. But you know, overall, the whole attitude was, SART was seemed like he was pretty laid back. You know, last time we saw him at bowl practice, he was cussing at John Bianca to get us out of there. And, you know, today is a lot more laid back. The viewing window was a little bit longer than I think they normally give us. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe they're a good move because it was just crisp, beautiful, Austin day this morning. But we're excited to be back and covering spring football. One recruiting note, we did see 2026 Fort Lauderdale, American Heritage quarterback D and Bell joined by his father. We did already know his father is Raja Bell. So he was there, got some great pictures from our Will Gallagher. We're going to have those on inside Texas today. We'll have Steve Sarkisian speaks to the media at right around 11. Get his takeaways. We'll have a lot of different things on inside Texas. And it's going to be the place to be. Probably won't have an open window again until next week. But as always, you Justin Wells and everybody else involved will get the inside scoop and get the latest from what's going on behind closed doors. So thank you for watching this video. Make sure you like the video. Subscribe to the channel. We're going to have so much action here during spring ball during the NCAA tournament. During everything going on this spring, head to insidetexas.com. We've got a March Madness promo for you to use. And we will see you next time on the inside Texas football YouTube channel, powered by insidetexas.com.