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Inside Texas Football
IT Roundtable: Texas Longhorns vs. Florida Gators Week Recap (Game Predictions)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your Friday round table. I've got Coach Dubb, I've got Jay Wells, and I've got Paul Waddington here. And Paul, I think you wanted to start with just an announcement on how we're going to proceed for the remainder of the show. We're going to proceed with the not indulging the fiction, the fan fiction, the coach fiction, the SID fiction that DJ Lagway is playing for Florida tomorrow. So if I have my face on the post game, I'm happy to take it. But DJ Lagway, hey, playing y'all like quit posting that DJ Lagway practiced. He practiced, he didn't practice. So moving forward, I think it's safe to assume that we will have young Aiden Warren under center who got, who went seven per 22 against Georgia, one interception. He also had one tackle, which is, which is a direct result of his interception. So coach, going into this, and Ian has laid out this week about how he anticipates Florida's probably going to play us too high, make us make those intermediate passes. What do you want to see from the Texas offense this week against against the Florida defense? Did I lose? Do we lose coach? Is he all frozen? Oh, no, it's frozen. Wow. Okay. I see. I don't know what you did. I'm renowned for my hard hitting question. It's dumb. It's infuriated by the phone and tenor of this interview. I've never made Charlie mad before. This is a late back guy. All right. Well, Paul's broken. Let's go a little X's and those with you then. Well, what do you, what do you want? And I know you've talked about this a little bit this week for the fine people that haven't seen. What are you expecting to see from the Texas, or rather, what do you want to see from the Texas offense this week? Well, look, I want to see what we haven't seen in three weeks, which is a really comfortable Queen Ewers commanding the offense, looking healthy, looking spry, looking mentally right, commanding the pocket. That's what we want all want to see. And Florida is going to help us in that regard. They don't have great natural base pressure. They do have to blitz. I believe 17 different gators have a sack on the season, at least one. But they only have 23 on the season. So they get their sacks by bringing unexpected packages, by bringing safeties, corners, nickels, linebackers. They don't have this dominant pass rusher up front. And so that should be good for the pocket. And then they're going to be down to starting corner, cornerbacks. So Jason Marshall being the most notable of the two in terms of athleticism. So Florida is going to have to bring some pressure judiciously. Mostly they're going to have to play off coverage just in L.C. And I think that's going to create opportunities for Queen Ewers underneath and in the intermediate game, which might be a nice way for him to get back to his confidence. Just talking football, it might as well go into my first deep stat of this week. And that is the average charge per play is actually pretty similar for these two teams. Now I appreciate that that is a little bit of a false stat because we're going to be having a completely different quarterback this game. But up until this point, I guess my question to you here is Paul is, if we're sitting at 6.5 yards per play, I think the average fan would think that has pretty good. What makes an elite offense? What numbers should we be looking for there? Well, we were seven earlier in the year and our offense, the last three games has probably brought down that average a little bit. I think that beyond, so your average yards per play is both mostly a measure of your explosives and also your ability to prevent negative plays, right? So anytime you have an average, if you add a negative eight to your yardage, that's not going to help you, right? So it really depends on the system and how you're trying to run your offense, how pass heavy, run heavy you are. Army is quite happy with five and a half yards per play, if they're putting the ball, right? So you don't have to set this set thing like seven is elite, you know, depends on the structure of your offense, but we need to see that tipping back up and not headed down as it's been the last three weeks. Justin, I really, as we move through this, I really want to hear about the recruiting and what we could be looking for this weekend. But before we do that, let's hear from our friend Laura. I want to tell you about Laura Baker. If you're looking for a new home in the 512 or even at this point, let's face it 737 area code, there's only one number to call. That's Laura Baker at 512-784-0505. As a member of the elite Andy Allen team with Keller Williams, Laura has helped Longhorns find the home of their dreams in central Texas. Just ask our resident sex symbol, Ian Boyd, who moved all the way from Michigan to Texas with Laura's help. Laura can help you find what you're looking for in the 512, the 737, or even parts of the 254 and the 210. Just, you know, give her a call at 512-784-0505. Her email is in the description as well as the rest of her contact details. She's a friend. Give her a call. We talked a little bit Wednesday, Justin, about how we are starting to wrap this class up a little bit. And there are some, some still some big fish out there. I think the five-star flips is the, it's tantamount to the drama that everybody wants to see in anything. But what are you, what are you expecting to see? I'm going to ask you to think a little bit big picture now moving toward the rest of the season. How do you see this class rounding out? Yeah, I mean, you're looking at a top five class right now. And so with that being said, you know, Texas, that's what Texas fans kind of need to get used to. Sarg's going to always hover around that top five class era around that rim. There's like five or six spots left, guys. And there's some five-stars to be flipped in Michael Jesusi and Devin Sanchez, a handful of other targets. But there's also some more realistic ones that I think can still add to the average. Right now, they have one of the highest averages per, per, per commitment in the country. And that's two official visitors this weekend, Grayson Littleton out of Tampa and Kellen Wiley, a linebacker who's also out of Tampa area. Both those guys are squarely on the radar. But Texas needs another corner. You want to go big picture. They need another corner in this class. You got to have somebody to join Caleb Chester. They added Zellis Hicks this week as he reclassified as we had kind of alerted to a couple of months ago. He's part of the 2025 cycle now, so safeties are done. But they've got to add another corner. They want another linebacker. They're still trying to flip Raleigh, Petajon, the McKinney four-star committed to Ohio State. They're still trying to get, they're still trying to get Madden Ferriimo, the California linebacker. They're still trying to get him on campus. That's looking like that could happen in the next few weeks. And so Texas, they're trying to fill the holes at this point. They need another linebacker. They need two more defensive linemen, maybe even three. And that'll kind of play itself out as we see. But right now, a bigger picture, Texas just wants to stay in that top five range. And for them to do that, they need to add a corner. They need to add a couple more D linemen, probably another linebacker. And, you know, with John Tae Cook, I've had a couple questions about John Tae Cook, you know, going to the portal, would they look at another wide receiver? I don't believe so. I think they're pretty set on what they have now. And I think they would essentially have Michael Terry III, who is a five-star, who is uncommitted, who Texas is in great position for. He'd probably take that last little receiver spot, so to speak, because he's going to be kind of a multifaceted kid. That's how this class finishes. You want to finish in the top three, sign Michael Terry III, grab another corner, grab another linebacker and get a couple of those defensive linemen from Georgia that I saw last week, because they grow them a little differently down there. Well, and this is a question for both of you. And I'll start with you, Paul. One of the things that we've seen at least, and maybe this is an element of being in the SEC, maybe it's the transfer portal, maybe it's NIL. But it seems to me, at least from a 30,000-foot view, that there is a lot of parity. These mid-level teams in the SEC, and even, obviously, the Vanderbilt's of last year, they're making a run at people, and they're keeping games really close. They're making you earn every win on Saturday. What do you attribute that to? roster construction, making good choices, and it goes both ways. Look at what happened to Florida State. So people just assume you live by the mercenary, you can die by the mercenary as well, if you make bad e-vals. And so Florida State, everyone just penciled them in in the SEC title game before the season. And it's not quite working out that way in Tallahassee, because they made bad choices. They brought in a bunch of portal guys that aren't living up to their billing, or they actually just did a bad e-val. We were giving Norville the benefit of the doubt on DJ Ugalay. Like, wow, this guy sees something we don't. I thought this was a proven deal, and it turns out we were right, and the coach had deceived himself. So it can go both ways. Vanderbilt's a great example of how you can improve yourself at quarterback, at offensive coordinator, which I think is a very underrated part of their development. They're tight-end Eli Stowers, who's going to probably be one of the best two or three tight ends of the SEC by the end of the year. He's back. He's back. Man, he was so angry when he straight out the alone. Let's mind his brain now that he's calmed down after Elsie asked him a disrespectful question. And again, I do apologize, sir. That was not my intent. I was asking you about a potential too high defense that the offense is going to be facing this week. And I forgot that was pretty triggering for you. So please feel free to talk about whatever you want to talk about, Coach. What are you looking for in this game? What gets you excited about this game? Another opportunity to go out and prove that they said it wrong. Everybody's talking to them, "We can't run the ball. All right, let's go show them." Say, "We can't throw the ball deep. Let's show them." It's kind of like about pride at this point, right? You know what I mean? Like, we hear you. That's time to shut everybody up. That's how I feel. That's how I would approach as a stat and if I'm a player. And you get an opportunity to do that against a pretty solid SEC defense. So that's what I'm looking forward to most. Let's show that we can't run the ball other than just laterally. We can run right at you and run over you. And then we can take our deep shots when they're there, when they're there. So yeah. One of the things that we were just discussing, Coach, is, and I'd love to hear you and Justin's thoughts on this is you're, you know, you neck deep in the recruiting world. But there seems also to be, as Paul pointed out, the main key here is that roster management. But there also seems to be a much more even distribution of talent, at least in my assessment of this. What are your thoughts on that, Justin? Talent assessment, are you talking about on the 2025 class? What I'm talking about is it seems like, and I know Coach made this comment the other day, like, every, they've all got Division 1 players. They're all good players. It's not like, it's not like maybe we were in the Big 12 where there, it seemed to be a dominant top heavy. It seems now that the players throughout the league, I mean, they're just, they're just good players all the way through. And that needs to be the expectation moving forward. Is that a fair assessment? I think, I mean, from what we've seen so far in the SEC, that's a very accurate assessment of these guys. What we're seeing are the same level of athletes. We're just seeing so much, the numbers are so much more in the SEC than what we're used to seeing in the Big 12. Instead of playing a team that's got, you know, three or four, possibly five future NFL players, you're playing guys with 20, 25 guys that could potentially play on Sundays. And that's going to have some sort of effect. Like, I think we've learned as Texas fans that the SEC is a boxing match every Saturday, and it doesn't matter who or where you're playing. You know, Florida's missing a dozen guys this week, but they're still going to come in there and throw hands because that's what they're used to doing over, you know, since they've been in the SEC. I think Texas is starting to get used to that. Sartin knew what was coming. I think that's why he built this roster the way he did. He knew he needed depth. And most of these guys have bought in, most of the guys that are in the rotation have bought in that know, hey, in one drop, I can be in this game and one injury, I can be in this game. And so I think really just from a roster management standpoint, Sartin understood we have to not only get more talented, but we have to do it from a depth standpoint. Texas has always had the talent, but now you've got to match these guys. And look, Florida is missing a lot of guys, and they're not as good as they used to be. There are still NFL dudes lined up in Gainesville. They've got some really good defensive fronts that you've got to pay attention to. And so you can't take these guys for granted, even if it's a third string quarterback who was a walk-on former Ivy League star, you've got to pay attention to all these guys. And so at the end of the day, Sartin knew what he was doing when he built this roster. He understood the magnitude of having depth. It doesn't matter who's on the schedule. Ask any of these schools. I think Texas fans are kind of learning that this year that, man, it really does not matter. Any Saturday in this league, you can get beat if you don't bring it all. One thing that Drew said, and I think it was on Wednesday, and we were talking about the offensive line, Paul, and just the lack of push that we seem to be getting in the run game. And Drew attributed it to just the mental aspect of the players. They just need to have the want to do it. And he doesn't seem to think that's there. I'm curious if you agree with that sentiment, or is there something else? Is it schematic? What are your thoughts on that? I think there's an element of that. I think there's also the fact that we don't have a running play that we hang our hat on. So we try to be all things to all defenses. Typically, I mean, if you could pull that off, wow, like, awesome. But at the college level, that's very difficult to push off. I mean, you're either going to be mostly a gap team, or you're mostly going to be a zone team. You're mostly a zone team. You need to pick one of them. You need to be really good at inside zone or really good at outside zone and commit all of your resources to that. But the point that the point is, is it's very difficult to excel at every aspect of the run game, and you got to have it run play. It's third and two, and we know we can run inside zone and get three yards. And once you can do that, and you have that confidence and you keep hammering and shipping away, the big runs will come, especially at the backs, frankly, you can block your backs better, and you can run your blocking better. And one of the two needs to start happening for Texas. So either we need to create a bunch of line yards, and the backs just run through a big gaping hole, or the backs need to start breaking a tackle at that second level at the two yard mark, and turn that into a 21 yard game instead of a three yard game as they stumble forward. So something's got to give, but I would probably narrow down the playbook a little bit and find what is our run game staple? What are we going to rely upon and build out some of the play action game from, rather than trying to be all things to all running game? And I don't care what they pick. I'm partial to the counter tray with our personnel, the counter gaps. But whatever they pick, I hope they pick something and really start excelling at it, because that's what we need. There's been a tremendous amount of coverage that a lot of the people on this screen have provided, and we want you to check us out. Please go to InsideTexas.com, use the promo code IT1, and you're going to get two months of our content for one American dollar. I don't know if you guys are doing the math at home. That's going to get you pretty deep into the playoffs, guys. So that is a good amount of time the rest of this season. It's only going to cost you one American dollar to get the insight that these guys are providing. We can only give you the best we can in this short window, but the level of depth that is going on on the website at InsideTexas.com is fantastic and we would love for you to join our community. When I was looking at this team trying to do my breakdown, one thing I was looking at obviously is, and you know, I like to dig into the stats a little bit, we talked a little bit already about the average yards per play. And what I noticed in this statistic, which Paul laid out why the statistic is maybe less important than some others, but there is some parity there. So I started to think to myself, where is their other parity? And a lot of people don't understand maybe outside of the southeast, but the University of Florida, just like the University of Texas, is considered one of those public school IVs. It is a very good public institution, and they have developed 140 patents last year, which is pretty impressive. They ranked number 11th nationally. The University of Texas ranks third only behind MIT and I believe Berkeley. So that's pretty impressive. Now, you may be wondering, Texas gets 235 patents last year. Florida only gets 140. Why did Florida win this? Well, none of the University of Texas is patents, frankly mixed well with vodka and Gatorade Frost does. So Florida gets the, Florida gets the edge here. And lastly, this is my favorite statistic is the admission rate. This is a, this is a first, I didn't, I wasn't here for you guys for that, that Vanderbilt game, but Florida right now, admission rate is 23.3%. Texas is 31.4%, which again, means that Texas is serving its community better than the University of Florida. All right, guys, let's get into our, let's get into our picks for this game. We're going to start with you, coach. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are, initial thoughts. And then go ahead and give us that game score. Yeah, so I got Texas 31 and 16. I gave Florida 16. I feel like they're going to have to go for two, thinking they can probably give back in game late. They get a cheap score and go for two. But I think the game is over early. Texas scores over 30 points again. And I think we control the clock. Kind of like we did in this Vanderbilt. We played their game and beat them at their game. And then they try to support the end there and go for two, try to make the score look better, thinking they can get back in at late. But that's my prediction there. Justin, we'll go to you. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I'm kind of along with coach a little bit there. I really want to, you know, Gunnar Helm said something pretty stark this week. He's like, you know, we need to get a confidence back in our quarterback. It's a nice sentiment, but I don't really want to hear that publicly. I want to know that the guy is locked and loaded and ready to go. And so what which Quinn we see this week, I think is going to be telling in this. I've got Texas winning on 27 to 13. I don't think Florida can do much more than field goals at this point. I think they'll move the ball a little bit, but Texas defense is really good and they're really good at home. Like they I think they do rally around the fans in that regard. This is a defensive team. This is a program is built around this. And I think that's what's actually getting better. They're going to be able to score just because I do think they're going to lean on the run more. I do think they're going to have to establish some sort of run game because you've got to keep these defenses honest and not one of them is going to play honest until you can prove you can run the ball. And they don't need that. I don't blame them for that fact. But I think we're going to actually in our and one of our round table stories that'll post it inside Texas, I've got Jared Gibson getting a score in this game. I think he's going to be a key. I think he's a guy that that Texas fans want to kind of see a little bit more of. We saw him earlier in the season and the dude is some true North running style. Now he doesn't know any other direction. And so I got the horns in a close in 27 to 13. This score indicates 14 point game, but I actually don't think it's going to be this close on the field. But until I see Quinn, you were kind of go back revert to what we had seen earlier in the year. I think they're still at 27. Paul, what are your thoughts? I think I've got it at 3410. I'm not sure the Texas offense is going to provide all that. I think the Texas defense is going to set us up with some short fields. Yeah, I think we're going to turn the Gators over. And I think Florida is going to have trouble scoring unless we hand them as we have the past couple of games, unless we hand them the ball with our 30 yard line over and over. I don't think we're going to do that knock on wood. Ultimately, I just think it's going to be a pretty workman like victory over a Gator team that, frankly, has been kind of bitten by the injury bug and they're not going to be able to put their best foot forward. I also like the defense in this game. The University of Texas and the University of Florida have met three times. The University of Florida has never scored more than seven points in any of those meetings. And I'm going to hold to that tradition moving forward. I think that Justin is right in this instance. This is going to be a defensive game for us. I do hope we see some offense out of this game, but a little bit weary. I think we've all been, we're a little bit of the. Got a little abused wife syndrome a little bit, right? We don't know what is going to happen here. We still love everything about it, but we're just so, so worth it. It's going to, it's going to happen. So please join us throughout this week. We, tonight we're going to have inside the program probably launching here with the next one or two hours. We will have our pregame one hour before the snap. The second the clock hits zero, we are going to be in our post game show. And then I will be with you guys on Sunday for the day after. We want to thank coach for being here. We really appreciate you stepping in for a young Ian Boyd who had to move his brother in law today. Did we get a coach job prediction? Yeah, we did. He opened up for us. Oh, okay. Sorry. Maybe I should actually pay attention rather than read the chat. It's okay. It is a, it is a phenomenally delightful chat. And we appreciate everyone who is, who's participated in it. Join us at inside texas.com. Again, that is it one for two months for one American dollar. Have a good weekend, guys.
Coming off of a bye week the Texas Longhorns take on the Florida Gators. The boys break down expectations as the Texas Longhorns start their final campaign toward the SEC Championship Game.