Mack Brown wants Texas to be more like OSU

Photo Attribution: US Presswire

Ah, we were always headed here, weren’t we?

This is just fantastic.

Mack Brown has ditched his dream to become Alabama and is headed down the Oregon/Oklahoma State/Baylor path of “run as many plays as possible and get the oxygen ready for our defense.”

Here’s what he had to say in the Austin American-Statesman the other day:

We’re not going to be the option type team that Oregon is, but we are going to run Oregon’s tempo. But we still gotta (become) physical. We are not changing our offense; we are changing our tempo.

So where does the Oklahoma State comparison come in? How about here:

I thought Todd Monken did as good a job staying physical and running no huddle as anybody. We’ll head in that direction.

Texas actually wasn’t terrible on offense last year. They averaged 6.34 yards per play (22nd in the country) and they finished 23rd in the nation in points per game — the problem with that is that there were six (!) Big 12 teams that finished ahead of them in points per game.

Texas also averaged 2.99 points per drive last year, OSU averaged 3.21 so there’s evidence that Texas could actually pull this up-tempo move off quite seamlessly.

Here’s the Horns’ dirty little secret though (well, besides Major Applewhite’s dirty little secret) — they weren’t very good on defense.

They gave up MORE total points than OSU did, despite being on the field for 145 fewer plays.

OSU defense – 1034 plays – 367 points given up
Texas defense – 889 plays – 380 points given up

So while the new offense in Austin might work just fine, I’d be careful about tossing a defense that repeatedly got torched last year out there for 10-12 more plays a game.

But I also don’t make $5 million/year like Mack.