Herman emphasizes team must ‘play cleaner brand of football’
AUSTIN — An unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Texas junior punter Ryan Bujcevski. A personal foul on senior center Derek Kerstetter on fourth-and-1 from the Oklahoma 2. A false start on redshirt sophomore left guard Junior Angilau on fourth-and-2 from the Sooners’ 38.
Those were just a sampling of penalties committed by Texas in last week’s crushing quadrupleovertime loss to Oklahoma.
In total, Texas (2-2, 1-2 Big 12) drew 11 penalties for 101 yards, bringing its aggregate across three Big 12 games to a leaguehigh 32 penalties for 278 yards. Had the Longhorns been able to prevent a few of those flags, they might be undefeated and at the top of a conference that has embraced the pervasive anarchy of 2020.
The problem is coach Tom Herman and his staff have struggled to get through to their players week after week. And if this group of well-compensated coaches can’t figure out how to engender more trust and faith, this season might unravel in uglier ways than anyone could’ve foreseen just a month ago.
“We’ve got to play a cleaner brand of football,” Herman said Monday. “I think you’re seeing it all across the country, but that is not an excuse. We’ve got to make
sure that we’re the exception and not the rule, and that we play a cleaner brand of football when we’re out there on Saturdays.”
For varying reasons, all the progress Herman says he has seen in practice hasn’t translated to the field. That felt true last Saturday at the Cotton Bowl, after days of Texas’ fourth-year coach raving about what an exceptional, maybe even historic, week of practice the team put in.
In fairness, it wasn’t all typical coach bluster.
The offense scored 45 points and gained 428 yards; the defense made several game-preserving stands despite Oklahoma starting with a short field. Every single week features Longhorns making plays on both sides of the ball, looking like the team that entered this season ranked No. 14 in the Associated Press poll.
The past three weeks —a nervewracking overtime win over an underwhelming Texas Tech team, a 33-31 home loss to TCU, and a heartbreak at the Cotton Bowl — all have featured far too
many self-inflicted wounds.
“You know, we are a work in progress,” Herman said. “And when you’re installing a new defense, you’re calling a new offense, there’s going to be some bumps in the road. And that’s not an excuse. That’s not something that we say is okay. But I think that’s also reality, too.
“So we’ve got a bye week and it’s important for us to make the most of all of those practice reps that we can get in to continue our
trajectory of improvement.”
Texas hasn’t been a picture of discipline under Herman.
The Longhorns finished last in average penalties (7.3) and ninth in penalty yards (68.5) among Big 12 teams last year. In 2018, Texas ranked eighth in penalties (7.4) and sixth in penalty yards (63.9). And in 2017, Texas finished ninth in both penalties (7.1) and penalty yards (66.8).
Most disheartening is seeing a player like Kerstetter, a senior captain and one of the most respected figures on the team, committing a costly penalty in year four of this regime.
“Nobody’s more sick about the penalty than (Kerstetter) is,” Herman said. “As he’s done very many times, he had assumed that Sam (Cosmi) was still up and driving the pile and that he was coming in to push the pile. We’ve got to be smarter in that instance, and he knows that.”
Texas has to fix this before its next game, an Oct. 24 meeting with Baylor at Royal-Memorial Stadium. But how?
It seems Herman is going to turn to a more aggressive style of teaching in a last-ditch effort to inspire something to change before it’s too late.
“And guys that commit foolish penalties will be punished,” Herman said. “And I’ve never been in the program that we’ve done that before. Some of the new coaches have been and so moving forward, we’ll punish foolish penalties. It’s the only thing left that we know how to do.”