Gilbert gets offense up to speed in a hurry
AUSTIN — They spent the offseason bragging about their new, 21st-century system, and proclaimed themselves to be the fastest offense Texas had seen. Against Notre Dame, the Longhorns said, they were going to unleash an attack that would change everything.
That was last year. And after a dud of an opener against the Fighting Irish in September 2015, some of UT’s players wondered if they were doomed to be left behind in college football’s no-huddle revolution.
“Well, is it something we just can’t do here?” tailback D’Onta Foreman said he remembers thinking. “Like, can we not be that fast?”
But as it turned out, all the Longhorns needed was a barbecue-loving, boot-wearing, slow-drawlin’ country boy from San Angelo to move their jalopy into the passing lane.
When UT coach Charlie Strong boarded a private plane to Oklahoma with athletic director Mike Perrin and school president Greg Fenves last December, a nation of college football fans laughed. How far had the once-mighty Longhorns fallen if they were begging a 37-year-old assistant (now 38) from a mid-major conference to rescue them?
Nine months later, it’s clear they knew something most others didn’t. Sterlin Gilbert, who learned the intricacies of the hurry-up, no-huddle offense from former Baylor coach Art Briles and later helped install it at Eastern Illinois, Bowling Green and Tulsa, already has transformed UT’s offensive outlook after one game as coordinator.
The program spent much of the previous six years stuck in neutral while the Baylors, TCUs, Texas A&Ms and Houstons of the world embraced the style of offense most popular in the state’s high schools, and not so coincidentally, the one most preferred by recruits.
Strong began his tenure at UT hoping to stick with the conventional, pro-style approach that worked for him at Louisville. That turned into a disaster. So, too, did his half-hearted effort to have former coordinator Shawn Watson implement a quicker pace.
But upon Gilbert’s arrival with his longtime friend and collaborator, offensive line coach Matt Mattox, UT finally began a legitimate overhaul. And from the first day of spring drills, it became apparent that this time, things really were changing.
“We were like, ‘Whoa, this is too fast,’ ” Foreman said. “I didn’t think I was going to catch on to how fast it was.”
But he did, and so did the guys around him. In Sunday’s season-opening 50-47 upset of Notre Dame, the Longhorns averaged one play per 21 seconds of game time. Last season, they averaged one per 25 seconds.
And while that might not sound like a dramatic improvement, the impact on winded defenders is real. Whether it was Shane Buechele throwing long passes to John Burt, or Foreman and Tyrone Swoopes running roughshod over would-be tacklers, Notre Dame’s defenders couldn’t keep up.
Is that why Strong got on that plane last December?
“I expected it,” he said, smiling.
Gilbert, for his part, doesn’t like to expound too much on how he pulled it off. He demurs when asked about how he connected with Buechele, or about who he talks to on his headset, or even about his approach to game-planning.
“We just call it, and they ball it,” Gilbert said.
What Strong especially likes about Gilbert’s scheme is that it doesn’t limit the Longhorns to one style of play.
When they want to spread the field, they can have Buechele fire darts to defense-stretching wide receivers like Burt and Jerrod Heard. But they also retain the ability to run the ball, as evidenced by Foreman’s 131 yards on 24 carries.
“We’re going to pound people, too,” Strong said.
So far, it’s tough to argue with that. And even though plenty of others might have doubted Gilbert’s ability to make it happen, he never gave the slightest impression he did.
“He has so much confidence in himself,” Strong said. “When you have that, and the players believe in the system, it’s going to work out.”