Making Plays

You hear all the time in college football that so and so is such a good coach. Truth is that players making plays make all coaches look good. Schemes and trick plays are nice, but the players have to execute them. Simple math really, the team that makes the most plays wins.

Since Texas did not play yesterday, I had an opportunity to watch other teams from around the country play and I saw "legendary" college coaches teams lose. Nick Saban at Alabama, Urban Meyer at Florida, and Joe Paterno at Penn State all lost. The teams their team was playing made more plays. Period.

Which brings me back to my point. A coach or coaching staff gets a lot of credit when their team wins, but the players are the ones that play. My beloved Longhorns were the benefactor of guys that made plays for the last 6 seasons. Vince Young made the coaches look good during a 30-2 stretch that included a National Championship. Colt McCoy went 45-8 and carried Texas on his back for 4 years. He WAS the team.

And when Colt went down in last season's National Championship game, the back up generator failed to click on and the excuse machine was activated. Garrett Gilbert came into the game and was horrible. A guy who throws 4 interceptions and has 1 fumble is BAD, not a poor guy thrown into the fire too soon. And the plays he supposedly made to bring the Horns back were executed by Jordan Shipley, who somehow was forgotten in all of the chaos.

This season, Texas is BAD. The players are not making plays. Coaches are still making excuses 5 games into the season and the fans are still waiting to see any resemblance to a good team. The offensive coordinator who with Vince Young and Colt McCoy looked like a genius, now looks incompetent. The defensive coordinator looks average at best to me, even though he has the head coach in waiting tag on him. And the head coach, the 5 million dollar man, spends a lot of time these days telling people what has happened in the past instead of what he expects to happen in the future.

The teams that I saw yesterday making plays are in a different league than Texas right now. These teams look like football teams executing at a high level, teams that are making plays, teams that are winning games.

And I believe it is harder to make plays when you play good teams. Teams like Boise State, Oregon, TCU, and Utah are making plays against bad teams, so in my opinion, they are getting more credit than they deserve right now. Put Boise State or Oregon in the SEC and see how many games they win when half of their play makers are hurt due to competing against better players who compete at a higher level than their current schedule allows.

If Nebraska continues to make plays and execute at a high level, brace yourselves, because it is gonna be a long, long afternoon in Lincoln this Saturday.