On Texas Football - State of the Program: Special assistants hiring info, a big June and more
On the latest video episode of On Texas Football’s State of the Program, Inside Texas’s Bobby Burton and Eric Nahlin give us some opinions on the Longhorns’ new coaching hires, on the anticipation for a big June and other things around Texas athletics.
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Both Burton and Nahlin lauded the hiring of former Wisconsin and Pittsburgh coach Paul Chryst and give us some insight on the two other new special assistants – longtime Division I and FCS coach Payam Saadat to help with the defense and Joe DeCamillis as a special teams boost.
“The Chryst hiring definitely caught my eye – that was a head turner in a good way though,” said Nahlin, the publisher of InsideTexas.com. “You know, I tend to downplay the value of analysts. I don’t mean that they don’t provide value. I think a lot of fans hope that they’re like the panacea and the one thing that’s gonna get them over the hump and more often than not they’re just more of a minor piece than that natural coaches on the field.
“But obviously, with Chryst, that’s to me, that’s the same level as hiring Gary Patterson,” Nahlin continued. “He could have some of the same effect that Gary Patterson did, helping, you know, conflict on run schemes, technique, they can go over different ways to teach these different techniques and schemes, game planning defenses.
“You know, I think there’s probably been a value added with him evaluating players. They kind of look for the same things and he’s going to open up a different region than Texas has traditionally would have.”
Burton related a story former Texas assistant Major Applewhite told him about how analysts works when Applewhite was at Alabama.
“When Major was on his staff recently as an analyst,” Burton laid out. “He said that we may sprinkle in a play or two here or there. That’s ‘hey, have you ever seen anything like this before? Have you ever run anything like this?’ And Major’s response would be ‘Uh, yeah, we did that all the time in the Big 12. But we did it this way.’ And that’s that was while Steve Sarkisian was there in Alabama.”
“My point to you and to everyone is that it’s very small things that get into the detail and minutia of football, they may end up being very valuable,” Burton continued. “They start off as kernels of an idea where they basically just, you know, throw ideas off and try to create a better team and a better product.”
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The two break down their thoughts on all three of the special assistants in the video, so go check it out in its entirety.
