Strong Coaches

AUSTIN — Three new football assistants were introduced to the media Monday in Anthony Johnson, Charlie Williams, and Clay Jennings.

All three left jobs that were, relatively, more stable than their current shifts on the 40 Acres. By most accounts, Charlie Strong and his crew will be looking for work if the program doesn’t win at least eight games against a loaded 2016 schedule. In essence, it’s a one-year audition for the new coaches, some of whom are still living out of suitcases and moving boxes.

DB coach Clay Jennings gets it.

“There are two types of coaches: the ones who been hired and the ones who been fired,” he said. “I don’t want to be the latter. We know we’ve got to get this thing going in the right direction. We have to do it quickly, but it’s exciting to know we have an opportunity to put a better brand of ball on the field this fall.”

A former Arkansas DB coach (2013-15), Jennings was recruiting against Texas just one month go and coaching against UT a little more than one year ago at the AdvoCare Texas Bowl. He quipped that he “had to sleep with one eye open” once news broke in the Ozarks that he was leaving for Texas. (If you’ve been to Fayetteville, you know they still hate Texas like it’s December 6, 1969).

However, Jennings is a native Texas who spent six seasons (2008-13) as TCU’s cornerback coach. He also grew up a Longhorn fan who believes Strong has made strides in building-up the Texas program.

“You have to be able to believe in the individual. Coach Strong is building this program on belief. When I was Arkansas, the one thing we talked about was trust, belief and accountability. The young men are beginning to trust where the program is going. They obviously have a great trust in their head coach who is our leader. They’re doing a great job of making sure there is accountability not only to us, not only to the University, but also to themselves.”

Yet, there is no collegiate football program that is more high-risk, high-reward than The University of Texas. And that’s part of what brings this particular trio of coaches to Austin. Each assistant, to a man, said the opportunity to coach the Longhorns was too good to “pass up.”

That’s especially true for RB coach and Texas-Ex Anthony Johnson. The Longhorn letterman (2001-05) from Jefferson, TX, arrives from Toledo (2014-15) where the Rockets led the Mid-American Conference in rushing both seasons. His 2014 unit finished No. 12 with 256.4 rushing ypg. Johnson had just been named co-offensive coordinator before accepting the RB job at his alma mater.

“I told everybody I knew that, at some point, I’d be back,” Johnson said, “but I didn’t know when. Words can’t describe how I feel about being back. They wouldn’t do it any justice.”

Johnson wasn’t hired primarily for his ties to the program, and he didn’t even know Strong until a week ago. His addition to the staff has OC Sterlin Gilbert’s hands all over it. There is considerable carryover from the attack that Johnson ran at Toledo to the scheme Gilbert is installing at Texas.

“From a tempo standpoint, we’d try to run as many plays as we could and as fast as we could,” Johnson said. “We’d try to wear defenses out. We’d try to overwhelm them with our speed and athleticism.

Johnson wants to upgrade a scheme that will continue to feature a power-running game.

“There really is a lot of carryover,” Johnson said. “Texas isn’t running anything that we haven’t run at Toledo. It makes it easy just from a conceptual standpoint. Football is football. Everybody runs the same plays but, if you talk about tempo, if you talk about huddle-up, there’s different types of ways to run it. It’s all about execution of the plays.”

WR coach Charlie Williams is the old man of the bunch. The 30-year coaching spent veteran the past four seasons with the Indianapolis Colts (three with the WRs, one with RBs). Prior to Indianapolis, Williams was the WR coach from 2007-2011.

Inquiring minds want to know: why leave the professional ranks to return to college ball?

“They (Colts) were going to pay me for another year,” Williams noted, “so I could have just sat back and relaxed. When I had the opportunity to come to Texas, I couldn’t pass it up.”

Williams does not frame his job in terms of the length of time it will take to restore Texas to a championship-caliber program.

“I see it like this: week after week, we have to do our job to get our players prepared. Then they have to go out and execute the plan. It’s a process, but it’s a process that’s already started. It started when we all got here.”

Williams inherits a stockpiled room of WRs, featuring John Burt who is go-the-distance on those rare occasions when a QB hits him in stride. Williams has been in town just one weekend, but he’s well aware of how wildly inconsistent the receivers were in 2015. That’s why says spring football, in his area, will resemble of “game of musical chairs.” It’s going to be a long time, perhaps even the week of the September home-opener against Notre Dame, Williams said, before he will name the starters.

“The main thing is ‘catch the football,’ Williams said. “If you’re going to be a wide receiver, you have to catch the football. That’s the number one thing. Number two, the thing we don’t do, is put the ball on the ground.”

The coaching carousel during Strong’s tenure has meant that his piecemealed staff was not always on the same page philosophically, schematically or even linguistically when trying to teach concepts. It’s too soon to tell if the current staff is on the same page but, at first blush, they’re at least in the same chapter. ‘Communication’ has been the buzz-word since early September, and was no less on Monday.

“Even if we’re all wrong,” Jennings said, “then we’ll be all right.”

And if things go “all right” in 2016, Texas will celebrate the one-year anniversary of most of its football coaches rather than introducing the new ones.