Former state championship winning coach Bryan Erwin discusses Texas vs. TCU

Lunch With The Coach is our weekly segment on On Texas Football with Bobby Burton (subscribe!) in which we get perspective from two-time state champion head coach Bryan Erwin. Coach Erwin was at La Marque when he reached the heights of 4A football twice. He is also a Texas-Ex, so hints of his irrepressible fandom often appear. Because of that, and the fact he speaks authentic Texas High School Football coach, to gain the full experience I’d encourage you to listen on your drive to work, while working out, etc. But if you can’t listen or watch, you can at least read his thoughts here.

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Erwin’s initial takeaway was the defense played very well considering how many bad positions it was put in. Said Erwin, “Really proud of our defense, the way they got stops, the way they got off the field, just an incredible display of defensive football.”

Burton mentions the inability of the offense to get the run game going. Erwin responds, “No, we couldn’t, there wasn’t much there. You gotta keep pounding it. You have to have the ability and capacity to stay with it, because guess what, they couldn’t run the ball either and they just kept staying with it and they put themselves in position to stay with it until finally the dam broke. I was at the game, there was no space out there. They were blanketing us. There was just no space. They took the air out of our offense.” 

Erwin mentions on defense you want to compress space, on offense you have to create it and Texas wasn’t creating it.

“Quinn struggled, it wasn’t a great game. Sark struggled, it wasn’t a great game. But I’m telling you, there wasn’t much there. Credit to TCU, they played great defense. Lack of credit would go to our offensive line and wide receivers. We got re-routed and then re-routed. We couldn’t get off re-routes from the defenders.”

Burton states Texas struggled with Sark’s preferred personnel packages and asks Erwin if Sark should have looked to spread them out earlier. Erwin responds, “In hindsight yes. I think Sark found that midway through the 3rd quarter. We found it and had some success and stayed with it. Maybe we should have stayed with it a little bit more. That was our best combination of plays because basically what we were doing we were getting in 11 personnel (1 RB, 1, TE, 3 WR) and we had the tight end set on the same side as the three receivers. So because we’re not a Zone Read team we can hand it to the tailback without Zone Reading it because we have a tight end on the back side to protect the C-gap. Block the guy most people normally read. We run the ball to the two-man service side. And then you got your RPO out to the same side. Quinn was throwing the RPO bubble to Jordan (Whittington) and we were picking up big chunks of yardage or we were handing it off to Bijan (Robinson). I think his best run was 9-yards, I believe, out of that set, that RPO scheme, in which we actually handed it off. Yeah, I wish we would have found that earlier.”

Burton wonders if we are getting to a time of the year where moving the football is more difficult due to teams having more familiarity on what. “I think it’s because you have 7, 8, 9 games of film on people. You know their route concepts, they’re not going to start developing new route concepts. You know the adjustment off those concepts. You’ve got a ton of data (the gruff voiced Erwin is a dat-uh not dayt-uh sort) that you can scout and show your players throughout the week. The passing game is a little easier to defend this time of year. That’s exactly why you gotta be able to run the ball in November. The college game and the NFL game, you’ve got to be able to run the football. We didn’t run the ball worth a lick the other night and therefore we played the way we played and produced the way we produced. It’s inexcusable, we have to be able to run the football to be a championship club.” 

Does Erwin have any words of encouragement for Ewers? “Keep your head up. Have fun. Make sure you’re preparing as hard as you possibly can. That’s up to him. We don’t know what that looks like throughout the week, I know what it should look like. Prepare, work your tail off, be the hardest worker on the team. Be ultimately prepared going into the game so you’re physically and mentally ready to go. Let’s have a great week this week. Let’s rebound. He’s a player but he’s a freshman. We gotta go through these growing pains. Sam Ehlinger went through these growing pains. Colt McCoy went through these growing pains. Vince Young went through these growing pains.”

Burton notes Pete Kwiatkowski may have had his most aggressive game plan to date. Erwin’s thoughts, “Oh it was fun. Snap-1, they lined up trips and we start matching those trips receivers, I’m like okay here we go we’re going with man coverage on first down, first route out of the box. We played aggressive, we played physical, they flew to the ball. We shut down the running game from the start. They had no air in there, there was no space in there. Doing a great job against the run, getting great pressure on (Max) Duggan and just played very, very well especially under the circumstances because the field position game was ugly in the first half. At half time I thought we were so fortunate to be down three to nothing. It’s a win. You know I didn’t blame Sark at all for not being aggressive right there at the half. I thought let’s get to half time, this has been about as ugly as it can be. Let’s get to the half, let’s make some adjustments, let’s talk through this, and get out of there because I was happy we were only down three at the half.”

What did Erwin see that was new on defense? “Early on, starting out playing some man coverage. I love that. I love the aggression there. We brought some pressure off the edge, especially from the field. Or we baited them, we bluffed them. Jahdae Barron did a great job of showing pressure and then not coming. And not showing pressure and then coming. We got great push from those guys inside, our edge guys played well. By and large, stopping the run and getting pressure on the quarterback. And just flying around, our guys were flying, and physical, and having fun. You know what I really like most, no matter how bad it got — the first couple of series, okay our offense isn’t moving the ball, no big deal but it’s fixing to come. Third series, didn’t move it. Fourth series, didn’t move it. Fifth series, didn’t move it. I was watching our defensive guys and their body language to see kind of were they gonna keep that energy level up, and they were. No matter how bad it got, no matter how bad the circumstances were, those guys’ body language was there. They were confident.”

For this week, “Everybody needs to step up, this is not on Quinn Ewers. Everybody’s gotta step up their play.” Erwin goes on to state Xavier Worthy needs to compete for balls, “he’s not even drawing PI’s.” 

Erwin mentions this week is more about Texas than Kansas. Texas has to be able to run the ball. “What I’m most concerned about today, we probably lost a tremendous amount of confidence on offense. And when you lose confidence, especially on offense, it’s tough, tough, to regain it. As a play caller, as a quarterback, as a tailback, it’s tough. And so that’s my biggest concern right now is offensively we haven’t scored a touchdown in six quarters. We’ve lost some confidence. They can say they haven’t — we have.”

“We need to get our confidence back on offense and we need our defense to come out and play like they did last week.”