Texas' portal recruiting on the Edge

Recruiting Edge players from the transfer portal is a tricky business, as everyone learned from 2021 when Texas took three players and then had issues with the position all season long.

To be a great Edge you generally need a pretty rare combination of size and athleticism, along with length and skill, which makes such players highly sought after. If you’re over 6-foot-2, 235 pounds with high level athleticism and explosiveness, you tend to play. If you play and get a featured Edge role, you are probably pretty happy where you are, and thus you likely aren’t looking to transfer to another school.

There are exceptions of course. Coaching changes and NIL opportunities higher up the college football food chain can send great athletes into the portal who were highly valued at their previous stops. These guys are in high demand though and you need to be able to offer them a role, a friendly depth chart, and then probably a highly appealing NIL opportunity in order to get the good ones. In 2021 Texas had to take 3rd stringers from LSU, Notre Dame, and Alabama. In 2022 they’ve been aiming a big higher.

Thus far they’ve yet to sign a single one, but we all expect them to end up with at least one if not two before fall camp starts. The players they’ve been offering are pretty instructive to where they think they stand at the Edge positions heading into 2022 and how they’d like to deploy the positions.

Texas’ Edge-heavy defense

It was highly unfortunate for Pete Kwiatkowski that his first year at Texas coincided with the resolution of a recruiting and schematic strategy by Todd Orlando in which the Edge position was underutilized or ignored and the roster had slowly been purged of them. His approach to executing a modern zone-blitz system descended from the 3-4 defense of yesteryear is the precise opposite as Orlando’s.

Rather than removing the outside linebackers and replacing them with defensive backs on the edge and regular-blitzing inside linebackers, Kwiatkowski keeps the outside linebackers on the field as defensive ends in his 2-4-5 nickel package.

In fact there are three outside linebacker positions for Texas and all of them have their chances to rush the edge, play standing up, and dropping back into hook or curl-flat zones in coverage. Small wonder Texas signed so many in their 2022 recruiting class and small wonder Steve Sarkisian didn’t feel the 2021 season was particularly indicative of what PK can do as a coach at Texas given their deficiencies at these spots. Here are the three positions:

Sam linebacker: This position plays in the base 3-4 scheme to the wide side of the field. Ovie Oghoufo played here pretty heavily against Oklahoma State and Baylor when Texas was keen to set the edge and stop the run. He’s like a hybrid between a nickel linebacker and an old school Sam.

Jack linebacker: This position is always on the field as the defensive end to the wide side of the field. He might be standing up fairly wide on the edge or he could also be asked to line up as far inside as a 4i-technique (across the inside eye of the offensive tackle) or potentially even as a 3-technique (outside of the offensive guard). He’s like a strongside end but his role is hybridized.

Buck linebacker: This position is halfway between the Sam and the Jack. He lines up to the boundary side of the field and stays on the wide edge rather than spinning inside to a 4i like the Jack sometimes does. The Buck drops into coverage a lot, but he doesn’t have to cover as much space as the Sam. He’s a typical weakside end hybrid player but PK probably drops him into coverage more than your typical coach would in deploying his weakside end.

The Jack linebacker is the most important position. He needs to be strong at the point of attack because he’s setting the edge to the wide side of the field (especially in the 2-4-5 when he has a defensive back at nickel rather than a Sam) and he’s also going to be rushing the passer more often than the Buck so ideally he’s pretty good at it.

Texas’ depth chart in 2021 went as follows at these spots:

• Sam linebacker: Ovie Oghoufo, Ben Davis
• Jack linebacker: Jacoby Jones/Alfred Collins, Jett Bush
• Buck linebacker: Ray Thornton, Ovie Oghoufo

None of these positions went great for Texas but the most glaring issues to most fans came when they’d play 6-foot-2, 235 pound walk-on and converted inside linebacker Jett Bush as the Jack. It didn’t go terribly well and it was clear the reason he was playing there was because his co-horts in the Edge position room were even weaker at trying to hold the point of attack there than he was.

Here’s the trick for 2022 as Texas aims to improve considerably. All of these positions are a little more heavy on technical skill than average because of the hybrid nature of each position. PK made his name as a coach by developing guys into these roles and sending them off to the NFL as versatile, skilled defensive players. However, between the level of skill needed and the challenge of battling college offensive tackles on a regular basis, it’s not a position which is particularly friendly to freshman.

So back to the portal we go.

Texas’ portal offers in 2022

Here are the Edge players in the portal we’ve seen Texas offer thus far, in order of their offer.

Jared Verse: 6-foot-4, 247 pounds. University of Albany

Verse is a little flexible on his potential position. With his length and power (evident on film) he could translate at Jack. He’s mostly a pure Edge rusher at this point though (only a redshirt freshman in 2021, mind you) and would probably have fit at Buck in most systems. It would have been interesting to see how Texas used him. Verse was in the portal early on and Texas jumped in late and ineffectively.

He committed to Florida State.

Drew Sanders: 6-foot-5, 244 pounds. Alabama

Sanders is a Buck all the way. He ran a 10.91 100m in high school and used his speed routinely at Alabama to drop into coverage from the boundary outside linebacker position, occasionally turning and running without much difficulty on wheel routes. He’s a solid pass-rusher with the potential to be better still, simply because of his explosiveness and speed, but he would have taken very well to the hybrid nature of the position in Texas’ scheme.

As it happens, he prefers not to play on the Edge like most freak athletes with size and wants to try off-ball linebacker at Arkansas.

Ochaun Mathis: 6-foot-5, 257 pounds. TCU

For years Mathis was a big, powerful athlete who didn’t quite know what he was doing at TCU. Then he started to work out how to use his size and explosiveness within the TCU scheme, which was heavy on line movement but virtually never had him drop into coverage, and he put up some numbers in 2020 and at times in 2021 (two sacks vs Oklahoma).

Mathis’ position at TCU was “left defensive end” and it wasn’t a 1-to-1 of Texas’ Jack position but there were some reasonable parallels. He would routinely play heads up on offensive tackles, would knife into B-gaps at times, and he uses his length and power to set the edge. He’d be a no brainer fit at Jack for Texas. The only thing he lacks is much experience dropping into coverage, but the Jack doesn’t do this regularly anyways.

He’s set to finish this term and take visits but Texas is favored. They have the Gary Patterson connection and also a friendly depth chart.

De’Rickey Wright: 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. Vanderbilt

Wright has bizarre, frustrating film. Trying to gauge his ability to play on the edge from his 2021 film is how I imagine NFL evaluators must have felt watching Joseph Ossai play nickel and Will linebacker for Todd Orlando in 2019.

“I mean sure, he can credibly drop up the hash and take receivers to the flat from the box as a nickel linebacker…why would you want him to?”

He has obvious potential as an edge rusher, particularly from the weakside on stunts where he could dive inside and hunt for daylight against O-lineman who are pre-occupied carrying defensive tackles outside on loops. He can accelerate, he can change direction, he can drop into coverage, and he has fantastic length for taking on blockers or obstructing passing windows while closing in on quarterbacks. Wright is particularly skilled as a coverage dropper, having played as what Texas calls a “Sam” in Vanderbilt’s base defense last year as the starter.

He has very little film setting an edge because he always had a true defensive end inside and in front of him. What film he has in setting the edge shows he understands the relatively simple concept of contain but how he might handle good Y-backs and guards kicking him out on split zone or counter is hard to know. He’d also miss the spring for Texas and have that much less time to master those skills.

Also revealing, here are a couple of Edge players in the portal Texas has not offered.

Khari Coleman: 6-foot-2, 221 pounds. TCU

Coleman won the right defensive end job at TCU opposite Mathis as a true freshman in 2020 and posted 15 tackles for loss and three sacks. The low sack total doesn’t really speak to the havoc he routinely caused as a regular uninvited guest in opposing backfields. Then in 2021 he fell off considerably after missing much of the early season with injury and apparently remaining hampered throughout the rest of the year.

He’s like a bigger Eric Striker, extremely sudden but also small. Moving to Buck rather than playing as a defensive end in a 4-down front would be a big win for him but he didn’t really get any reps in coverage at TCU so it wouldn’t be a seamless transition. It appears Texas isn’t really interested, perhaps because of the lack of coverage skill or because Patterson isn’t impressed from his time in Fort Worthy, maybe both.

Mitchell Agude: 6-foot-4, 245 pounds. UCLA

Agude was at JUCO before he went to UCLA and he started last year in a position that was nearly identical to Texas’ Jack linebacker spot. While he doesn’t have the ideal weight for playing an inside shade, he does have some length. He had 6.5 tackles for loss and two sacks for UCLA last year and most of his film involves him moving hard and fast off the ball to take a gap. If he timed those bursts well he was effectively, otherwise he wasn’t very good.

There may be others like him in the portal with some experience in trying to set a wide edge but Texas hasn’t seemed interested, either waiting to see how it goes with Mathis or content it’ll pan out.

What is Texas planning at Edge in 2022?

The offers Texas has made reflect a few different priorities. One is to add talent on the edge which is ready to play immediately. Texas added a number of Edge prospects in the 2022 recruiting class but it’s tough trying to start as a freshman, as mentioned above, and only Justice Finkley and Jaray Bledsoe will be present in spring practices to get a good start.

Another clear priority is to target Bucks who can drop into coverage. That’s simply the nature of PK’s defensive system, which he clearly doesn’t intend to jettison after one tough year with non-ideal personnel. What’s more, he’s right. Having the flexibility to drop the Buck combined with having a true Edge to the wide side of the field regardless is exactly how you win in the modern game. You want to be able to rush the passer with three while dropping eight and you accomplish this by having something like a Jack linebacker on the field.

Here’s Texas’ Under front they played extensively in 2021, but imagine it with Mathis as the Jack and Alfred Collins as the defensive tackle in a 3-technique while a coverage-savvy weakside rusher such as Wright, Oghoufo, or Jett Bush is at the Buck position.

There’s a lot of pressure the defense can get by mixing the angles and order they send the 3-technique and Buck after the quarterback. If your 3-technique is a good pass-rusher and the Buck is a flexible hybrid there’s a lot of damage to be done. Add in occasional blitzes by the boundary corner, safety, or Will linebacker and you’re really cooking.

Finally, Texas’ offers suggest they want both a Jack and a Buck who can compete to start 2022 and buy time for their younger players to learn the ropes. The fact they keep offering coverage-savvy Bucks while standing pat at Jack with the Mathis offer speaks to their comfort there.

Gain Mathis and the most important position is settled, then Texas can play more of a hybrid at Buck and mix in different looks and coverages while maintaining hope of being able to rush the quarterback and defend the wide edge with three down linemen. The success of Texas’ offseason on defense probably hinges on securing the commitment from the Horned Frog. The quest to add players like Wright is secondary. If Texas does better in the portal here than in 2022 it should have a reverberating effect across the entire unit.