With Texas football 15 games into the season, execution takes precedence in the College Football Playoff

Despite it being a new year, there aren’t many new leaves available for teams like Texas and Ohio State to turn over ahead of the College Football Playoff semifinals at the Cotton Bowl. The Longhorns have a program record 15 games under their belt, one more than Ohio State’s 14.

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Teams are what they are strategically at this juncture, and the coaching staffs of both the Longhorns and the Buckeyes will have an extra couple of days to study the ins and outs of their opponents.

“You have 15 games on tape of what type of schemes you run,” Longhorns safety Michael Taaffe said Sunday.

Ryan Day and company are going to look at the Longhorns and see a team that tries to major in outside zone, RPOs, tight end checkdowns, and play-action deep shots on offense. They’ll see a team that has run a significant amount of middle-of-the-field closed coverages, leaves Thorpe Award winner Jahdae Barron to his own effective devices, and brings pressure from a variety of places with an athletic defensive front.

“We know when we get to this point in the playoffs, we’re going to be playing against great players and great scheme,” Day said Friday. “And we know that this offense has a chance to be very, very explosive. So we’ve got to get back to work this week and focus on the game plan, make sure that we have a good mixture of the things that we’ve done in the past, mixed in with things that are possible change-ups along the way, based on how they attack us.”

Steve Sarkisian will see a Buckeye passing attack that features two nearly impossible-to-guard wideouts in Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka and a two-headed multi-faceted rushing offense all helmed by a capable, athletic quarterback in Will Howard. On the other side of the football, Sark and his offensive staff will see a familiar Jim Knowles defensive system with top-tier pass-rushers and one of the best football players in the nation patrolling the middle of the field in Caleb Downs.

He’ll also see a Buckeyes team that has done everything at an extremely high level during the College Football Playoff.

“Game planning, putting together a nice plan on offense, defense, and special teams, and instilling that with the players, and the players playing with confidence,” Sarkisian said Friday, highlighting strengths of Day’s staff. “I think that’s one thing that jumps out when you watch it is how confidently they’re playing. They’re definitely calling it aggressively, but the execution is at a really high level. So that’s what jumps out at us.”

The amassed knowledge will make execution paramount in these games. Because of the significant amount of data on tape for both programs, there won’t be a ton of surprises. After all, Texas knew Cam Skattebo wanted to run the football for the Arizona State Sun Devils, and had much of the ASU preference capably corralled until exhaustion started to play a factor. Similar applied to Arizona State with the Texas run game, which was bottled up in Atlanta. It took miscues by a handful of Arizona State defenders in the pass game for the Longhorns to even be able to continue their season with a victory.

Knowing how to contain the expected is one part of the equation. Being prepared for the unexpected is another.

Arizona State executed multiple game-changing trick plays. A fake punt from deep inside minus territory extended one Sun Devil drive, while a Skattebo touchdown pass against an out-of-sorts secondary pulled ASU within one possession late. Off-schedule plays, the type Howard can make, also hurt the Longhorns when Sam Leavitt used his legs.

Conversely, the Longhorns have a specialty Arch Manning package at their disposal in addition to a number of trick plays Sarkisian has run over the years.

Both the Longhorns and the Buckeyes will need to be wary of exotic plays, specifically the Longhorns on special teams after succumbing to shocks the third phase in several key games.

Those tricks and the like are deviations from the norm. While they could be effective, the Longhorns and Buckeyes are going to work toward making sure their bread and butter strategies are operating at peak efficiency in the highest-stakes game of the season for both teams.

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These teams know each other well at this point, despite not playing since the year 2009, thanks to so much data on tape from the 2024 season. Whoever walks out of AT&T Stadium with the win will be the team that more often executed preferred plans.