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mantis toboggan

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Posts posted by mantis toboggan

  1. 34 minutes ago, SamMan said:

    Tiny quibble here. Respectfully, Bobby actually did say this very thing. I believe it was one of the morning shows, probably late-March. Something to the effect of “guys, I’m just telling y’all, this team is literally a big time, difference maker at DT away from being a legit championship contender next year. Without it, I’m not sure that they are. That’s the only impediment they have right now.” I remember it because I remember thinking, “that’s a bold statement—the last time I saw that secondary they looked like dog shit, and they are sporting a years long track record of underperformance.” 

    The rest of this is long, it is spoilered for space:

      Reveal hidden contents

    @JFKFC gets it half right when he says what he heard and was told was horseshit. The problem is it isn’t NIL and the big swinging dicks that let him down. His blame is ill-placed. OTF shoulders some of the load here.

    That said, I never took Bobby’s hyper fixation on that singular issue too seriously. The man readily admits that he is a compulsive worrier and tends to focus on the negative. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, either. He spent the entire offseason last year looking under every rock to find a way to get Jake Majors (suggesting either Conner or Hutson take over repeatedly) out of the starting center position he had competently held for two years because he was simply too damn small and had snap infractions. [Ironically, now he has changed course and thinks Cruz should move to guard..because Majors and Robertson are good. I’d rather not discuss Conner’s struggles or why Ian thought Campbell (lefties can’t snap!) lacked the mental acuity to play anywhere on offense, ergo he should be a NT.] Likewise, Gerry has been expertly trained in striking the perfect balance between what his audience wants to hear, and what his audience needs to hear. In my opinion, they bear some responsibility for the schadenfreude going around right now. They pushed narrowly-tailored narratives that fit preconceived notions/outcomes, and those things did not come to pass.

    Bobby bitching about the tone and tenor of the secondary discussion turning caustic is amusing to me, considering they (other than Rod) hardly covered it with anything more than cursory explanations as to how and why they will be better (“faster, more athletic”) and platitudes about the coaches (“they didn’t have the guys”). They downplayed or dismissed any and all concerns expressed until after the spring game. It took Brooks (starter, presumed leader) completely blowing a coverage for them to mention a thing about him. Then we learned he showed up overweight (definitely heard about Mitchell’s weight and his illness at the start of camp) and hadn’t been cutting it on the field all spring (definitely dissected Collins, Broughton, and Bryant’s abilities and camp performance extensively in that same period). Suddenly, everybody (including the entire informed class of Texas commentators, apparently) realized the DBs were nowhere close to the competitive standard we were assured existed everywhere but DT…and the criticism was fierce.

    Bobby ripped a true freshman for getting beat by another true freshman and a third true freshman making a great throw. A competitive rep. Not a blown coverage. Suddenly, Kobe Black is behind schedule, his move to safety has all but been made for him, and Ryan Wingo is a top ten lock for the 2027 draft. Likewise, a third or fourth string CB matches up against WR1 (more on him in sec) and gets beat on a competitive rep (not a blown coverage) with no pass rush, and Bobby rips him, too. You think his audience isn’t going to take that and run with it? Who coaches the guys he is suddenly criticizing quite harshly? “Terry Joseph wasn’t a punching bag until Brooks hit the portal and the secondary sucked..” No shit, dude. Look in the mirror. You control the conversation. It was hardly discussed until right now.

    Back to WR1, the guy who came to Texas claiming to be a first round pick. Why do they feel the need to provide a catalogue of excuses for a veteran receiver having “the yips” or otherwise not being able to catch a perfectly thrown ball? We heard it was “anxiety” or “people in the stands” or Gerry’s latest “he has kinda always dropped the ball early.” What the fuck is that about? If we’re going to say the DBs he was up against were trash, why are we making excuses for his inability to do what he is paid to do? Hold him to a standard in accordance with his own fucking claim.

    Thing is, they went from saying:

    ”Jabbar Muhammad—too short, they like what they’ve got.” 

    to “Brooks’ departure was anticipated. They have a plan in place. They are going to prioritize speed and length. The WRs in the SEC are bigger, stronger, faster, better than everybody else. Gotta be able to hang with the X receivers in that league. They are going to go big game hunting. Davis will definitely get on campus for a visit.” [Credit to Rod here. Gerry tried to get him to vibe with this narrative (boundary corner bs), and he pushed back against it.]

    to “peep this 5-10 175 lb corner who did nice things against UNLV while at SJSU for a year.”

    That’s the issue—not failing to sign a guy, or going after inadequate talent, but leading your audience in one specific direction, toward one specific outcome, and then drastically changing course when that outcome doesn’t happen. When that occurs, blame is often assigned to the wrong parties. It makes the coaches seem incompetent and the money men appear to be gun shy. Look, I like those guys. I’ve followed Bobby and Gerry’s work for over two decades now, and they are two of the best in the industry. But they aren’t infallible.  

    Quite frankly, I’m not too worried about either position. There is enough talent available that is capable of stepping up in those rooms, and there is more than enough talent capable of stepping up around them. I like Alex January and Wardell Mack was my favorite prospect in the previous cycle. If anybody is going to step up and start challenging guys for snaps by mid-to-late October, my money would be on those two. I think we’re going to be alright, but I’ve been wrong before. It’ll definitely be entertaining to watch.

     

    A Deadly Adoption Applause GIF

  2. 1 minute ago, Texas Flood said:

    You must be Ketch’s new sock. That or you’re just a mouth breathing dumbass voluntarily spamming the board with his articles that no one’s asking for.

     

    The sausage finger typos look like a Ketch giveaway though. 

    You got me. I didn’t know you spoke for the people that commented and genuinely responded to the information. Now that I do, I will stop to preserve the integrity of this board. 
     

     

  3. If anyone gives a shit, Jabba:


    I communicated with a source on Thursday about the recruitment of TCU defensive tackle transfer Damonic Williams and here's what I learned.

    * The central figure in the recruitment is the agent/representative for Williams, who is doing what most agents/representatives do in trying to secure the most lucrative deal possible for their clients. There are questions about where exactly that is going to take the recruitment.

    * The sense that I have is that Texas believes that it has the best NIL situation of any of the finalists in the Williams recruitment, but it's unclear whether the Texas offer is being used as leverage to try and get the NIL packages at other schools (specifically OU) increased and, if so, where that leaves the Longhorns.

    * For the first time, the source I communicated with on Thursday mentioned that the Longhorns were in the pole position (the player is very keen on the Longhorns) in the recruitment at one point in the middle of this week, but there's a sense that things may have turned when it was communicated to the agent that the Longhorns would not bend in putting together an NIL offer that the agent believes should exist for Williams, especially when it is already believed that none of the competing schools are matching what is already on the table in terms of lucrative NIL opportunities. .

    I'm told that the agent believes a seven-figure market exists and is determined to find it/tap into it.

    * The word going around on Thursday afternoon is that OU is probably the current leader, but there's a real sense of confusion about how all of this is playing out, partly because it is believed that OU has come under the Longhorns in terms of NIL opportunities (OU's is believed to be in the half-million range), unless that offer was enhanced on Thursday when meetings apparently took place between the agent and the Sooners.
     

  4. Thursday morning update from Jabba:

    Pessimism is the word of the hour in UT's recruitment of TCU defensive tackle transfer Damonic Williams.

    Per a source late last night, there were conversations between Texas and Williams on Wednesday night. From what I can gather, Williams is looking for an incredible one-year NIL package that would make Walter Nolan blush.

    Will he get it?

    That remains to be seen, but it almost certainly won't come from the Longhorns. I've been told for more than a year that the Longhorns would be willing to go huge on a "Jordan Addison type" player if the coaches thought that the addition would be season-changing, but Williams is not viewed as that type of player and Texas isn't going to completely turn its entire NIL model on its head in an effort to get him.

    Perhaps the NIL package being sought after will flatten out because none of the four teams under consideration will go as high as the Williams camp is looking for one of them to go, but at the moment it feels like the Longhorns aren't going to be the team.

    I wasn't given the name of a projected leader, but it might be OU. The dark-horse might be Missouri, if only because maybe the Tigers will be willing to do anything to get Williams. 

    Regardless, it feels like an Texas and Williams are at an impasse as of Wednesday night.

  5. 40 minutes ago, mchookem said:

    as a female who 1) drank a good amount in college, and 2) had plenty of sex in college, often after/while drinking, allow me to say that i do not look back on any of those instances and think 'i think i was sexually assaulted'. mostly, i look back on those days the same as y'all - fondly and with a healthy amount of cringe. 

    the only time i felt disturbed in any way was a frat party (can't remember which, but one of the smaller ones), where i ended up separated from my friend, in an upstairs room and suddenly decided i did not want to be there anymore, and the 'gentleman' who had escorted me upstairs thought it would be a good time to play a game of 'block the door/keep her from leaving'. 

    so whichever of you assholes that was, sorry-not sorry for kicking you in the balls and running. 

    Classic Stacy

  6. 6 minutes ago, irishtexan said:

    The optics of this seem..... not good. Rather than give Foster and Bobby Taylor the dignity of an exit interview with coaches and the option of first entering the transfer portal, the coaching staff "cut" these dudes. It's not a good look. VERY weird strategy here. 

    You must have not heard of the Junction boys

    • Haha 2
  7. 24 minutes ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

    I don't think Elko's strategy is that complicated. He's throwing as many bodies as humanly possible at the problem and seeing who sticks. Run off the absolute worst ones and then throw even more bodies at it. I get that's it's mostly bread in / bread out, but what are his other options? 

    I think you are supposed to be in the Ukraine war thread

    • Haha 2
  8. 3 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

    Fun story about me and semicolons. When I was in high school writing essays, I'd get these comments from teachers like "great point say more." I was confused because I thought usually my point was self-evident and did not require elaboration. 

    Later on bearing this in mind, I apparently started crafting dense, complex sentences to pack in more of the requested information. 

    Finally, in my last year of law school in an advanced writing class, Terri LeClercq, truly one of the Texas Law greats, pointed out my complex sentences and suggested that I retreat to very simple sentences and then perhaps combine them with semi colons to increase readability and comprehension and avoid the see spot run problem.   Still use to this day. 

    This is mostly a tribute to Dr. LeClercq. 

    https://cla.utexas.edu/english/news/alumna-terri-leclercq-fights-uphill-battle-to-preserve-prisoners-rights

    Kept expecting to see a semicolon in your post; am upset I did not. 

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