How self-inflicted wounds hurt No. 1 Texas in 35-13 win over Mississippi State

“We can’t continue to play games with two turnovers and and false starts and holding penalties and playing behind the chains — that’s a recipe for disaster.”

AUSTIN, Texas — On Monday, Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian assessed one challenge of the SEC as the mental intensity necessary to compete at a high level each week, citing the then-No. 7 Missouri Tigers needing overtime to beat the perpetual conference cellar-dwelling Vanderbilt Commodores and the then-No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs edging past the Kentucky Wildcats 13-12 by scoring the game’s only touchdown in the fourth quarter.

Saturday’s SEC opener put that reality into stark terms when the No. 1 Longhorns needed three second-half touchdowns to open up a close contest against the Mississippi State Bulldogs, the No. 77 team nationally in last week’s SP+ rankings from ESPN, winning 35-13, almost two touchdowns short of covering the spread.

It was the first flawed performance in the team’s 5-0 start that saw the Longhorns outscore their first four opponents 190-22. Having spent three seasons coaching at Alabama, Sarkisian understands the risk inherent in sloppy performances in the nation’s best football conference.

“We can’t continue to play games with two turnovers and false starts and holding penalties and playing behind the chains — that’s a recipe for disaster. So we’re gonna have to clean that stuff up,” Sarkisian said.

Here’s a look at the areas Texas needs to clean up heading into the bye week before what has long profiled as the season’s defining stretch of consecutive games against Oklahoma and Georgia.

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Fumbles

At this point in Sarkisian’s tenure at Texas, the frequent refrain from coaches and players is that the standard is the standard. For the running back position, the standard isn’t just producing RB1 in consecutive NFL Drafts, it’s protecting the football. If Bijan Robinson struggled some in that regard with six fumbles in 539 carries — one every 90 attempts — Roschon Johnson and Jonathon Brooks exemplified the expectations for ball security, only fumbling once each in 631 combined carries.

So it was no surprise that Sarkisian and running backs coach Tashard Choice benched junior starter Jaydon Blue after two fumbles on Saturday on only six carries, giving him four fumbles in 131 career attempts, one every 33 carries.

“I hate it for Jaydon because I know he didn’t want to fumble. Nobody goes in thinking, this is what I want to do or nobody wants to drop a pass or anything of that sort. But I also am concerned about the psyche of players, too,” Sarkisian said.

Sarkisian doesn’t want any lingering mental impact from the fumbles as Blue enters the bye week with an emphasis on ball security.

“We’ll get that figured out because we’re going to need him — we’re going to need Jaydon Blue throughout this season. So I don’t want anybody think like we’re giving up on Jaydon Blue, but in this game, sometimes you have to shift and you have to pivot,” Sarkisian said.

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The fourth-down call

In case the “All Gas, No Brakes” mentality wasn’t clear enough in defining how Sarkisian approaches critical game-management decisions on offense, his aggressiveness taking a 49-yard field goal off the scoreboard to go for a 4th and 3 at the Mississippi State 31-yard line in the third quarter was a perfect encapsulation.

Up 14-6 after Blue’s second fumble to open the second half, Sarkisian said that he’d made the decision to go for it if he got into 4th and 3 or less, a common decision for head coaches near the edge of field-goal range. So when the Bulldogs were offsides on kicker Bert Auburn’s 49-yarder, Sarkisian made the decision to go for it, calling for a trips formation to the field and creating some natural rub routes for junior wide receiver Isaiah Bond, but the delivery from redshirt freshman quarterback Arch Manning was poor and Bond wasn’t able to make the contested catch.

“I thought they played what we were running pretty good. We got the look we wanted. They played it pretty good,” Sarkisian said. “I wish Arch had given Isaiah a little better throw. It was going to be a really tough catch for him.”

It was the type of decision by the Texas head coach that is easier to view with the benefit of hindsight.

“I always say, if I could play Monday morning quarterback like you guys do, I would have left the three points on the board, but I don’t get to do that — I have to make real-time decisions,” Sarkisian said.

In those real-time decisions, Sarkisian will always err on the side of putting pressure on opposing defenses.

“I’m never going to apologize for us trying to stay aggressive because our players appreciate us being aggressive,” Sarkisian said. “And it wasn’t us going rogue — it was something that we believed in that this was the number of where we were going to go and that number came up, so we went forward.”

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Offensive penalties

Before the season, Sarkisian talked about self-inflicted wounds causing the struggles on third down and scoring touchdowns in the red zone last season. On Saturday against Mississippi State, those same type of self-inflicted wounds had a huge impact on Texas in the form of eight offensive penalties for 65 yards, a number that doesn’t even include the lost yardage from the positive plays negated by holding penalties.

Early in the second quarter, the first penalty on Texas was a holding call on junior right tackle Cam Williams that canceled a seven-yard gain by sophomore running back Quintrevion Wisner. Forced into 2nd and 20, Manning took a two-yard sack on the following play and then settled for a seven-yard completion to senior tight end Gunnar Helm. A blocked punt gave Mississippi State the ball at the Texas 37-yard line, allowing a seven-play, 10-yard drive to produce a 32-yard field goal for the Bulldogs.

As Texas tried to score in the two-minute drill before halftime, another holding penalty on Williams came when Blue picked up seven yards on 3rd and 6. Fortunately for the Horns, redshirt freshman quarterback Arch Manning delivered a beautiful ball under pressure, connecting with sophomore wide receiver DeAndre Moore Jr. on a 49-yard touchdown.

Two penalties on Helm helped produce the need to kick the 49-yard field goal that resulted in Sarkisian’s questionable fourth-down call — a false start on Helm turned a 3rd and 3 into 3rd and 8 before a holding call on Helm negated a 23-yard gain on a screen pass.

On the huge drive that gave Texas a 21-6 lead later in the third quarter, the Horns had to overcome a false start on 1st and 10 by junior right guard DJ Campbell and a snap infraction on senior center Jake Majors on another 1st and 10.

In the fourth quarter, a holding penalty on backup junior right guard Cole Hutson negated an impressive 20-yard touchdown run by Wisner that showed off his strength. When Texas was able to get into a 3rd and 2 after Hutson’s penalty, Moore was flagged for holding on a screen pass that gained 14 yards and sparked a dismissive gesture from Sarkisian.

Fortunately for the Horns, Manning made it right on the next play by connecting with Moore for a 27-yard touchdown.

Against a better team, the margins of error are smaller to overcome those penalties. Even in the win over the Bulldogs, the Longhorns lost 121 total yards due to penalties, including 56 yards negated in addition to the 65 penalty yards.

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Johntay Cook’s drop

Beyond the two fumbles by Blue and the offensive penalties, arguably the biggest mistake offensively came when sophomore wide receiver Johntay Cook dropped a would-be 62-yard touchdown on 3rd and 9 midway through the second quarter.

In a difficult down and distance, Sarkisian motioned Cook into a trips formation to the field, getting a favorable matchup against Mississippi State’s zone coverage and the sophomore wide receiver wide open down the middle of the field. Manning delivered a strike, but Cook appeared to take his eyes off the ball at the last second.

With the 62 lost yards and seven lost points, the inability to play clean football meant that Texas left 183 yards and 10 points on Campbell-Williams Field.

“I thought offensively, a lot of self-inflicted wounds today that maybe could have changed the flow of the game. You fumble in the red area, take points away. You drop a touchdown, you take points off the board. Coaching decision to take three points off the board to go for it on fourth down, you take points off the board. You fumble the first play of the second half. You have, I believe, eight penalties on the offensive side of the ball. So there’s plenty of things offensively for us to clean up,” Sarkisian said.

Defensive mistakes

Against a team that entered Saturday ranked No. 131 in time of possession, the Texas defense allowed Mississippi State to hold the ball for 34:57 as head coach Jeff Lebby eschewed his total up-tempo offensive attack in favor of taking more than 30 seconds off the play clock on most plays, nearly 50 percent longer than normal.

The ability to sustain drives, mostly on the ground, afforded the Bulldogs control of the clock, especially in the first half when they possessed the ball for more than 21 minutes, running 40 plays to 26 by the Longhorns.

Of the nine first downs by Mississippi State in the first half, six came on the ground as the Bulldogs ran for 115 yards, finishing with 150 rushing yards and 12 first downs via the rush. Texas wasn’t getting gashed — the longest run by MSU was 17 yards — but they were struggling to keep the Bulldogs off schedule until the margin was sufficient enough to force the visitors into passing situations, allowing the Horns to create five second-half sacks with three in the fourth quarter.

Ultimately, though, the Texas defensive gameplan was successful in Sarkisian’s estimation.

“You can always look at and say, ‘Gosh, I wish we didn’t give up these four- and five-yard runs,’ but that’s hard to do when you get the ball in your own 25-yard line, thinking you’re just going to run it at that pace like that and expect to score touchdowns,” Sarkisian said.

“It’s just in this day and age of football, you’re going to have to try to find explosive plays, and I credit Mississippi State for trying to stick to that plan, but at the end of the day, all the time of possession, all of the plays that they ran in the first half, they went in the locker room with six points.”

Still, the Longhorns head coach does want to clean up some things in the run game with super senior linebacker David Gbenda pointing to run fits and missed tackles as the culprits in Mississippi State’s sustained drives.

In fact, Pro Football Focus credited the Bulldogs with six forced missed tackles and 118 rushing yards after contact, so of the 294 total yards gained by Mississippi State, 40 percent came after contact. As redshirt junior safety Michael Taaffe pointed out before the season, sometimes it’s not the quantity of missed tackles that causes problems — PFF had the Horns with eight total misses — but it’s the number of yards gained after contact that Texas needs to mitigate by reducing missed tackles and populating the football to reduce the extra yardage when missed tackles do happen.

“I say honestly, we just need to wrap up and stop getting leaky tackles because there was leaky yards on the field and I would just say overemphasize communication as well, because it was a tempo offense and it was a new wrinkle,” Gbenda said. “But I don’t think we struggled with that, it was just understanding fits and just wrapping up, making sure you had secure tackles and put them on the ground.”

The only touchdown scored by Mississippi State, a 12-yard scramble by quarterback Michael Van Buren, came on a blitz from both linebackers when Texas lost rush-lane integrity and allowed Van Buren to escape the pocket in the most dangerous direction — right up the middle.

From a wide stance, Texas senior Jack end Barryn Sorrell tried a speed rush as sophomore linebacker Anthony Hill Jr. went outside the running back in pass protection, leaving both players too far upfield to make a play when Van Buren climbed the pocket. Redshirt senior defensive tackle Vernon Broughton was solid with his rush lane, but couldn’t disengage in time to make the tackle for a short gain because he was being held by a Mississippi State offensive lineman. No flag was forthcoming, and the Longhorns allowed their second rushing touchdown and third overall touchdown of the 2024 season.

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On Monday morning, Sarkisian will have a lot to show his team in regards to areas for improvement that the Mississippi State game proved will be necessary to survive the grind of an eight-game SEC schedule.

“I really want to show them areas where we can improve as a team because that’s what the great teams do — they continue to get better as the season goes on and we surely have room for improvement. We surely can play better,” Sarkisian said.

“Clearly tonight, we left a lot of opportunities on the table and it’s not because the guys don’t want to do well, but we gotta make sure that we rectify some things that down the road, if we don’t get them fixed can cause us some real harm. But that’s part of coaching — that’s why they call us coach. We’ve got to find ways to motivate our players to try to be the best that they can be and I think we’ll do that because we have a hungry locker room that wants that, too. So I’m looking forward to that opportunity this week with our guys.”