Inside Texas running ‘Orbit Sweep + Spinner G/H Counter + Bluff Reverse’ for Isaiah Bond against Florida

How the season’s second bye week afforded the Longhorns offensive staff a chance to draw up a remarkable play.

AUSTIN, Texas — Isaiah Bond is back, and his speed changes games.

The Texas Longhorns wide receiver hadn’t looked like his normal explosive self since sustaining an ankle injury against the Oklahoma Sooners in the Cotton Bowl that caused him to miss the narrow win over the Vanderbilt Commodores two weeks ago.

Coming out of the bye week against the Florida Gators on Saturday, however, Bond had three catches for 55 yards, including a dynamic catch and run on a screen pass that resulted in a 34-yard touchdown and one of the day’s most impressive plays by the Longhorns — a 44-yard run on a trick play devised by Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian that showcased the synergy between the offensive coaching staff and the Alabama transfer.

“What he does, I think, is add to the speed factor that we have on offense,” Sarkisian said.

On Twitter, Houston Episcopal offensive coordinator Dan Casey termed the play, “Orbit Sweep + Spinner G/H Counter + Bluff Reverse.”

In Sarkisian’s post-game press conference, the Texas head coach described how the staff created the play over the bye week.

“Probably too much time for us as a staff and you get in there and you start going through what if, what if, what if, and you start going through it, and then we’re like, well, sometimes it’s throwing mud on a wall and seeing what sticks,” Sarkisian said.

After drawing up the play, the staff took it to the practice field with two weeks to perfect it before facing the Gators. Sometimes the results even surprise the creators.

“We ran it in practice, we’re like, wow, that looked way better than we probably thought it was going to work,” Sarkisian said.

The next step is taking it to the field in a game, which requires finding the right moment to call the play — in this case, with 4:58 remaining in the first quarter and the game still scoreless — and getting the right execution from all 11 players on the field, from the ball-handling of quarterback Quinn Ewers to impact the eyes of the defenders and, perhaps most importantly, wide receiver Matthew Golden executing his block on the front side of the play to give Bond a chance to get into the open field.

Lined up tight to the formation, Golden was responsible for sealing the edge to allow running back/wide receiver Ryan Niblett and tight end Gunnar Helm a chance to get out in space to make the lead blocks for Bond.

In a deep Texas wide receiver corps, Golden and DeAndre Moore Jr. are the team’s best blockers with Golden putting an emphasis on the skill dating back to his high school career at Klein Cain in the Houston area. Over two years at Houston, Golden put enough on tape as a blocker that Sarkisian cited it as one of the reasons that Texas pursued him out of the transfer portal late last year as the Longhorns head coach and wide receivers coach Chris Jackson looked to rebuild the room.

“I take pride in it — without being able to block, the offense wouldn’t be able to execute as much. So, just being a receiver, you’ve got to be able to block,” Golden said.

So it wasn’t surprising to see Golden execute, bouncing his assignment off of Helm coming across the formation and ensuring Bond could turn the corner and pick up 44 yards. Two plays later, Golden got the reward for his selfless blocking, catching a 29-yard touchdown pass from Ewers to open the game’s scoring and put the Longhorns on track for the eventual blowout by scoring 14 points in the first quarter and 21 points in the second quarter.

“Any time we can get that play in particular, but on all those plays, any time we can get the ball in our playmakers’ hands in space and allow them to to do what they’re best at, and that’s run like we can run, and when we can make a guy miss, or we can block on the perimeter — and it happened numerous times — so it’s getting those guys in space to go do what they do, and that’s our job to find those opportunities, but then it’s the players’ job to play as 11, because those plays can’t happen without those guys making those selfless blocks on the perimeter for that stuff to come to life,” Sarkisian said.

What makes that type of play so hard to defend?

“Just knowing football, when people on the box see run, they normally rush to it. So especially when there’s a running motion coming, it kind of throws the eyes of a defender off, but then I’m coming around the back side, so it’s definitely a hard play to defend,” Bond said.

As a playmaker, it’s an exciting play to get to run and a fun aspect of football, known as a copycat game with rare moments of true innovation like Emory Bellard inventing the Wishbone and changing the course of college football history. But a play like the one that Sarkisian and his staff drew up are flashes into the creativity of top offensive minds that surface more frequently than the creation of an entirely new system and occur several times per season.

In the way that few things in football are truly new, though, Casey compared Sarkisian’s play to what the undefeated 1952 national champion Michigan State football team was running the single wing buck series.

Most of all, the play was fun — for the coaches, for the players, for the fans in the stadium or wherever they watched the game.

Sports should be fun.