Texas week opened on the Flagship with three days to Austin and one idea running through the whole show: the matchup may have just tilted before kickoff. Wednesday’s episode dug into the gift that could land in Trinidad Chambliss’s lap, why Will Echoles is the hardest man on the field to block, and the reminder that the team sitting at No. 19 was No. 1 in the country not long ago. Here’s the best of it. Hotty Toddy.
The Colin Simmons “gift” could decide this game
The cold open said it plainly: “Colin Simmons has 55% of Texas’s sacks, and Trinidad Chambliss has been sacked five times all year. That, my friends, is the gift.” The reporting — from Yahoo Sports and Orange Bloods — has Simmons dealing with a high ankle sprain and possibly out Saturday, with the SEC availability report the thing that settles it. The math is the point: Simmons has 10.5 of Texas’s 19 sacks, 55% of the whole rush from one man. Pull out the Tennessee game, where he set a school record with 5.5, and the rest of that defense has barely shown up. Against Ohio State, Oklahoma and Florida combined, Texas had six sacks and Simmons had four of them.
Now set that against Chambliss. He has been sacked just five times in six games behind a line giving up under a sack per game — the fewest in the SEC — and he’s completing 67.6% with 14 touchdowns to four interceptions and a touchdown pass in 19 straight games, tying Matt Corral for second in school history behind only Chad Kelly’s 22. Take Simmons off the field, the argument went, and Chambliss “gets to play this game on his terms in Austin.” The honest caveat came from a lineman who sees that caliber of rusher every day: Patrick Kutas wasn’t buying the easy version, calling Texas “a really talented defense” and pointing to communication up front as the real key in that stadium.
Why Will Echoles is the hardest man on the field to block
Forget the box score — the case made here is that Will Echoles is the best football player on Ole Miss’s roster and a name near the top of NFL draft boards. The people who face him daily sell it best. Patrick Kutas, who blocks him in practice: “He’s just a very large human that moves very fast. He’s very strong and he’s very smart … he’s all maxed out in those areas, so he’s pretty tough to block.” Makhi Frazier, reading him from the backfield, said you have to process fast because of how quickly he gets off the ball.
The stat line — 18 tackles, four for loss, 1.5 sacks — undersells him. Pro Football Focus grades Echoles the top-graded Rebel defender through six games with 14 pressures, and a year ago he led the Power 4 in both pressures and defensive stops. The tell that mattered most on the show: the defense goes where he goes. Seven pressures and a sack in a win over LSU; held without a pressure against Florida, who ran for 302; a sack and two pass breakups against Missouri, who managed 39 rushing yards. Saturday he draws a Texas front that has already surrendered 17 sacks. As John Fourcade put it on Monday, “that kid’s a beast.”
Don’t let the No. 19 fool you — Texas is still loaded
The sharpest warning of the day: this is a team that was ranked No. 1 in the country 11 days ago, and Vegas has the Longhorns favored by 3.5 at home. Texas put 11 players on the preseason coaches’ All-SEC teams, tied with Georgia for the most in the league, and has a quarterback in Arch Manning who Pete Golding said Monday he believes could be the top pick of the draft. The résumé is real — a 24-23 win over then-No. 1 Ohio State, a win at Tennessee, and four straight weeks at No. 1 in the AP poll, Texas’s longest run at the top since 1977.
What’s broken, though, is the kind of thing that fixes fast. Third down fell off a cliff — around 56% early, down to 22% (8 of 36) over the last three games — and the scoring dropped from nearly 38 points a game to under 23. The defense went from five takeaways in its first three games to zero in the last three. Third down and turnovers are the two stats that flip the quickest, and Texas is the second-youngest team in the Power 4. The landing point: “Ole Miss isn’t playing the 19th-best team in the country on Saturday. It’s playing a team that was No. 1 11 days ago and still has the players to prove it.”
Also on the show
Texas week also brought a sit-down with Ole Miss great Bill Flowers and a Locked On crossover breaking the matchup down from both sidelines. Both are on the feed now if you want the full Texas-week slate.
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