Texas Longhorns grades vs. Florida: Manning, offense, coaching get D's

As we continue the fallout of the Florida loss, it’s time to grade the Longhorns. Today, we’ll focus on the three sides of the ball and then wrap up with the coaching staff. As you can imagine, this will be the lowest grades across the board for this season. Surprisingly, the special teams is the sole group that earns a remotely good grade this week. 

Here’s how I’d stack up the four aspects of the game for Texas:

Texas LonghornsOffense: D 

As it has been all season, the offense was terrible this weekend. It started nicely, with two scoring drives to open the game. From then on, it was an uneven performance that left much to be desired. Manning missed open reads, Sarkisian didn’t consistently give them winning situations, the offensive line looked lost and so much more plagued the Texas offense. This offense seems to have no cohesion or confidence, which halfway through the season, is truly unacceptable. The fixes could be coming but it’s easier to find things that don’t need fixing than things that do on the Texas offense. 

Texas Longhorns Defense: B- 

In my opinion, this was the worst defensive performance of the season. Florida did a nice job making adjustments to the quick passing game at halftime and the defense never fully adjusted. The group, once again, did enough for Texas to get the win but it wasn’t a strong performance in the second half. It seems they will be without Colin Simmons for some time, so the rest of the unit will need to step up. It wasn’t a downright bad performance by any means but the season seems to be wearing on this group. 

Texas Longhorns Special Teams: B+ 

This was the best special teams performance of the season. Ryan Niblett’s punt return is obviously the highlight but the coverage units put together relatively strong performances. There were minor lapses on kickoff coverage but a unit that dragged Texas down against Oklahoma, had a strong bounceback this weekend. We’ll see if they can build off that and avoid hurting the Longhorns moving forward. 

Texas Longhorns Coaching: D 

The coaching staff, namely Steve Sarkisian, continues to fall short. If the offense’s issues boiled down to poor QB play, that would be one thing. The issues go well beyond that and they are issues that have existed for Texas before Manning even became the starter. Sarkisian hasn’t done a nice job building the Texas QB’s confidence after the Ohio State win and it’s led to the worst play of his career. Muschamp and Banks mostly handled their part but the failure from the offensive staff is overwhelming six games into the season.