Texas Football: 3 reasons Sam Ehlinger is better than Kellen Mond

3. Kellen Mond was actually the less efficient rusher

This isn’t by any means a huge discrepency between the Texas A&M rising senior quarterback Kellen Mond and Texas’ fellow rising senior signal caller Sam Ehlinger. But Ehlinger was actually, by a hair, the more efficient rusher between the two quarterbacks last season. He did tally up one less rushing touchdown than Mond.

Ehlinger did register 4.1 yards per carry, 663 rushing yards, and seven touchdowns. Meanwhile, Mond registered four yards per carry flat, 501 rushing yards, and eight touchdowns. Touches taken away from Ehlinger by the running back combination of Roschon Johnson and Keaontay Ingram caused Ehlinger’s number of rushing touchdowns to drop from 16 to seven last season.

In each of the last two seasons, Ehlinger either more than doubled his number of rushing touchdowns, or topped his average yards per carry. Ehlinger didn’t have the best offensive line holding up in front of him either. Granted neither quarterback had a tremendous offensive line in front of them last season.

According to Football Outsiders, both Texas and Texas A&M ranked outside the 80 best FBS offensive lines in the entire country last season with sacks rates greater than seven percent each way. Texas and Texas A&M also both relied on the quarterbacks often to spark the ground game. Ehlinger was just a hair better at doing that on average than Mond last season.