Texas Football: Impact of CB Kobe Boyce leaving the Longhorns

Yet another notable loss dropped for the Texas football program to the defensive backfield on July 18 with the news that CB Kobe Boyce is calling it quits.

This crazy cycle that the Texas football program faces in the midst of the 2020 offseason and the novel coronavirus pandemic only continued to run its course on one particular position group on July 18. On the afternoon of July 18, rising redshirt junior cornerback Kobe Boyce announced on his Twitter timeline that he would be stepping away from football due to mental health and depression reasons starting this year.

There is no clear timetable set for a possible return to football for Boyce, but that is not the main focus on this message from him. At the end of those message on Twitter, Boyce stated “love you all and I’m excited for my new journey”, which gives a good insight into what the priority of this statement was.

Nonetheless, this is still a key part of an ongoing storyline of personnel changes for the Longhorns due to an increasingly varying number of reasons. Between potential precautions put in place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, social activism reasons, and now mental health issues, there’s a lot of factors that will influence the Longhorns roster for 2020.

This is also the second loss in a matter of the last four or five weeks for the Longhorns just at the cornerback position. Texas also lost former four-star recruit and rising junior defensive back Anthony Cook to the NCAA Transfer Portal earlier this offseason.

Add that to the loss earlier than that in the offseason of rising redshirt senior cornerback Donovan Duvernay to the transfer portal, and you can a very volatile set of personnel turnover in the defensive backfield of late. This will be a lot for recently hired defensive coordinator Chris Ash and head coach Tom Herman to deal with moving forward.

Granted all of this depth volatility will be rendered worry-less if the 2020 season winds up getting cancelled out due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

What the Longhorns are losing in Boyce is obviously experienced cornerback depth, some size, and production from the last couple of seasons. In his three years playing for Texas, Boyce registered 32 total tackles, one interception, seven pass deflections, one forced fumble, and one fumble recovery. He had some level of defensive production in 13 games in his college career to date too.

Boyce was one of the most experienced and productive cornerbacks on the roster heading into the 2020 season. Considering the cornerback room was already starting to dwindle down on depth after the losses of Cook and Duvernay, losing Boyce too does hurt. It also adds another dynamic to the volatility that is roster and personnel management during the 2020 offseason.

There is so much going on right now, that it’s almost impossible to keep all of the focus on football. Since the 2020 college football season has this growing trend and school of thought that it might not even happen, keeping the chip on your player’s shoulders to keep working to the start of the 2020 season has to be an extremely difficult task for all coaching staffs around the country.

We do have to wish all of the luck in the world to Boyce in whatever his next endeavors are, and hope that his fight for mental health finds success. He was a notable part of this Longhorns team for the last few years and was one of the veterans returning in 2020.

Texas is supposed to open up the 2020 season, if everything goes as planned, on Sep. 5 at home against the South Florida Bulls. They will now be doing that with even less depth in the defensive backfield with Boyce retiring from football.