3 former Texas football players that were poor fits with Kwiatkowski
Ray Thornton, LB
A good example of some of the misevaluations that the Longhorns staff had in the transfer portal last offseason was with the former LSU Tigers senior linebacker Ray Thornton. Texas landed Thornton as a grad transfer out of the portal last offseason, and he wound up starting in most games for them at the linebacker position.
More specifically, Thornton was the starter for Texas for most of the season (especially throughout Big 12 play) at the buck end spot.
He took more than 500 defensive snaps last season, roughly 40 percent of which were in pass-rushing plays. Around 50 percent of them were in run defense, and the rest came in pass coverage.
But Thornton wasn’t very effective in any phase of the game for this defense last season. He only had 18 stops on more than 260 defensive snaps in run defense, the lowest percentage of any starting linebacker for Texas last season.
And his seven quarterback pressures on more than 180 pass-rushing snaps also led to the lowest pressure rate of any linebacker/edge rusher/defensive end among the regular starters last season.
All in all, the numbers did a nice job of illustrating the lack of an impact that Thornton was able to make for the Longhorns last season. He just wasn’t a good fit for the scheme he was put in, and he also isn’t really a starting-caliber linebacker.
Thornton was most often effective at LSU when he was thrown into multi-dimensional blitz packages where he could slip through gaps in the midst of the chaos around him. He was never very effective as a pure edge rusher at LSU. And the same could be said for his ability as an edge rusher for the Longhorns.
Kwiatkowski and the Longhorns need an edge rusher with more explosiveness off the line of scrimmage than Thornton brings to the table and a better nose for the football. Finding the ball and wreaking havoc on opposing quarterbacks will be the name of the game for Texas at the buck position this fall.
Learning from what went wrong with Thornton last year can help Kwiatkowski and this defensive staff avoid some of those mistakes.