Heading into the 2025 season, everyone knew that Texas’ offensive line was going to struggle early on since they lost four starters up front from the 2024 campaign. What’s happening right now, however, is more than just “growing pains” by the new starters.
Watching film from the past two weeks suggests that there could be a couple of main issues that are causing the current struggles in the trenches:
Consistent juggling between players at LG
Both Connor Stroh and Neto Umeozulu have been rotating in and out during practice and in-game. Though something like this might not seem to be that big of a deal at other positions, it could be for offensive linemen and their overall comfort level in an offense.
This could be even more magnified in Texas’ situation because for some reason, the staff decided to bench Umeozulu for Stroh only 3-4 days before the Ohio State game. This undoubtedly threw off the consistency and possibly even the communication between the starting five leading up to the regular season.
Talented players, wrong offensive scheme
There’s absolutely no doubt in anybody’s mind that the Longhorns have an incredibly talented group of offensive linemen right now. They were all highly touted, and most of them were hand-picked by Steve Sarkisian and his staff.
That being said, it’s abundantly obvious that Sarkisian’s zone-run schemes haven’t been effective for whatever reason in 2025. Texas has been a lot more effective and efficient on gap/power-run plays so far this year in both weeks 1 and 2. When the offense is running trap, counter, lead, wham, or different duo variations, they look like a totally different team on the ground. It's somewhat easier for offensive linemen to displace defenders when they're able to take advantage of the blocking angles that power schemes provide on gap/down blocks and when pulling.
Though things started to look a little better for them against San Jose State, they need to be more consistent in the run-blocking department and work on the little details in practice. Needless to say, the lack of overall displacement or movement that they're getting up front is totally unacceptable right now.
Zone-blocking fundamentals are what Kyle Flood and this Texas offensive line absolutely have to work on over the next two weeks before conference play begins.