Some say Tom Herman took a shot at Gary Patterson. But it might have been the opposite.
TCU fans thought Texas coach Tom Herman might’ve provided some bulletin board material during a news conference Monday, saying Gary Patterson “doesn’t do a whole lot.”
That’s the phrase a number of TCU fans and even former players were hung up on, viewing it as a shot at Patterson.
In reality, though, Herman wasn’t taking a shot at all. Instead, he was being overly complimentary of Patterson and his signature 4-2-5 defense. Herman echoed similar praise for Patterson on the Big 12 conference call earlier in the day.
Here is the quote in its entirety when Herman responded to a question about the difficult of facing TCU and Patterson’s defense:
“As far as going against Coach Patterson’s defense, I don’t know that I was tremendously frustrated two years ago. I think the final score was 31-16. You always want to score more points and hold them to less points.
“It gets frustrating sometimes because Gary, to his credit and a ton of respect for him, doesn’t do a whole lot. What he does is he’s got his players to play really, really hard. He puts them in great position. They’re extremely fundamentally sound. You have this false sense of maybe some confidence because unlike other defenses you play where half the battle is figuring out where they’re going to be, lined up, blitzing from, and rushing from, and all that stuff — that battle is not one that’s waged a whole lot against Coach Patterson’s defenses.
“The battle is, ‘Can we play more fundamentally sound than them? Can we play harder than them?’ There are going to be some schematic things that you want to take advantage of. It’s a matter of making those opportunities count and not having long foul balls when you schemed up a shot against a certain coverage.
“An offensive lineman might be blocking on an edge, and the play gets disrupted where 10 other guys are doing their jobs. I think therein lies the frustration a lot playing against Coach Patterson’s defenses. You’re like, ‘I know where they’re going to be and we know what they’re going to do.’ They just do it so well that it’s extremely challenging.”
TCU and Texas meet at 11 a.m. on Saturday in Austin.
This story was originally published September 28, 2020 at 9:07 PM.
