 "Photo: Jeff McWhorter")
Life moves fast when you’re Blake Gideon.
Gideon graduated from high school a year early. He got thrown into the starting job in his first game.
It’s been a whirlwind year for him and fellow freshman safety Earl Thomas, but things are finally beginning to slow down.
At least the game is.
“The game has slowed down in their eyes,” defensive coordinator Will Muschamp said. “They’re doing a much better job dealing with nerves, calling plays, everything.”
The safety position was a spot of concern when Texas started the season. Of their six safeties to choose from, five were freshmen. That changed when junior Ishie Oduegwu underwent shoulder surgery and was forced to sit out for an unspecified time period.
So far, Gideon and Thomas have answered the concerns.
During the first game, both safeties missed a few calls and plays but made up for it later in the game, helping the Longhorns shut out Florida Atlantic in the second half. Against UTEP, the Longhorns held the Miners to just 5.8 yards per attempt.
Most of that improvement came in the safeties’ play-calling efforts and overall awareness.
“People don’t realize that the safety is the quarterback of the defense,” cornerback Ryan Palmer said. “They’re calling plays, basically running everything.”
And that sort of experience can’t come just from practice.
“The big learning curve is from game one to game two,” head coach Mack Brown said. “They’re going to make mistakes in the first game but learn from them.”
Gideon graduated a semester early from Leander High School so he could learn Texas’ system and work out during spring drills. With his dad as a lifelong football coach, Gideon spent his days growing up learning playbooks and watching practice.
“It goes back to studying the game,” Muschamp said. “It goes back to understanding formations and splits and backfield sets and what teams do in certain situations and understanding and anticipating checks before they happen, and he’s able to do those things.”
Enrolling early gave him the chance at starting. Muschamp noticed Gideon making plays during spring practice and first started paying attention to the freshman at that point.
“As a coach, your biggest barometer is when you’re playing in front of 40,000 people, and here is a guy who should be going to the prom and is playing in the spring scrimmage and making plays against good athletes and good quarterbacks,” Muschamp said. “I don’t think there was any one play, but that he was very effective.”
Thomas is the hard-hitter of the crew. He made bone-crunching tackles during fall practice and impressed coaches enough with his physicality to earn his starting job.
“He’s got a tremendous mental and physical toughness,” Akina said. “And much like the great ones I had, he has a desire to be a learning player.”
Both players have started working on the details that make the safety position one of the most difficult in football. With pass-heavy spread offenses like Missouri, Texas Tech and Kansas just around the corner, their job could become even more important.
“It’s not just lining up and playing,” Muschamp said. “It’s formation recognition, it’s eye control, it’s receiver splits. There are so many things that go into the cerebral part of the game into being a good player. When young players go up there and just think that they can line up and play, they don’t understand that. That’s not really what good players do. Good players understand the mental part of the game.”
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