AUSTIN, Texas — By the end of the 2018 season, Texas Longhorns coordinator Todd Orlando sounded like a broken record. Every Wednesday evening, he walked into his weekly media availability and talked about how his defense needed to get off the field, particularly referencing the cratering of the team’s third-down defense, which fell from No.3 nationally at 27.1 percent in 2017 to No. 109 nationally at 44.3 percent.
Predictable blitz packages were partly to blame, but a deeper dive into the numbers revealed that a lot of the issues were the increased prevalence of conversions on 3rd and 6 or less and fourth downs.