Ad Disclosure
What’s Texas’ best strategy for containing Jeremiah Smith? Avoid what Tennessee did
Published:
I won’t pretend to have a clue as to how one stops Jeremiah Smith.
Anyone who tells you that they have a true roadmap to containing the Ohio State freshman sensation is ambitious at best and downright disrespectful at worst. Oregon coach Dan Lanning didn’t have a successful plan, which was why Smith went off for 187 yards and 2 touchdowns in the Playoff quarterfinals at the Rose Bowl.
It was an even bigger statement than the one that Smith made in the first round against Tennessee. The Vols trusted that someone would have the answer in single coverage against Smith, who hadn’t surpassed 100 receiving yards against a Power Conference foe all year and was coming off his 2 lowest receiving totals of the season. Jim Thorpe Award semifinalist Jermod McCoy had a remarkable season that saw him intercept 2 passes in the end zone and 3 passes inside the opponent’s 3 yard-line, and Rickey Gibson III was a breakout player for a UT secondary that surrendered just 6 passing plays of 30 yards vs. SEC opponents in 2024.
Needless to say, though, single coverage on Smith looked like a foolish decision by night’s end after both Vols were on the wrong end of touchdown grabs. Even Smith had a laugh looking back at the “headliner” matchup against the Vols.
That’s worth remembering heading into Smith’s matchup against Texas on Friday night in the Cotton Bowl. At this point, the Longhorns will deserve to be laughed at if they play Smith in single coverage like their new SEC brethren did in Round 1.
Wait a minute. Have I forgotten about Texas corner Jahdae Barron, AKA the Jim Thorpe Award winner as the best defensive back in America in 2024? Why shouldn’t Texas DC Pete Kwiatkowski trust that his 23-year-old All-American corner can handle the Smith matchup? After all, Barron is coming off Playoff quarterfinal victory in which he allowed 12 receiving yards on 4 targets against Arizona State en route to Peach Bowl Defensive MVP honors. That was after a regular season in which Barron didn’t allow a touchdown on 454 coverage snaps and his worst game of the year in coverage came when he allowed 43 yards against Kentucky (that came on 1 catch by Barion Brown). Why wouldn’t that continue against Smith?
Uh, have you not been paying attention? It’s not worth it to find out.
Even if Kwaitkowski decides to let the versatile Barron — he covered the slot 772 snaps in the previous 2 seasons and played safety earlier in his career — shadow Smith, that could still be a losing equation. The goal is to make Ohio State quarterback Will Howard process as much as possible. If he knows pre-snap that he has Smith in single coverage, he’s taking that chance and living with the consequences, as he should. Smith is on that kind of a run for the new national title favorites.
That might sound like a weak move for a Texas defense that ranks No. 1 in FBS in yards/pass allowed (5.5) along with a 8-21 TD-INT ratio. It’s not, though. That production, as impressive as it was in the regular season, didn’t include a receiver of Smith’s ability.
(I don’t mean any disrespect to Arkansas receiver Andrew Armstrong, who had 6 catches for 74 yards against Texas … but he was the only 1,000-yard receiver the Longhorns faced in their first 15 games.)
The closest thing that Texas faced to Smith was fellow true freshman sensation TJ Moore, who went off for 9 catches and 116 yards in the first-round matchup vs. Clemson. Moore was a major part of what was easily Texas’ worst game defending the pass all year. He’s the only player to hit 100 yards against the Longhorns. Also of note, Moore is 6-3, 200 pounds. He’s not quite as physically imposing as the 6-3, 215-pound Smith, but the body control at that size felt like a nice appetizer for the heralded Buckeye wideout.
Smith’s size is why that whole “freshman” distinction should be forgotten. And while he had games this season in which he’s been more of an afterthought, Texas seems to be defaulting to much more recent history with Smith.
To be fair, he’s 19 now. His 19th birthday was a day before Michigan handed Ohio State a devastating loss that many questioned if Smith and Co. could bounce back from.
We know that answer. What we don’t know is whether Texas can contain this version of Smith, and what exactly that defensive game plan might look like; all we know is what it shouldn’t look like. After Tennessee’s plan failed, Smith laid out exactly what not to do ahead of the Oregon game.
“I’m just laughing in my head. Why are y’all really playing man-on-man against us, or against me, I should say?” Smith said before the Rose Bowl (H/T ESPN). “And when we see man (coverage) against any of our receivers, we’re going to take a shot down the field. So I’m just letting everybody know right now that if you play man, we’re taking a shot.”
For what it’s worth, Ohio State still took shots in zone coverage, too. Smith also managed to make that look easy.
Nothing Oregon did worked. Maybe nothing that Texas will do will work, either.
If Smith is going to haul in contested catches against multiple Longhorns defenders, there won’t be any adjustments to make. Based on everything he’s done, there could be a handful of those moments on Friday. Texas’ hopes of playing for a national title for the first time in 15 years could depend on how it approaches that tall task.
Anything but an all-hands-on-deck effort to cover Smith deserves a belly laugh.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
