told<\/a> Inside Texas last week.<\/p>\nAs one of the top dual-threat quarterbacks in the state, head coach Mack Brown and the Horns were interested in Kinne, who received an offer at a Junior Day in 2006, the most important recruiting events for Texas at the time with expectations set by the staff that most top targets would commit on the spot after receiving their offer from Brown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t ready at the time, earlier in the process, to kind of buckle down,\u201d Kinne said.<\/p>\n
Texas moved on to other targets \u2014 Texarkana\u2019s Ryan Mallett, one of the nation\u2019s top players, and Florida product John Brantley, another elite national prospect. After Brantley committed to Texas in April, Kinne commited to Baylor in July after his father joined the program to coach the linebackers.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Kinne\u2019s recruitment wasn\u2019t over \u2014 late in the cycle, Brantley decided to stay close to home and sign with Florida, his father\u2019s alma mater, forcing Texas to find another quarterback in the class. So Brown and running backs coach Ken Rucker, Kinne\u2019s recruiter, circled back on the East Texas product, reaching out to Gilmer head coach Jeff Traylor and Gilmer cornerback Curtis Brown, a Texas commit, to ask about Kinne, who had transferred from Canton for his senior season.<\/p>\n
Traylor and Brown convinced the Longhorns staff that Kinne was worth taking, and he flipped from Baylor to Texas days after Brantley\u2019s decommitment, took a January official visit, and inked with the Horns on National Signing Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cKind of one of those dream-come-true moments getting to sign with the University of Texas being an in-state kid, so a lot of fond memories going from Gilmer to Austin,\u201d Kinne said.<\/p>\n
The stay on the Forty Acres was short, however \u2014 as Kinne\u2019s recruitment developed during 2006, redshirt freshman Colt McCoy took hold of the starting quarterback role by ably filling the big shoes of Vince Young, so after Kinne spent the 2007 season redshirting in Austin, he opted to transfer instead of sitting two more years behind McCoy.<\/p>\n
Landing in Tulsa under offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn began to shape Kinne\u2019s future trajectory as he learned Malzahn\u2019s fast-paced power spread offense with its gap scheme roots in the old Wing T offenses. Although Kinne never helmed the offense for Malzahn, who left to become the Arkansas offensive coordinator before Kinne became the starter for Herb Hand and then Chad Morris, the former head coach at Stephenville and Lake Travis. Current Florida State head coach Mike Norvell served as the passing game coordinator for Tulsa when Kinne was the starter.<\/p>\n
Kinne had received his first introduction to the spread offense when his father, whose background was on defense, decided to start running it after taking over at Canton in 2003 at the beginning of the spread revolution in Texas high school football, fueled by Todd Dodge\u2019s success at Southlake Carroll and the productivity of standout quarterbacks like Graham Harrell at Ennis and Matthew Stafford at Highland Park.<\/p>\n
Gary Joe Kinne didn\u2019t really know how to run a spread offense, but he was committed to it, and so Canton ran about four or five plays, achieving some success despite the scheme\u2019s simplicity. When Kinne got to Tulsa, Malzahn\u2019s offense was \u201can eye-opening experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kinne\u2019s stint in the NFL continued his offensive evolution playing for Chip Kelly, who was the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, before beginning his coaching career as a graduate assistant under Morris at SMU before following him to Arkansas as an offensive analyst.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most defining moment for Kinne as an assistant came after he reunited with Malzahn at UCF in 2021. The Knights had previously found success under offensive coordinator Josh Heupel running a variant of the Art Briles veer-and-shoot offense that was finally proliferating around college football.<\/p>\n
Quarterback Dillon Gabriel had thrown for 3,600 yards and 29 touchdowns in that offense, so Malzahn dispatched Kinne to meet with his quarterback and see what Gabriel wanted to add to Malzahn\u2019s attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Man this is some really good stuff,\u2019 and really fell in love with that. Obviously still incorporating a lot of stuff that Gus had done throughout the years and we added some of that stuff and had some success with it,\u201d Kinne said.<\/p>\n
Enough success for Kinne to land his first head coaching job at Incarnate Word the following year, where he could finally \u201cdo everything that I always wanted to do.\u201d The offense Kinne ran with the Cardinals wasn\u2019t without another input, though \u2014 from Mack Leftwich, the quarterbacks coach who identified and recruited Cam Ward.<\/p>\n
After Kinne elevated Leftwich to offensive coordinator to keep him in San Antonio, the two began developing a offense drawing on their diverse influences, adding Air Raid elements that Mike Leach disciple Eric Morris used at UIW, combined with the wide splits of the veer and shoot and an evolved version of Malzahn\u2019s gap schemes.<\/p>\n
\u201cReally just built this offense the way we want to, and every year it\u2019s evolved,\u201d Kinne said. \u201cFeel like it puts a lot of pressure on the defense. It\u2019s a quarterback-friendly offense \u2014 it\u2019s really just a numbers game at all times. What are you trying to take away? How can we attack you? Combine that with tempo and some different wrinkles and it\u2019s been been a pretty good offense, top-five offense, the last four years.\u201d<\/p>\n
The quarterback who benefits from the friendliness of Kinne\u2019s offense is redshirt sophomore Brad Jackson. A San Antonio Reagan product whose recruitment was impacted by his listed 6\u20190 height, Jackson broke out last year with the Bobcats, throwing for 3,224 yards and 21 touchdowns on a 71.3-percent completion percentage, and adding 744 yards and 17 touchdowns running into the space created by the offense\u2019s wide splits and the plus-one advantage Texas State creates on option plays against light boxes.<\/p>\n
According to Kinne, Jackson is the closest quarterback to McCoy that he\u2019s been around.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot just on-the-field play, I think it\u2019s the off the field, too, the consistency, the person that he is, the work ethic, the leadership qualities, all that kind of goes into the intangibles of being a great quarterback,\u201d Kinne said. \u201cThen his on-the-field play is pretty similar as well. He\u2019s super athletic. He\u2019s got a great arm. He\u2019s really accurate. Just an unbelievable quarterback\u2026 I think he\u2019s primed to take that next big step.\u201d<\/p>\n
The return of two 1,000-yard wide receivers in Beau Sparks and Chris Dawn will help Jackson as Texas State\u2019s tempo, which ranked just outside the top 20 nationally in seconds per play last year, puts alignment, assignment, and communication stress on the Texas defense.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to own the tempo, right? I think that starts with communication, getting the call and getting lined up,\u201d Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said on Monday. \u201cI think it\u2019s imperative we get our cleats in the dirt, ready to play, and we\u2019ve got our eyes in the right spot.\u201d<\/p>\n
To prepare for the Bobcats, the Longhorns have devoted extra periods to practicing against tempo.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the keys is still striking people, still getting off blocks, still playing fast, and so that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been emphasizing, and I think Coach [Will] Muschamp\u2019s done a really good job of that, of getting our guys ready,\u201d Sarkisian said. \u201cNow we\u2019ve gotta make that come to life on Saturday, right? We\u2019ve gotta put it on tape and prove us right that we think we\u2019re ready to play.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a 29.5-point favorite on FanDuel, Texas has a major talent advantage over Texas State, but the Bobcats have enough talent offensively to make it difficult for the Longhorns defense as Kinne returns to the Forty Acres as a head coach shaped by his schematic football journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 On Saturday, Texas State Bobcats head coach GJ Kinne will have a full-circle moment in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,536,28],"class_list":["post-422373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-longhorns-football","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}