The Tigers' New Stripes

I'm starting my 16th year of coaching, fifth year as a head coach, so I spent 11 years as an assistant. Nine of those years I spent under coach Ken Herring, who learned his football from Odessa Permian. So, that's where the basis of where I get most of my philosophies is from the Permian system of the '70s and '80s. It's a sound system and I like it. I think coming to Mansfield was a good move for my family, my wife and my daughter. Fort Bend was a great place, but their junior high systems weren't set up very well, to be honest with you, and so every year it felt like we were having to start over. Every year we would get freshmen and instead of them already knowing what we were doing, we were having to reteach from day one. That got old. And I love the facilities up here. They're unbelievable. Adding all those things together made it a pretty easy decision. When I first got here, they were going through offseason and one of the first things that struck me was the kids' attitude and enthusiasm. It was tremendous. They accepted me with open arms, which for seniors sometimes that's hard to do, because they are used to the way the old coaching staff did things. We've got great senior leadership. Not only in our tailback Stepfan Taylor, but in linebacker Winston Dossman. We've got other great seniors, like Logan Hodges and Jacob Crabtree. They've been great. We had a good spring and they like what we're doing. So far during fall camp the enthusiasm has been real good. One of the first things I did was change up offseason. We started lifting weights more. I'm a big believer in the weight room. That's what we do after practice. Instead of running your traditional sprints after practice, our conditioning is weights. And I think that's a change from what they were doing. They weren't used to lifting as much. I'm a big, big believer in the weight room. I think that's where you gain a lot of ground on teams. That was probably the biggest thing I did early. When spring ball rolled around, obviously we changed up the offense and defense. We went from a spread to an I-offense and to a 4-3 on defense. I hope the fans still think it's an exciting brand of football. What we run is not a ground-it-out, three yards and a cloud of dust offense. We're going to pass the ball. But we also believe in running the ball. We believe we need to run the ball to be able to win. We feel like we've got some exciting offense and will put some points on the board. Defensively it's going to be a little bit different than what you saw last year, just because of what we're going to run. We feel like we can attack people and get after it with our front four defensive lineman. The bad thing [about Stepfan Taylor] is that I'm only going to have him for one year. That's really the only negative I see right now in Stepfan. That's a selfish thing for me to say. The positives, gosh there are so many. First and foremost he's a great young man. Secondly, he's got outstanding grades, or he wouldn't be going to Stanford. When you hear the word scholar-athlete, it's Stepfan Taylor, without a doubt. And he's a tremendous football player. He's got great vision, good size, and he's got great speed. He's what you look for. They tell me that Mansfield has never won a playoff game. I didn't know that. That's motivation for the kids, motivation for me as a coach, and motivation for our staff. That's something we got turned around last year at Clements. We'd taken them to the playoffs three years in a row, but two years before that we'd been knocked out in the first round, so for Clements to go four rounds deep, it was an amazing ride. The community got behind it, and to me that's what high school football playoffs are all about. That's what we want to do, we want to be consistent. We want to be in the playoffs year after year. But we also want to make some noise in the playoffs. We want to see what we can do.