Heading into the offseason, Texas football’s pass-catching group really only had two guarantees: Ryan Wingo and DeAndre Moore were going to step into important roles in the offense, and someone young was going to have to play. [Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY and get the BEST Longhorns coverage!] At the time, Texas was thin […]
Heading into the offseason, Texas football’s pass-catching group really only had two guarantees: Ryan Wingo and DeAndre Moore were going to step into important roles in the offense, and someone young was going to have to play.
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At the time, Texas was thin at both tight end and wide receiver. Moore and Wingo were the only two returners to catch a pass in 2024. Because of this, Texas turned to the portal to address a need at tight end and that third receiver spot.
In came Jack Endries from Cal and Emmett Mosley from Stanford, two players you can all but guarantee will play big roles in 2025.
These four were the expected starters heading into fall camp, but the emergence of RS FR Parker Livingstone has added another layer. He’s Arch Manning’s roommate, brings an electrifying downfield threat with his size-speed combo, and can play the traditional outside receiver role better than most on the team. With new information we’ve gathered over the past two or so weeks, Inside Texas believes Livingstone starts, with Mosley playing a large part in rotation in 11-personnel sets.
With this group of five mostly solidified, IT sought out answers for what lies left in the two-deep. Two more receivers, one more tight end. So I asked coach Steve Sarkisian about who had impressed outside of the core five in the pass-catchers group.
He first asked me to name the core five for him, to which I timidly spat off the five above, and he made no amendments to the list. Is that confirmation of the starters? I don’t know. Hopefully, he doesn’t hate me.
“I love Day-Day (Daylan) McCutcheon, I love Kaliq Lockett, I love the versatility of Ryan Niblett,” Sarkisian said. “I love the isolation plays by Michael Terry and Jamie Ffrench. So we’ve got a heck of a room of really talented people, and it’s going to be challenging for myself, Coach Jackson, Coach Milwee of finding the right combination of guys and keeping them fresh.”
As we’d suspected, the first three names make up a core second-string of players. McCutcheon as the slot specialist, Lockett on the outside, and Niblett in this flex role that allows him to line up out wide or in the backfield in 21 personnel to block and receive the ball in space.
Here’s the way we imagine the current depth chart:
Usually, depth charts just list 1–3 deep at each position, but there’s some nuance in this group. Livingstone and Mosley will interchange depending on the situation, so they’re more the 3A, 3B receivers in the room. Moore and Wingo will play the majority of 12. After that, the three below will play, with Lockett seeing an increased role in case of an injury to an outside receiver, and McCutcheon seeing more snaps with an injury to a slot pass-catcher. Niblett’s role will likely remain the same no matter what.
This doesn’t mean we won’t see any of Terry, Ffrench, or RS FR Aaron Butler, but they likely won’t contribute in the five or so most competitive games. All three are still young and probably not up to the consistency that Sarkisian would want.
Onto tight end: Endries is the obvious starter, but Sark is making it clear that they want to use both Jordan Washington and Spencer Shannon.
“We’ve got a multitude of guys, different personnel groupings, trying to put guys in position to do some of the things that they do really well, especially our younger players, all the while knowing Jack’s got a wealth of experience and played a lot of football. But like I said, Spencer has come a long way. Jordan’s come a long way,” Sarkisian said. “For a long time, it was like the same 11 or 12 guys that played, and I think we’re going to see a lot of different faces this year, which is a little bit different for us.”
He also mentioned true freshmen Emaree Winston and Nick Townsend, though both will likely take a back seat in 2025. It seems like there is truly an open competition for the TE2 role, but Sarkisian may dabble in using both Shannon and Washington this year, no matter who wins the competition. That would be something new for Sark, who has almost exclusively used two tight ends every year he’s been in Austin, but like he said, it may be a little different in 2025.
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Texas has a wealth of depth in its pass-catching group. It’s rare that a second-year four-star or a freshman five-star isn’t able to make a team’s top-10 pass-catcher group, but that’s how it’s going to be in Austin if Chris Jackson and Jeff Banks continue to recruit at the level they do.
Category: General Sports
