In 2011 Malcolm Brown was a 5-star recruit and the #1 prep running back in the country, 6-0 and 220, a powerful inside runner who'd rushed for over 4700 yards and 54 touchdowns in two seasons, leading Byron Steele High of Cibolo, Texas to their first-ever 5A State Championship. Brown made Army All-American, and State 5A Offensive Player of the Year. Longhorn message boards lit up when he committed to Texas in January.
Excitement grew as the ground-pounding, hard-to-tackle San Antonio native had three 100-yard games in the first half of his freshman year, and two more against Wyoming and Ole Miss as a sophomore.
Mr. Brown turns them upside down: great strength and balance makes Malcolm Brown a formidable weapon in the Texas running game. He rumbled and bounced for 131 yards in the loss to Baylor, a game that cost the Longhorns the Big-12 title (Jerome Miron, USA Today Sports Images photo.)
Finally established as the workhorse of the Longhorn attack after a season-ending injury to Johnathan Gray, he emerged in the second half of his junior year with his best sustained stretch of football, reeling off four 100-yard performances in his last seven games, including 128 against Texas Tech and 131 against Baylor in the last two.
His long carry of the year is just 30 yards, against Kansas on November 2nd, a game in which he scored four touchdowns. The longest run of his career is 31 yards, sophomore year versus Wyoming. For the season, he has 774 yards and 9 tds, 4.1 yards a carry.
Regarding the Ducks, Brown told the media this week, “We understand the importance of being physical and running the ball against Oregon or with any team. We want to go out and start fast and hit them in the mouth and establish that we will run the ball the whole game.”
He'll run behind a veteran Texas offensive line that features three seniors. As a group, they average 6-5, 305 across the front.
It's no secret that they want to run right at Oregon, then burn them with the play action pass. Oregon's corners and safeties make a lot of tackles in run support, partly because of a smallish and underachieving linebacking corps.
In Nick Aliotti's last game as Oregon defensive coordinator, the challenge is to stop the run versus a team that has been run-dependent at times this season. It's a challenge the veteran coach has met before, most notably in Fiesta Bowl wins over Colorado (2002) and Kansas State (2013). It's also a test the Ducks failed miserably this season, struggling the contain the run versus Washington, Stanford, Arizona, and Oregon State. In the last five games of 2013, opponents averaged 228.8 yards a game on the ground, an Achilles' heel that Texas offensive coordinator Major Applewhite and both Browns (Mack and Malcolm) can't wait to hit with a sledgehammer.
And the sledgehammer, in this case, is a now-225-lb. running back from Cibolo, Texas.
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