Colt McCoy shrugged off the question, much like he did tacklers toward the end of last season.
Will he continue to run as much — maybe even more — this season?
"I just want to do what's best for the team to win,"
the Texas Longhorns' junior quarterback said as preseason training camp got under way this week.
His coaches won't say for sure, either, but they're dropping hints that McCoy will be expected to do what he did in last December's Holiday Bowl victory over Arizona State.
In that game, McCoy was as effective running the ball as he was throwing it. He was credited with 84 net rushing yards. He actually gained 147 but lost 25 yards on sacks and 38 on running plays.
"He was a big factor in the bowl game,"
Texas coach Mack Brown said. "We need his feet, we need him to get off-schedule plays, and we need to be able to run the zone read to be successful at what we want to do."
McCoy gained five pounds in the offseason — he's up to 215 — to make himself more sturdy to take hits in the pocket as well as downfield.
As a redshirt freshman two years ago, McCoy took over Vince Young's offense, but, unlike his predecessor, rarely kept the ball on the team's bread-and-butter zone read play. He gained just 170 yards in 13 games that season.
This time a year ago, Brown and offensive coordinator Greg Davis made it clear that they wanted McCoy to take a bigger role in the running game. But he didn't start running until mid-October. Of his 492 rushing yards last season, 414 came in the final seven games.
Davis estimated this week that 60 percent of McCoy's yardage came off of called running plays, with the rest picked up off of freelance scrambles.
McCoy's total was third best among Big 12 quarterbacks, behind Texas A&M's Stephen McGee (899) and Oklahoma State's Zac Robinson (847).
"I think Colt surprised himself over the last half of the year with his ability to run the ball,"
Davis said. "And I think, quite honestly, he surprised all of us a little bit."
McCoy even enjoyed his first 100-yard rushing game, with 106 on 16 carries against Oklahoma State as he helped erase a 21-point fourth-quarter deficit.
To put McCoy's game in perspective, the last UT quarterback not named Young to gain 100 yards in a game was Donnie Little, who did it twice in 1980 back when the Longhorns were a run-heavy team.
Young set a near unreachable standard for UT quarterbacks, rushing for 3,127 yards in three years. Marty Akins is second all-time among quarterbacks with 2,020 yards from 1973-75. If McCoy replicates his 2007 total in his junior and senior seasons, he'll easily pass Little's 1,306, which ranks third in school history.
Texas' unsettled running back situation may add to the need for McCoy to keep the ball more often. Longhorns coaches are evaluating three potential backs and may end up with a committee approach behind McCoy. Texas coaches won't be able to tell much about the running game until Friday, when players practice for the first time in pads.
Still, McCoy figures to go back to how he played from midseason on a year ago.
"We'd like to do whatever we need to do to move the ball,"
Brown said. "If we're a spread offense, the zone-read play is really important to us, and we'd like for him to continue to build on it. (McCoy) did a better job in the spring. He's healthy now, he's much stronger, he's continued at the same level of speed, so we'd really like to see him do that and be a factor running the ball."
