From "Baby" Myers to "Snacks" Coburn: a history of Texas Longhorn "large humans"
300-pound athletes were not common in Austin until well into the 1990s.
If the official 2025 Texas Longhorns football roster is to be believed, last year’s team had 23 players who weighed 300 pounds or more, plus three others who were about one good meal away from reaching that number. The team had almost the same number of players who weighed under 190. Eleven players had listed weights at 325 pounds or more.
The terms “large humans” or “big humans” have become ubiquitous in articles discussing the prospect evaluations and recruiting philosophy of Longhorn offensive line coach Kyle Flood, who has held that position at Texas since Steve Sarkisian was hired as head coach in 2021. The Longhorns have definitely targeted bigger players on the lines in recent years, and in one particular recruiting class they signed four players who already weighed at least 350 pounds. But the program had its share of beef on the roster even before the more recent targeting of recruits of Leonard Davis-esque proportions.
Going back 12 years to the 2013 Longhorns, the last UT squad coached by Mack Brown, the program’s online roster for that year shows 18 players with weights at or above 300 pounds. The roster for Mack Brown’s first Longhorn team (1998), which was primarily composed of players he inherited from John Mackovic, had 13 players listed at 300 pounds or more. Players weighing 300+ pounds are by now commonplace on Division I college rosters, and there are likely more of them now at the high school level than ever before. But the University of Texas football program was almost a century old before 300-pounders were more than a novelty at Austin’s Memorial Stadium.
This post will highlight some notable “large humans” to have played for the Texas football team over the years and cover the historic progression from the program’s early decades — where anybody over 200 pounds was considered “big” — to the present era, where the median weight of Longhorn teams is well above 200 pounds.
I decided to cover this topic after a recent online exchange with Billy Dale, a former Longhorn halfback who was a three-year varsity letterman at UT from 1968 to 1970.1 Dale runs the Texas Legacy Support Network (TLSN), a non-profit and “independent organization celebrating Longhorn Sports History and assisting qualifying Horns who need temporary financial assistance.” The TLSN website features many first-person accounts of memorable games and players from UT’s sports history, as well as articles on Longhorn history contributed by a variety of writers. Larry Carlson, a longtime professor in Texas State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is a frequent contributor of articles to TLSN.
Two weeks ago, Dale shared on both the TLSN website and his public Facebook page an article Carlson had written on Robert Guevara, a Longhorn defensive tackle of the early 1970s who was dubbed “the Marfa Giant” due to his size and his west Texas hometown (more on him later in this post). This led to a discussion in the comments section on Guevara and two other players who were also part of the Longhorn program during his time who were reported to weigh either 300 pounds or at least within the vicinity of that figure, and they may have been the three heaviest players the Longhorns had ever had up to that point.
After the founding of UT’s football program in 1893, it took a long while for the linemen to get dramatically bigger on average, and it was really not until the 1940s when 200-pounders were the norm. If anything, the men in UT’s backfields got heavier before the linemen did. One reason for this was likely the diets and physical training methods that were common in those early decades, though a more obvious one is the fact that one-platoon football was the norm until well into the 1940s, and starters were expected to play on both offense and defense. Carrying excess weight was generally not conducive to maintaining the stamina needed to potentially play for all or most of two 30-minute halves of college football. It was not until the era of free substitutions and two-platoon football (that is, players specializing on offense or defense) that college and pro football began to see a lot of athletes playing effectively at 260 pounds or more, never mind 300 pounds.
When digging into the history of heavy players on UT football rosters, a modern-day researcher can only know the weights of players from decades ago from their listings on official rosters, contemporary news accounts that reported players’ weights, and sometimes yearbook pages dedicated to the football team’s players that included such information. It can be hazardous taking weight listings from such sources at face value, and I’ve seen plenty of instances in which news articles from a given month or even a given week listed very different weights for the same athlete.
And there is the obvious fact that the weight of any adult man can fluctuate in a relatively short time even when he isn’t playing college football or going through fall two-a-days during one of the hottest months of the year and losing a few pounds of water weight every day as a result. So a player’s listed weight at the beginning of a football season may bear little resemblance to their actual weight by the end of November.
I should acknowledge that while reading old news articles in preparation for this post I found a February 1986 column from longtime Austin American-Statesman sportswriter and Texas Longhorn football historian Lou Maysel that was partially focused on this very topic and mentioned several of the players named below. This post expands on that theme quite a bit and covers a much longer period of time than was available to Maysel forty years ago.2
“Baby” Myers (1893-94) — 210 pounds
The University of Texas’s first varsity football team was formed in 1893. Its heaviest player was its center, John Henry Myers, who was reported to weigh 210 pounds and was known by the nickname “Baby”. The regular backfield starters on UT’s first team all weighed 150 pounds or less, and the left tackle on that inaugural team weighed all of 150 pounds. For comparison, the lightest player on UT’s 2025 roster was wide receiver Aaron Butler at 170 pounds.
Baby Myers was the regular center on UT’s first two football teams and was the only 200-pounder on any of the first six UT football teams (1893-98).
Leo “Big” Sam (1899-1900) — 230-240 pounds
Leopold George Sam was a regular at guard on the UT football team for the 1899 and 1900 seasons and was the biggest man to play football at Texas during the program’s first two decades. The 1901 Cactus yearbook listed his size as 6’2” and 231 pounds. Semp Russ, the quarterback of the Texas teams during Sam’s time, said many years later that Leo Sam weighed 240.3 I’m almost certain that I’ve read other accounts that estimated his weight even higher than that, but I wasn’t able to find them when putting this post together. All sources agree that he was very agile for his size and great at opening holes when blocking for the offense, and at times he was employed as a ball-carrier in “guards-back” formations that were used in the era before rules were implemented to require seven men to be lined up on the line of scrimmage before the start of a play.
Leo Sam was easily the heaviest man on UT’s undefeated 1900 team, but not its only player who would have been considered big for that time. The other two guards who played the most on that year’s team were David McDaniel, who was 6’2” and 195 pounds, and Arthur Griggs, who was listed as 6’1” and 218 pounds in the Cactus, though a contemporary news report put Griggs’s weight at 235 pounds. Regardless of which two guards were on the field, the 1900 Texas team had the heaviest guard tandem the program would have for many years.
I previously wrote about McDaniel and Griggs in the posts linked below.
Leo Sam probably would have been a program legend had he played guard for three or four years, but his career was short because he was evidently too good of a student. He graduated from Texas with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1901, only two years after receiving his diploma from Houston High School. He had a brief legal career before tragically dying at age 23 following a brain hemorrhage.
Gordon “Fats” Conley (1916-18) — 270 pounds
Charles Gordon Conley came to the University of Texas after graduating from Quanah High School in rural north Texas, and he played guard for parts of three seasons on the Longhorn football team. He was commonly known by his middle name, as well as the now politically incorrect nickname “Fats”. There have been Longhorns through the years who were given ironic nicknames, such as John Gooch, a tackle from the mid-1920s who stood 6’6” and weighed 215 pounds but was known as “Tiny”. But there was no irony to Conley’s nickname. He was reportedly 6’3” and weighed 240 pounds as a sophomore in 1916, and in subsequent seasons his weight was claimed to be between 255 and 270 pounds.
(It should be noted that another player from this period, a tackle and sometime guard from Houston named Alva Carlton, was also occasionally referred to by the nickname “Fats”. Carlton, who was a four-year letterman on the Longhorn football team from 1913 to 1916, was reported at the beginning of the 1915 season to weigh 205 pounds and was the heaviest man in that year’s preseason camp.)4
The 1916 Longhorn team was the first one in the program’s history in which the players’ uniforms had numbers on the back, though it was not until the early 1940s that the custom was established for linemen to wear numbers between 50 and 79. Conley, all 240+ pounds of him, was the original wearer of jersey #9 in UT’s football history.
In a column on Gordon Conley that was published in the Austin American on October 21, 1917, the writer said of him:
Doubtless it will always be a mystery how a man can grow until he weighs 255 pounds, but Gordon “Fats” Conley has done it, and he uses his weight to wonderful advantage on the Longhorn football team. They say he is rather hard to bowl over, and his side of the line is absolutely impregnable. There have been faster men than “Fats”, but nowhere will there be found one who is more valuable to the team, more loyal to the school and varsity football, or a better all-around man.5
I previously wrote about Conley in a Burnt Orange Nation post in 2022, which covered his Longhorn career and a 1919 incident in which the Austin newspapers erroneously reported that he had died following a bout with appendicitis, though he was actually still alive and would live for 40 more years.
Henry “Demp” Harris (1941-42, 1946) — 270 pounds
Harlan Wetz (1943-46) — 275 pounds
In the two decades that followed Gordon Conley’s last season on the gridiron with the Longhorns the team had relatively few players who could have been called true heavyweights, certainly none who were in Conley or Leo Sam’s weight class. The Longhorn halfbacks, fullbacks, and quarterbacks of the 1920s and 1930s tended to be a lot heavier than the comparative welterweights and lightweights who played in UT backfields in the 1890s and early 1900s, but it took a long while before the average weight of Longhorn linemen was even within 100 pounds of Cole Hutson and Brandon Baker, who were the lightest of the Longhorns’ regular offensive linemen in 2025 at a listed 308 pounds each.
Louis Jordan, a star guard and captain of the 1914 Longhorn football team who was the first UT product to be named an All-American by Walter Camp, was fairly big for his time, standing 6’1” and weighing 205-210 pounds.
Gordy Brown, the Longhorns’ regular left tackle as a 22-year-old junior in 1928, was a two-way terror and seen as the best tackle in the Southwest Conference that year, and he was named to several All-America teams. Brown stood a mere 5’10” tall, and his weight was reported at different times in 1928 as being a very modest 171 to 180 pounds.
Jim Tolbert, the heaviest of the tackles on the 1934 Longhorn team, was 6 feet tall and a mere 200 pounds, and even at that size was still big enough that contemporary articles described him as “big”.
Chal Daniel, a senior guard on UT’s 1941 team who was named to the Associated Press (AP) All-America third team that year, was between 190 and 200 pounds for most of his Longhorn career. This was not an uncommonly low weight for a guard even in that era of college football. The five linemen who made the AP’s All-America first team for 1941 had an average listed weight of 200 pounds.6
Henry Franklin Harris, an Alabama native who came to UT in the early 1940s, was the next “large human” of note to come through the Longhorn football program. He was known by the nickname “Dimp” while attending Wilcox County High School in Camden, Alabama, a nickname that was usually spelled “Demp” while he was a Longhorn. Harris was a reserve tackle for the Longhorn teams of 1941 and 1942. When he registered for the military draft as a 19-year-old in the summer of 1942, his draft card listed his height and weight as 6 feet and 260 pounds. He was projected to be a starter in 1943 but was called into active duty with the Army in the spring of that year. He returned to UT and re-joined the Longhorn football squad after his discharge in 1946 and started at left tackle during that season, during which he was reported to be 270 pounds. After the end of his college career he played in two NFL seasons.
Harlan Wetz was the next giant to play for the Longhorns, and his career overlapped by one season with the 270-pound Demp Harris. Wetz carried roughly the same weight as Harris but was five inches taller. He was a graduate of New Braunfels High School, and when he registered for the military draft as a UT freshman in 1943, his draft card listed his size as 6’5” and 275 pounds. We can surmise that he was fairly athletic for a big man, as he filled in at quarterback for his high school team when they had a starter injured, and while a Longhorn he served as the team’s kickoff specialist late in his career while also playing tackle. He was an honorable mention All-Southwest Conference pick as a senior in 1946. Wetz was the 45th overall pick in the 1947 NFL Draft, and he played for one season with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC).
Bud McFadin (1948-50) — 250 pounds
Kenneth Jackson (1948-50) — 252 pounds
Soon after Harris and Wetz completed their collegiate careers, two notable heavyweights from very different parts of Texas arrived on the UT campus. Lewis “Bud” McFadin hailed from the small town of Iraan in far west Texas, while Kenneth Jackson made the short trip to UT after graduating from the local Austin High School. They didn’t necessarily break new ground with their playing weight, but they were arguably the first Longhorns who were truly enormous for their time while also being very effective players.
Bud McFadin was a two-way lineman who won All-America honors at guard as a junior in 1949, then was a consensus All-American guard as a senior in 1950. He was 6’3” with a playing weight typically listed at 245-250 pounds. He was easily the heaviest player to make the AP’s 1950 All-America first team, at a listed 245 pounds.
McFadin was the 11th overall pick in the 1951 NFL Draft, and he went on to play professional football for eleven seasons and made two Pro Bowls. He was inducted into the UT Athletics Hall of Honor in 1973, and into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983.
Kenneth Jackson spent most of his senior season as UT’s starter at right tackle, but also occasionally lined up at right guard. He was listed at 222 pounds as a sophomore in 1948, and reports on his weight during his senior season varied greatly. He was reported to be 225 pounds before the start of the 1950 season, but by October most news articles mentioning him that noted his weight were putting it at 255 pounds or slightly higher. He didn’t garner All-America honors like his teammate Bud McFadin, but he was named to every All-Southwest Conference team for 1950 and was the 22nd overall pick in the 1951 NFL Draft.
The 1950 Longhorns went undefeated in Southwest Conference play and upset then top-ranked SMU along the way, but a 14-13 loss to Oklahoma kept them behind the eventual AP and Coaches’ Poll national champion Sooners, and Texas finished third in the final AP poll.
The Longhorns’ starting offensive linemen against fourth-ranked Tennessee in the 1951 Cotton Bowl — which included McFadin at left guard and Jackson at right tackle — had an average listed weight of 225 pounds, which was about seven pounds heavier on average than the Texas offensive linemen who faced Notre Dame in the 1970 and 1971 Cotton Bowls two decades later.
Jerry Oliver (1962) — 270 pounds
When Jerry Oliver enrolled at UT in 1962, he was likely the biggest freshman the Texas Longhorns had since Harlan Wetz almost twenty years earlier. As a senior two-way tackle at Brazosport High School on the gulf coast, he was an honorable mention Class 4A all-state pick and made the All-District 12-4A second team on both offense and defense. He was reported to be 6’5”, and different sources listed his weight as 266 or 277.
He impressed both rivals and his own coaches with his size and strength as a UT freshman. This was a decade before freshmen were allowed to play on varsity football squads, so Oliver spent that fall on the Longhorn freshmen team. He was voted almost unanimously to the Southwest Conference’s all-freshmen team for 1962 and was named that class’s Most Outstanding Lineman.7 He reportedly wore shoes that were size 14-EEE. Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal said of Oliver, “He has the biggest hands and feet I’ve ever seen. We’re going to X-ray his big toe. I think it has a liver in it.”8 Royal also compared shaking hands with Oliver to “shaking hands with a stalk of bananas.”
Different reports in December of 1962 put Oliver’s weight at 245 or 260 pounds, and it went up in the spring. In early March of 1963 it was reported that he had weighed in at 270 pounds, and that he had lost a mere three pounds in the weeks before the beginning of spring practices while going through Longhorn trainer Frank Medina’s notoriously grueling conditioning program.9
He was believed to be the strongest man to have been in the Longhorn football program in many years, stronger even than the consensus All-American guard and pro football veteran Bud McFadin. Had Oliver stuck it out with the Longhorn varsity he would likely have been a key contributor to their 1963 national championship squad and might have teamed with All-American Scott Appleton to form a very formidable defensive wall. But in the first week of March in 1963 it was reported that Oliver had quit football and intended to enlist in the Army, and he never played football at UT again.10
Robert Guevara (1970-71) — 290+ pounds
Fred Pointer (1971) — 300 pounds
John Boecker (1971-73) — 310 pounds
In the early 1970s the Longhorns had a trio of super-heavyweights who were likely bigger than anyone seen in Austin since Jerry Oliver had come and gone without completing his freshman year. All of them arrived in Austin with high expectations, but none finished their college career at UT.
Robert Guevara, the oldest of the three, was a jumbo athlete from the remote west Texas town of Marfa, which is about 170 miles southwest of Odessa and a drive of more than 400 miles west of Austin. He was appropriately nicknamed “the Marfa Giant” due to his hometown and his 6’6” 275-pound frame. Some articles put his height as high as 6’8”. He had good foot speed in spite of his gargantuan size, and as a senior at Marfa High he played linebacker on defense and was occasionally used as a single-wing fullback on offense. He was named the San Angelo Standard-Times’s 1969 All-West Texas Class 2A Defensive Player of the Year for his play at linebacker, and was also named to its Super All-West Texas first team.11
At least 14 college coaches made the long trip out to Marfa to visit him in late 1969 and early 1970, and Texas Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal traveled there to watch Guevara and the Marfa basketball team in an important district match in February 1970. Guevara waited until the conclusion of basketball season to choose his college destination. He signed with Texas in late February, receiving one of the final scholarships out of the 50 the Longhorns awarded to members of the 1970 recruiting class.
Guevara weighed 285 pounds when he reported for fall practices as a freshman in August of 1970, and he was placed with the defensive linemen. A mere two days later he was hospitalized after suffering from heat exhaustion during an afternoon practice, the Austin humidity being far different from the west Texas mountain air he was more used to. The following week, he amazed practice observers by running a forty-yard dash in five seconds flat. Longhorn freshmen team coach Bill Ellington described Guevara’s potential as “unlimited”.
He had a fine season with the 1970 Longhorn Yearling (freshmen) squad, and in December he was one of nine Longhorns named to the Southwest Conference All-Freshmen team. Ellington proclaimed that the 1970 crop of Longhorn freshmen was “even deeper and more balanced” than the vaunted “Worster bunch” that had signed with Texas in 1967 and finished its run with three straight conference titles and two claimed national championships.12 Guevara was listed as 6’6” and 282 pounds on the news release announcing the 1970 All-Freshmen team, and the only other player to make the team who was within even 50 pounds of that weight was TCU’s Charlie Davis, a second-team guard listed at 6’3” and 265 pounds. Davis’s much younger half-brother Leonard Davis (who will make an appearance later in this post) would suit up for the Longhorns nearly three decades later.
Despite Guevara’s freshman year laurels and unprecedented combination of size and speed, Darrell Royal was less than sanguine about his chances of making a big impact for the Longhorn varsity team in 1971 with the weight he carried. Guevara reportedly weighed 292 in March of 1971, and when Austin American sports editor Lou Maysel asked Royal what he saw in Guevara one month later, the Longhorn mentor responded, “I see he’s got to get down to about 260 or 255. He just can’t play at 290. He doesn’t have the agility and he won’t have the stamina and the quickness. He might play some at his present size but he will never reach his potential.”13 Three months later when Royal called to check on him, Guevara claimed he was 275 pounds, so that was his listed weight in the Longhorn football media guide for 1971.
He was a backup defensive tackle for most of the 1971 season, though he started at right defensive tackle in UT’s 39-10 win over Rice on October 23 in place of an injured starter. He recorded a fumble recovery in that game, and a week later he made an assisted tackle on a goal line stand that prevented an SMU touchdown in a game the Longhorns went on to win 22-18. The Longhorns finished 8-3 overall that season and claimed their fourth straight conference championship.
While Guevara was in his first year on the Longhorn varsity, two equally bulky newcomers were playing on UT’s 1971 freshmen team. John Boecker, a 6’6” 280-pound tackle, signed with Texas in 1971 after receiving all-state honors at Seguin, and Fred Pointer signed that same year as a highly-touted 6’3” 275-pound guard from San Antonio Jay. Both were starters on the 1971 Longhorn freshmen team, Boecker at right guard and Pointer at left guard, and Pointer reportedly ran a forty-yard dash in 5.1 seconds in practice. In the published lineup for a November game against TCU’s freshmen, Boecker was listed at 310 pounds and Pointer at 282. Boecker made that year’s SWC All-Freshmen team.
The spring of 1972 found the Texas Longhorns in the unfamiliar position of having three players weighing at least in the vicinity of 290 pounds. Royal wanted all of them to get their weight into the 255-265 range, and he made it publicly known that if Guevara, Boecker, and Pointer did not drop enough pounds over the summer then they would not have a spot on the Longhorn team when fall practices began, no matter how many forty-yard dashes they could run in 5.1 or faster. He blamed excess weight and poor conditioning for several injuries and pulled muscles suffered by his charges in the previous months.
Guevara was apparently unable to get below 280 pounds. Royal said he was welcome to rejoin the team if he got his weight to the desired range, but the “Marfa Giant” elected to leave UT and never played football again. He continued his college studies at Sul Ross State College (now Sul Ross State University) in Alpine, Texas, a short distance from his hometown.
Pointer weighed 300 pounds when he reported to Texas in the fall of 1972, which Royal called “big enough to burn diesel.”14 He left UT and transferred to Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State) in San Marcos. He would play guard on its football team for three seasons and was named an NAIA All-American as a junior in 1974.
Boecker managed to drop his weight from 310 to under 270 between November of 1971 and August of 1972, and he was allowed to remain with the team. He won his only letter at Texas in the 1973 season, during which he was a backup at offensive guard and defensive tackle. He became academically ineligible the following year and transferred to Adams State College (now Adams State University) in Colorado. He played his final year of eligibility with Adams State in 1975 and made the All-Rocky Mountain Conference first team, and was also an honorable mention NAIA All-American.
The first 300-pounders to see the field at Texas
Ken Hackemack (1986-89) — 305 pounds
Charles Seafous (1986-90) — 308 pounds
Sam Adams (1988-1992) — 320 pounds
There was a gradual upward progression in the average weights of Longhorn linemen in the two decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. The five offensive line starters for Texas in the 1971 Cotton Bowl averaged 218 pounds, with sophomore right tackle Jerry Sisemore being the heaviest at a listed 241 pounds. Notre Dame’s four starting defensive linemen in that game were ten pounds heavier on average.
Twenty later when Texas faced Miami in the 1991 Cotton Bowl, the Longhorns’ offensive line starters averaged roughly 275 pounds, with the lightest one being center Todd Smith at about 260 pounds.
John Boecker may have played on UT’s 1971 freshmen team at 310 pounds, but was down in the 275-285 pound range during the lone season that he contributed to the Longhorn varsity.
Gilbert Esteves, an offensive tackle from Brownsville who came to UT as a junior college transfer in 1983, weighed in at 305 pounds when he arrived for fall practices that year and was ultimately redshirted. Esteves was listed at a slimmed-down 286 pounds a year later as 1984 fall practices began and was still the heaviest player on the two-deep roster at that time, but he left the team “for personal reasons” in late August and never played in a game with Texas.15
As for when Texas had its first 300-pound man suit up and appear in a game, that is not entirely clear. Gene Chilton, who received All-America honors as UT’s starting center in 1984 and 1985, was typically listed at 295 pounds in his last two seasons in burnt orange, though a news article from December of 1985 stated that he had gotten up to 315 pounds during one summer in his college career.16 Assuming that Chilton’s weight listing was accurate and that he never actually played at or above 300 pounds, then it was most likely in the 1989 season in which a 300-pounder first played in a game with the Longhorns.
Charles Seafous was a late-blooming offensive tackle prospect who didn’t even play football for his high school until his senior year at Houston’s Furr High School. He was 6’6” and had weighed 330 at one point during high school, but was listed as 308 pounds when he signed with Texas as a member of the 1986 recruiting class, and he may have been the first Longhorn high school recruit who carried over 300 pounds with him to Austin. He reportedly weighed 299 during fall camp in 1986 and was tied with redshirt freshman Brian Nielsen as the heaviest member the squad at the time. Seafous redshirted in his first year with the program and didn’t see his first action with the team until 1987. By that point his weight was variously listed between 262 and 281 pounds, and it was still listed in that range in the following two seasons as he made occasional starts at left tackle.
Brian Nielsen was a backup guard in 1986, but he was typically listed at 292 pounds that year after weighing 299 during training camp. At least one roster published during the 1987 season listed his weight as 305 pounds, but others put it closer to 287. He spent much of that season as the Longhorns’ starting right tackle, but he was declared academically ineligible in 1988 and didn’t play for Texas again. He signed with Texas A&I (now Texas A&M-Kingsville) two years later and played guard on the Javelinas football team for two years, receiving All-Lone Star Conference honors twice and Little All-America first team honors as a senior in 1991.
Sam Adams was another huge offensive line prospect from that decade, and he signed with Texas in the recruiting class of 1988 from Baytown Sterling. Adams (not to be confused with the defensive tackle of the same name who signed with Texas A&M three years later and went on to play 14 seasons in the NFL from 1994 to 2007) was listed at 6’7” and 306 pounds on Sterling High School’s roster going into his senior year, and when he joined the Longhorns for fall practice as a freshman in 1988 he claimed to be 320 pounds. He redshirted as a true freshman and saw his first action with the Longhorns as a redshirt freshman in 1989 when he filled in at left guard for an injured starter. He was listed at 308 pounds early in that season.
So there were several players who weighed 300 or more pounds as they first arrived at UT or before they became regular contributors, but my guess is that the first 300-pounder to actually enter a game for Texas was defensive tackle Ken Hackemack, a 6’9” behemoth from Bellville who was reported to be 305 pounds in August of 1989 after playing at 280 the season before. Hackemack was a starting defensive tackle in UT’s 1989 season-opener vs. Colorado. Sam Adams saw his first playing time later in that year and may have been the first Longhorn on the offensive side of the ball to play at 300+ pounds.
UT’s first 300-pound All-Americans
Texas had its first 300-pound All-American honoree at some point in the 1990s. Exactly when isn’t clear, but there are three obvious candidates.
Blake Brockermeyer, UT’s left tackle as a junior in 1994, was generally listed at 6’5” and roughly 300 pounds. When he was named to that season’s All-Southwest Conference team, the press release announcing the voting results for that honor listed Brockermeyer at 298 pounds. He was named to the AP’s All-America second team and also won All-America honors from the Sporting News and Football Writers Association of America (FWAA). If he didn’t play that season at 300 pounds, he was very close to it.
If UT’s first 300-pound All-American wasn’t Blake Brockermeyer, then it was Ben Adams and/or Jay Humphrey, decorated Longhorn offensive linemen of the 1998 season. Both were commonly listed at 300 pounds or more, and as seniors in 1998 Humphrey (who played right tackle that season) was named to the AP’s All-America second team, while Adams (who played right guard) made the AP’s All-America third team.
Casey Hampton, the immovable nose guard from Galveston Ball, was the first defensive All-American from UT to weigh above 300 pounds. Hampton made the AP’s All-America first team as a junior in 1999 after being credited with a team-leading 101 total tackles, then was a consensus All-American as a senior in 2000. He was listed as 6’1” and 305 pounds in the press release announcing the AP’s 1999 All-Americans, and he weighed in at 314 pounds at the 2001 NFL Combine.
The first all 300-pound offensive line — 1998
Men tipping the scales at 300 pounds became more common on Longhorn rosters as the 1990s progressed. Three years after defensive tackle Ken Hackemack played his senior season at 305 or so pounds, true freshman defensive tackle Stonie Clark got playing time for the 1992 Longhorn team while listed at 6’1” and 300 pounds. Clark and senior offensive lineman Alan Luther (6’4” 293 pounds) were the only two members of the 1992 team with a listed weight that topped 290.
As previously stated, the offensive line starters for Texas in the 1991 Cotton Bowl Classic averaged about 275 pounds. Six seasons later when Texas faced defending national champion Nebraska in the first Big 12 Championship Game in 1996, their starting O-line had an average listed weight of 293 pounds. The only 300-pounder in that group was left tackle Octavious Bishop (who is now Dr. Octavious Bishop, having received his Ph.D. in psychology), while the other four weighed between 283 and 297 pounds.
Two years later in 1998 the Longhorns fielded their first starting offensive line made up entirely of players listed at 300 or more pounds. Left tackle Octavious Bishop (330 pounds), left guard Roger Roesler (300), center Russell Gaskamp (305), right guard Ben Adams (300), and right tackle Jay Humphrey (300) helped pave the way for senior running back Ricky Williams to rush for 2,124 yards and 27 touchdowns and break the NCAA record for career rushing yards during his 1998 Heisman Trophy-winning season.
Eleven players on the Longhorns’ two-deep roster going into the 1998 Thanksgiving game vs. Texas A&M were listed at 300 or more pounds, topped by a certain sophomore offensive tackle who was listed at 350 pounds.
Leonard Davis (1997-2000) — 365 pounds
Over 25 years since the end of his Longhorn career, Leonard Davis remains one of the most massive athletes ever seen on the 40 Acres. Standing 6’6” and over 300 pounds while still in high school, he was a football and basketball star at tiny Class 1A Wortham High School in central Texas. He committed to Texas A&M early in his senior year, but changed his mind shortly before National Signing Day and signed with Texas as a highly-ranked member of the 1997 recruiting class. As a high school senior he was commonly reported to weigh anywhere from 320 to 350 pounds.
He reportedly weighed 355 pounds as a freshman in 1997, and was the first Longhorn to top the 350-pound mark. If any a 355-pound man could be called “svelte”, it was a young Leonard Davis.
Davis began his college career as a defensive tackle, and was credited with 11 total tackles, one tackle for loss, and one fumble recovery as a true freshman in 1997. He was moved to the offensive side of the ball after that season and was the team’s backup left tackle as a sophomore in 1998, then took over the starting left tackle spot as a junior in 1999 following the graduation of three-year starter Octavious Bishop. Davis was a consensus All-American as a senior in 2000, and weighed in at 370 pounds at the 2021 NFL Combine. He was selected with the second overall pick in that year’s draft and went on to play eleven seasons in the NFL and was selected to three Pro Bowls.
Longhorn “large humans” of the last 25 years
In the quarter-century since Leonard Davis was picked second overall pick of the 2001 NFL Draft there have been a few other UT products who entered the pro football ranks with an official weight closer to that of Davis than the 300-pound Blake Brockermeyer.
Offensive tackle Mike Williams weighed 370 at the NFL Combine before being selected fourth overall in the 2002 NFL Draft.
Offensive guard Derrick Dockery, a third round pick in 2003, was 6’6” and 347 pounds at that year’s combine.
2023 Outland Trophy winner T’Vondre Sweat weighed 366 pounds at the combine before being picked early in the second round of the 2024 NFL Draft.
Several other Longhorns who either did not go pro in football or finished their college careers with other programs likewise found themselves in the 330+ pound range at one time or another.
A pair of recent Longhorns drafted by NFL teams were relatively slimmed down after reaching very high playing weights while in college.
Offensive tackle Cameron Williams, taken in last year’s sixth round, weighed in at 317 pounds at the 2025 NFL Combine after reportedly weighing 360 pounds when Texas signed him in the 2022 recruiting class.
Defensive tackle Keondre Coburn, a man who was nicknamed “Snacks”, had a listed weight on the Longhorn roster high as 348 pounds, and inspired some Longhorn fans to start referring to a “Coburn” as a unit of weight, had trimmed down to 332 by the time he weighed in at the 2023 NFL Combine.
In the five full recruiting cycles that have taken place during the head coaching tenure of Steve Sarkisian (2022-26), the Texas Longhorns have signed no less than ten high school recruits who were listed at 335 pounds or more on UT’s signing day press releases. The 2023 class alone included four players weighing 350 pounds or more (three of whom have since left the program), which prompted a tweet in which I jokingly compared that group to the Celestials seen in the 2021 movie Eternals.
Texas is likely to continue recruiting “large humans” to man its offensive and defensive lines for the foreseeable future, players who are not simply big by college football standards but ones who Gregg Easterbrook would label as belonging to the Ticonderoga class (in reference to a class of warships used by the U.S. Navy). Whether the weight of those ginormous recruits will prove to be more of an asset than a hindrance to them reaching their athletic ceiling is likely to be something fans will wonder about every year.
I hope you enjoyed this stroll through the high points of this “weight”-y subject. My goal was mainly to cover the notable Longhorns who set new standards when it came to player weight over the years, and to show just how long it took to get from 210-pound “Baby” Myers being considered “big” to 308-pound Cole Hutson being relatively undersized at offensive guard. With 133 seasons of Texas Longhorn football history now in the books I’m almost certain to have missed a “large human” of historical consequence somewhere along the line. Please comment on the post or send me a message if you’d like to point out others you think I should have mentioned.
Author’s note: the original version this post erroneously stated that Brian Nielsen signed with Southwest Texas State (rather than Texas A&I) in 1990, two years after leaving the Texas program. This was due to the February 15, 1990 issue of the San Antonio Express-News, which reported on that week’s National Signing Day results for various colleges in the state, erroneously labeling a group of Texas A&I football recruits as “SWT signings”. A friend of Nielsen’s pointed out the error.
Billy Dale is most notable in the annals of Longhorn football history for scoring the winning touchdown for Texas in its 21-17 win over Notre Dame in the 1970 Cotton Bowl to clinch the Associated Press national championship for the 1969 college football season.
“Big Longhorn recruit is new to game”, Austin American-Statesman, February 23, 1986; page D10.
“Top O’ Morn” by Lou Maysel, Austin American, April 16, 1969; page 21.
“Texas squad begins to look like real contender for title”, Austin American, September 19, 1915; page 9.
“Tower of strength for Texas University”, Austin American, October, 21, 1917; page 20.
“The 1941 AP All-Amerca”, Valley Morning Star, December 13, 1941; page 4.
“Surprising Owlets top all-frosh grid ballot”, Waco Tribune-Herald, December 9, 1962; page 3-B.
Houston Post, December 15, 1962; Section 4, page 5.
“Top O’ Morn” by Lou Maysel, Austin American, March 2, 1963; page 3.
“Jerry Oliver, 2 more frosh quit UT squad”, Austin American, March 5, 1963; page A13.
“Reagan Owls top All-WT listing”, San Angelo Standard-Times, January 7, 1970; page 4B.
“Royal labels Longhorns ‘ordinary folks’ in 1971”, Bryan-College Station Daily Eagle, January 10, 1971; Section C, page 3.
“Top O’ Morn”, Austin American, April 25, 1971; page D5.
“For the Record” by Bob Ostrum, San Antonio Light, September 3, 1972; page 3-H.
“Southwest Conference Notes”, Houston Chronicle, August 29, 1984; Page 2, Section 2.
“‘Coke machine’ delivers for Longhorn offense”, Austin American-Statesman, December 31, 1985; page E4.