Texture mod installing question

[JamesRook]

If I have a mod that just changes a texture, say like Telephone Retexture by jorhadoq, can I manually DL the mod, extract the textures from the zip file and then place them in the correct data folders without activating the mod in NMM? I'd like to try and decrease the number of mods I have loaded and am fine if the vanilla textures get overwritten with the ones I like.