Sarkisian: No shortcuts for Longhorns
ARLINGTON — University of Texas football fans want more than respectable rankings and bowl victories. They would like to win some Big 12 titles and be in contention for national championships.
While the Longhorns are still the Big 12’s most recent team to win a national title, that 2005 season with Vince Young at quarterback only gets smaller in the rearview mirror. Their most recent conference crown came four years after that in a league in which Baylor and Kansas State have both been champions twice since then.
That’s why Steve Sarkisian is the third Texas coach in eight seasons since Mack Brown’s departure in 2013. Tom Herman won four consecutive bowls and got the Longhorns into the top 10 during each of the past three seasons, but they never won a Big 12 title.
“I haven’t been focused on what happened before. I’m putting all our energy in what we’re doing now,” Sarkisian said this past week at the Big 12’s preseason media event. “I do believe in, at the end of the day, teams win championships. Locker rooms, facilities don’t win championships, big stadiums don’t win championships, bright lights don’t win championships, recruiting rankings don’t win championships.”
Texas is routinely the richest college athletic program and has all of the necessary modern facilities as well as its own ESPN-backed network.
“We can’t sit back and relax and think because we’ve got a great stadium, because we’ve got great resources, because we’ve got the five-star, fourstar players, that we just sprinkle a little magical fairy dust and all of a sudden we’re a really good football team,” Sarkisian said. “Winning is hard, and winning takes work and winning takes perseverance. Winning takes grit. Winning takes great teamwork and great leaders and great teammates and an awesome culture.”
In the Big 12’s preseason media poll, the Longhorns were picked third behind sixtime reigning champ Oklahoma and Iowa State, which lost to the Sooners in the league championship game last December.
This is Sarkisian’s third head coaching job — he was at Washington from 2009 to 2013 and at fellow Pac-12 program Southern California for 2014 and part of the following season — but he is coming off a stint as Alabama’s offensive coordinator and being part of Nick Saban’s most recent Southeastern Conference and national championships last season.
The Longhorns hired Sarkisian in early January, only hours after they fired Herman. Sarkisian said he couldn’t believe he’s already been on the job in Austin for more than six months, a stretch in which he has hired a new coaching staff, implemented a strength and conditioning program, recruited and installed new schemes on offense, defense and special teams.
“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” he said, “but I love where we’re at and I love the mindset of our team at this point of developing a teamfirst mentality, which I think our players have bought in to and are kind of making come to life now in the summer.”