Sarkisian aims for right fits now
New Longhorns coach seeks to hire his first selections for assistants
AUSTIN — The pieces never clicked together for Tom Herman at Texas.
Herman’s first attempt at building out a coaching staff, a process that began with his hiring on Nov. 27, 2016, featured seven assistants who were dismissed and replaced following the 2019 season. Herman also swapped offensive line coach Derek Warehime with Auburn’s Herb Hand after one season, shifting the former to tight ends coach in a staff shuffle that included redefined job titles for several other staffers.
That years-long search for the perfect combination contributed to Herman’s undoing at Texas. And despite how disruptive and complicated the COVID-19 pandemic was for the Longhorns’ assembled staff, athletic director Chris Del Conte and school’s othcoach er powers believed Herman had enough swings.
New Texas coach Steve Sarkisian wants to avoid the fate of his predecessor. Whiffing on your initial hirings is close to a death sentence for most FBS coaches, especially those at titlestarved programs with astronomical expectations.
So Sarkisian, who served as head coach at Washington (2009-13) and USC (2014-15), paced himself. The process was methodical and deliberate and included interviews with a variety of candidates.
There are a couple Herman-era holdovers in wide receivers coach Andre Coleman and running backs coach Stan Drayton. Three assistants were part of Alabama’s 2020 national championship team alongside Sarkisian, the Crimson Tide’s former offensive coordinator. Safeties coach Blake Gideon once started 52 consecutive games for Texas, and defensive line coach Bo Davis spent three seasons (2011-13) on Mack Brown’s final staff.
“It wasn’t necessarily about hiring people that I knew or hiring people that I was close to,” Sarkisian said. “It was about trying to assemble the best staff I could hire. Some of those guys have worked with me in the past. Some of them I’ve competed against some of them. Some of them I didn’t know and I had to interview and get to know.
“But through it all, I’m sitting back and I’m meeting with these guys right now and I’m assessing their work and I’m listening to them talk and we’re getting involved in recruiting, and I’m like, yes, we got it. We really did a great job of putting the jigsaw puzzle together because forming a staff is a really intricate process when you start talking about staff culture.”
Special teams coordinator and tight ends coach Jeff Banks served in those same roles for Alabama from 2018-20. Offensive coordinator and offensive line
Kyle Flood spent the past two seasons coaching the Crimson Tide offensive line. And quarterbacks coach AJ Milwee served as an offensive analyst for Alabama in 2020 after seven years at Akron.
Davis also had a couple stints on Alabama coach Nick Saban’s staff as defensive line coach, most recently during the 2014 and 2015 seasons. So while Sarkisian did diversify with several other hires, he picked plenty from the tree of a head coach who has
won six of the last 12 national championships.
“I think clearly he (Saban) recognizes like I recognize they’re really good coaches, right,” Sarkisian said. “This is a very attractive job, and to come to the University of Texas at this time, at the forefront of something like this, I think was very enticing to these guys to want to come and be part of. And I welcomed them with open arms. It was not something where I went and tried to just recruit a bunch of coaches off the staff. I knew the guys really on the offensive side of the ball very well.”
As successful as his ransacking of Saban’s staff was, plucking defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski might have been Sarkisian’s finest move. Kwiatkowski became regarded as one of the Pac-12’s best coordinators over seven seasons at Washington, producing 17 NFL draft picks from 2014-20 and coaching the Huskies to three straight national top 12 finishes in scoring defense and total defense.
“Hire the best people for the job,” Sarkisian said. “And it doesn’t always have to be a tie to me. If they’re really good for the job, if they’re really qualified, if they fit the parameters of the things that you’re looking for, those are the people you should hire.
“In the end, you know, you have to go with your gut and you have to say, ‘OK, this guy feels like the right fit.’”