Steve Sarkisian addresses what he learned in first year at Texas, previous stops

Steve Sarkisian’s inaugural season at Texas didn’t go the way he would have liked, but he isn’t losing hope. Although the Longhorns finished 5-7 and failed to reach a bowl game for the first time in four years, Sarkisian believes better days are on the horizon.

The coach had a clear vision of what he wanted his program to be and realized when he took over that it could take time to get there. As he learned working on Pete Carroll’s first staff at USC, good things come to those who wait.

“(Carroll) made a really cool point to me and for some reason he kind of endeared himself to me and became a great mentor,” Sarkisian said in a recent appearance on ESPN. “He said there’s two ways to do it when you take over a program. The first way is to do as many things like the guy and the staff before you did it because that transition will be a little easier for the players and all parties involved. But the more things you do like the previous staff, you have to be ready to accept similar results. So when you’re replacing a legend or something along those lines, that’s the easy way to do it. If you really want to do it your way, it’s going to be more difficult on the players. It’s going to be more difficult on the staff because there’s a lot of learning involved. You’re gonna have to live with the bumps in the road and the adversity you get faced with.

“We went with the latter. We’re coming in to instill our schemes, systems, the way we do things, style of play. Ultimately, warts got exposed during that process. Some of those warts needed to be removed but we needed to do it in a way that still gave our players the opportunity to be successful. We lost some gut-wrenching games and I felt for our players because they did put in a lot. But in the end for our program, I thought that was the best way to go about doing it.”

There were certainly some embarrassing moments for Steve Sarkisian and Texas this past season. The Longhorns at one point lost six straight games, including to Big 12 bottom feeder Kansas — a team that has just three conference wins over the past five years. But Sarkisian pointed to lackluster first years for Carroll at USC and Nick Saban at Alabama to show that a turnaround is very much possible.

“When we were at USC, we went 6-6 our first year under Pete Carrol then proceeded to go to seven straight bowl games, win two national titles and lose a third,” he said. “Then I had an opportunity to be with coach Saban three years. I ask all the hard questions when I get around coach and I want to know the ‘whys’ of what he did. It goes without saying, when he came to Alabama he was gonna do it his way. There was adversity. There was bumps in the road. Year 1 of coach Saban at Alabama was 7-6 and losing at home to Louisiana-Monroe. But in the end, we’ve seen what happened after that. He was 10-2 the next year and third year you guys are national champs.

“So my two mentors did it a certain way when they took over their programs. Through my experience having been a head coach and worked with those guys, that was our approach. You don’t like the growing pains, bumps in the road, the tough losses and learning how to win and be as consistent as you can be, but in the end we’ll be better for it. I feel like we already are.”

Sarkisian will hope the Longhorns can undergo a similar transformation in his second year in Austin. Texas is set to open the 2022 season on Sept. 3 against Lousiana-Monroe.