Steve Sarkisian explains Texas' immediate success in SEC, credits lessons learned under Nick Saban

Steve Sarkisian took the job at Texas before the news of heading to the SEC broke. He signed on to be a head coach in the Big 12 and spent three years in the conference. But Sarkisian had bigger aspirations than winning in the Big 12, wanting to compete for national championships. A big ask at the time considering the decades that took place before his arrival.

In order to reach those goals, Sarkisian planned to turn his program into an SEC one on paper. Getting bigger at the line of scrimmage and finding speed on the outside was his main goal when recruiting. Nothing else would work when trying to compete with the top schools in the current landscape of college football.

“When we took the job here four years ago, really looked at ‘Why are we taking the job?’ You don’t come to Texas just to be a head coach, you come to Texas to compete for championships and we felt like ‘Okay, if we want to win national championships, in the old model, you’re going to have to beat Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, and maybe Notre Dame.’ Those were the four teams that were rotating the College Football Playoff,” Sarkisian said.

“To do that — ‘Okay, what time of team do we need to have that happen?’ We felt like we had to get bigger up front, both line of scrimmages of the ball. And we need to get faster on the perimeter. We felt that is what it would take to beat those teams in the Playoff.”

Soon after, Texas was invited and voted into the SEC but Sarkisian had multiple recruiting classes to prepare before the move became official. The strategy never changed though, still recruiting big bodies up front and trying to find skill-position players capable of competing in the SEC.

Sticking to the plan has helped Texas transition quite well into the conference, winning its first two games against conference foes by an average of 26.5 points while looking like a national title contender.

“When we got notified of going to the SEC, that formula for building the team really didn’t have to change at that point because we had already been building the team that way to beat the best teams out of the SEC. It kind of just reaffirmed what we were doing, what needed to be done. So that’s been the process.”

Next up on the schedule will be the hardest test, going up against Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs. Both are from the Nick Saban coaching tree after successful stints in Tuscaloosa. One thing Sarkisian respects about Smart’s tenure with Georgia is the consistency he has found throughout the years, never really having a down year.

Both have them have spoken at length about the lessons learned from Saban and Smart has proven to apply them to his program. Sarkisian is hoping to be the next one.

“A lot of this is Kirby and I’s background with Coach Saban. When you’re at Alabama, whether it’s a short time or a long time, there’s a lot of lessons to be learned. Not everybody is going to be Nick Saban but there are a lot of lessons to be learned and there’s some method to the madness of how he goes about his business.

“I think we both took some pretty good notes of trying to build a program and an organization that could be sustainable and not just one year, having a really good year and then be down. But be sustainable to where you’re competitive and you’re competing for championships year in and year out.”