Steve Sarkisian pushes back on narrative that Texas is skipping spring game to avoid tampering

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian pushed back on the narrative that the Longhorns skipped their spring game amid tampering. Sarkisian simply wanted to go in a different direction.

There were plenty of teams across the SEC and other conferences that opted to not have spring games. It seems like this has been a bigger deal than in recent years.

But Sarkisian was clear it wasn’t because of tampering. Heck, that could happen anyway, spring game or not.

“But all the while, I think one thing is important, that there’s a little bit of a misnomer of why we’re not having a spring game,” Sarkisian said. “To be clear, the portal opens April 16, the portal closes April 25. That’s Friday. So we’re not not having a spring game, so people don’t tamper with our players. They could go out and catch five touchdowns on that Saturday. They couldn’t go in the portal anyway. Okay, that’s not the premise of what we’re doing. 

“You know, people are going to tamper with our players whether we like it or not. That’s fine. You know, hopefully we’ve built a culture. They believe in the development of the other guys before them in our program, that they feel like this is the best place for them.” 

Not having a spring game is attributed to the development of new guys. Sarkisian rather get those players up to speed.

“We’re not having a spring game because I got 27 new faces on my roster that I need to take time to develop, and that development starts at the beginning of spring ball, where we’ve got to really build a foundation of understanding the whys of what we do, from how we practice to the drills that we do, to the foundational aspects of the offense, the defense, the special teams, of where we build and then where we grow from there,” Sarkisian said. “Now the challenge for us as a coaching staff is to grow quickly, that we’ve got to build the foundation, then we’ve got to grow because I do believe we have a talented football team. 

“But we have some youth and we have some inexperience, and I’m really pressing upon everybody in our program, coaches, staff members, included, to take the next step and to develop the leadership that’s needed on this team, because who we were a year ago, individually, we’ve got to be better than this year, right? We can’t remain the same, so everybody’s got to grow.”