Steve Sarkisian reveals message to team at first practice after Oklahoma loss

Texas had a big lead on Saturday against Oklahoma. The Longhorns jumped out to a 28-7 lead and led 38-20 at halftime. But Oklahoma came back and ultimately walked away with a 55-48 victory behind 25 points in the fourth quarter. Following the loss, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said that he saw the anger and pain in his team after dropping the game.

Sarkisian went on to say that nobody feels bad for Texas for losing, so that the team needs to move on and get ready for the next one.

“Yeah, I think it was (the right level of hurt and anger after losing to Oklahoma),” Sarkisian told reporters on Monday of Texas’ reaction to the loss. “There’s not a lot of time in our sport the way the turnaround is for kind of the ‘poor me’s.’ Nobody feels sorry for us. Whether it’s outside of here, I mean nobody’s feeling sorry for us losing that game the way we did. So, we don’t have a lot of time to feel sorry for ourselves.”

Sarkisian: Texas needs to take the feeling from the loss and use it moving forward

The grind of a college football season can be grueling for coaches and players and everyone else involved. When a team loses a game, it undoubtedly hurts. That is especially true in losses like the one Sarkisian and Texas suffered on Saturday.

“It hurts when you invest in something and you don’t get the outcome that you’re looking for,” Sarkisian said of the feeling of Texas’ loss. “That’s painful, but that’s the agony of sport. And that’s why we do what we do. There’s those tremendous highs that we get to appreciate and there’s some really tremendous lows that we have to endure. But the key to that is accepting that feeling and then using that feeling of pain or suffering or whatever that is to help springboard you to the next one.

“I think that the greatest competitors in the world have that. They’ve always had that ability. I’ve never known a football player or any other sport to have won every single game of his life. But they learn from that loss and then they springboard that into another performance and that’s what we’re going to need to do.”

Sarkisian and Texas will look to bounce back from the tough loss on Saturday against No. 12 Oklahoma State. The game will kick off at 12 noon ET.