Steve Sarkisian comments on viral monkey incident involving Texas assistant

While a monkey belonging to the girlfriend of Texas special teams coordinator Jeff Banks has dominated Texas-related discussion this week, it apparently is having no effect on the football team in Austin. 

On Thursday, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was unsurprisingly asked about the monkey situation.

“Not a distraction at all,” Sarkisian said, per Brian Davis of the Austin American-Statesman.

Sarkisian needs his 4-4 team to be focused after losing three-straight games. Their last win was over a month ago.

Texas travels to Ames this weekend to play an inconsistent but dangerous Iowa State team. The FS1 primetime contest is sure to feature its fair share of monkey-related jabs at the Longhorn faithful. Iowa State is a 6.5-point favorite.

Halloween party gone awry

In Banks’ first year with the Longhorns, a report surfaced Monday night that the monkey of his girlfriend, Dani Thomas, had an encounter with a trick-or-treater during Halloween festivities on Sunday.

Thomas responded to the report Monday night, taking to Twitter to answer a series of questions and showed where the monkey, Gia, lives. An emotional support animal according to Thomas, Gia lives in a caged environment away from where children were allowed to trick-or-treat.

Thomas went on to describe the situation and how the incident occurred.

“No one was viciously attack this a lie, a whole lie,” she wrote on Twitter. “She was not apart of any haunted house, the kid did not have permission to be on the other side of my property!”

She continued: “I had a haunted house on one side gated off. He had no permission to go pass the gate. I had no idea he went in my backyard. Neither did I know anything about a bite! Until a doctor of neighborhood told me the treat a small bite. No parent have contacted me about it!”

A former punter at Washington State, Banks led the then-Pac-10 and ranked No. 15 nationally in average yards per punt while helping the Cougars earn an invitation to the Rose Bowl in 1995.

Banks was previously the special teams coordinator at Alabama, where he worked with Sarkisian. Before joining the staff at Alabama in 2018 , Banks was the special teams coordinator at Texas A&M.

When former head coach Kevin Sumlin was fired in November of the 2017 season at Texas A&M, Banks was named the interim head coach. He went 0-1 on the job, losing to Wake Forest in the Belk Bowl.

On3’s Pete Nakos contributed to this report.