UT's Steve Sarkisian says Saturday's loss to Florida is 'on me'

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA—His team was 3-1, ranked No. 9 and a road favorite. But Saturday, coach Steve Sarkisian’s Texas Longhorns succumbed to the unranked Florida Gators and fell in the Swamp, 29-21.

“Obviously a disappointing loss in the fact that we just didn’t play great,” Sarkisian said. “And especially early on in the ball game, we struggled to get stops defensively. We really were not very good at the line of scrimmage on either side of the ball early. We got a little better on defense, but we just weren’t great at the line of scrimmage on offense. Had some opportunities, missed some opportunities, but we battled. They competed. We competed ’til (the) very end. I love the fight of the guys. But we got to play better. You know, we just didn’t play good enough, and that’s on me. So we got to get that fixed.”

Texas had few answers for the Gators.

UF entered the game 113th nationally at 328.2 yards a game and 99th in scoring [22.0]. The Longhorns came in allowing only 211.0 yards a game. UF surpassed that in the first half and finished with a season-best 457 yards. 

Gators quarterback DJ Lagway played perhaps the best game of his college career; he 21 of 28 for 298 yards, 2 touchdowns and 1 interception. UF added 159 rushing yards, 107 coming from Jadan Baugh.

Meanwhile, the UF defense at Texas’ lunch for much of the game. The Gators intercepted quarterback Arch Manning [16 of 29, 263, 2 touchdowns] twice and sacked him six times. And, the Longhorns had only 52 yards on the ground when you include sacks.

Here are some other notable quotes from Sarkisian after the game:

*On if this loss will test his team’s resolve: “I think that this is where you find out about the culture that you have, you know. And that’s what we just talked about as a team. We got to get tighter than we’ve ever been. We’re gonna have to quiet the noise, because there’ll be plenty of noise coming out of this game. And we need to get back to work, and we need to play our our brand, our style of football that we’re capable of playing.

And we just didn’t do it tonight. You know, that’s a good team. We knew it was going to be a good team coming in. We knew it would be a tough environment. We knew we needed to play well, and we didn’t play good enough. But we’ll hunker down. We’ve done it before. We know how to do it, but it’s going to take everybody staying really well connected, and we’ve got to be really tight. We got to march forward. And we’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.”

*On the Texas rushing attack, or lack thereof: “We have to figure that out. I don’t have a great answer for you today. What I do know is we couldn’t run it tonight when they didn’t know we were going to run it, regardless of when they knew we were going to run it. And so we’ve got to improve that. You know, we just cannot be a one-dimensional team. When guys can just start rushing the passer and not worrying about the run, the game gets really difficult. So we got to find a way to generate some run game and generate some run game outside Arch. We got to find it with the runners. And that’ll be a task of ours tonight, tomorrow, Monday, to put together a plan for next week.”

*On not being able to pressure Lagway often: “The one that really stood out to me was the kind of the deep post they hit, I think to (Vernell Brown III). Want to say that was in the third quarter, where we felt like he looked left, he looked right, looked left, looked back right, and we just didn’t get a pass rush. And Grayson, you know, he’s in tight coverage, but that’s tough to guard a guy that long, all the way down the field.

But I think to their credit they ran the ball enough to where we had to play run defense, and then when they were calling their passes, we weren’t really in straight pass-rush mode. You know, we got home, we hit the arm and forced the interception there for Taaffe with a pass rush. But we have to find a way to make opponents one-dimensional, and we weren’t able to do that tonight. They were able to run the ball and win on early downs, especially early in the game, and that opened up their entire playbook to him.”

*On Manning’s performance: “Arch kind of got a stinger on his shoulder. That’s why he went to the tent and came back out. He did take some hits. You know, I thought Arch competed really well today. He battled his butt off. You know, there’s a couple … the interception there that their safety makes over the top is a heck of a play. I’m sure there’s going to be plays he’s going to look at on the film and say he wished he could have back. But I thought he battled, he competed.”