Steve Sarkisian, Texas on UGA: “Georgia’s got the heart of a champion”

ATHENS, Ga. — Enough talk! Time to see this game get played. Georgia has had its spot in the SEC Championship for almost two weeks now. Meanwhile, Texas earned it last Saturday with a road win over arch rival Texas A&M. That set up a rematch between the Bulldogs and Longhorns, the two top teams in the conference throughout the season with the league’s title on the line. DawgsHQ has had you covered with everything from the Georgia side of things this week. But, before kickoff, let’s take a look at what’s been said in Austin about Saturday’s showdown…

STEVE SARKISIAN (SUNDAY)

OPENING STATEMENT: This is a heck of an honor to earn an opportunity to go to Atlanta and compete for an SEC Championship. It was something that was clearly one of our team goals before the season began. We knew it would be extremely challenging. Anytime you can make it to an SEC Championship game, that means you kind of were able to survive to some degree the treachery that this conference has … The fact that our guys were able to manage that throughout the season, we knew when we had the matchup with Georgia earlier in the year – we didn’t play great football, they beat us pretty handily that night – that our margin for error was really very small. We’d have to win every game and hope that it would be enough to control our destiny to get ourselves in this position. Our guys were able to do that. Credit to our coaches. Credit to our players for getting that done.

It’s a heck of a challenge. What Kirby has done at Georgia over nine years now has been pretty incredible. They’ve become the standard of college football. Couple national championships. Couple SEC titles. What they’ve just done on a consistency basis in recruiting. Their style of play. Ton of respect for what they’ve done at Georgia. Obviously this will be a heck of a challenge for us going to Atlanta, competing against them.

ON REMATCH: I think the one thing that I’ve tried to lean into here today, as we’re in the preliminary stages of it all, is kind of take myself back to the NFL. You get in your division there, you play teams multiple times a year. Then over time, a couple years go by, you start playing them four times in two years. If it’s the Playoffs, five times in two years. You try to, A, do the things that you do well. B, you try to take in the information that maybe you can gather from seeing them in person as opposed to what it looks like on tape. Then making sure that you have an idea of some of your own tendencies, that you’re able to break some of those things.

At the end of the day our job is to put our players in the best position to be successful, whether that’s physically, mentally, schematically, whatever that looks like. That’s what we always kind of fall back to. Again, I do think there are some things you can take from a first matchup, good and bad. Clearly there were enough things we need to fix from the first time we played ’em. You don’t get shut out in the first half, you don’t have four turnovers in the game, you’re not trailing 23-0, to get better from the first time we played them.

STEVE SARKISIAN (MONDAY)

OPENING STATEMENT: It’s a great opportunity to go against a really formidable opponent. Georgia and Kirby have been the standard in College Football now for about the last eight years. They’ve been in the SEC Championship seven of the last eight years, they’ve been to the last four consecutively. As I touched on with the team, and this is a real compliment and not something to intimidate our players; Georgia’s got the heart of a champion. You see it time and time again. You watch their game against Georgia Tech when it looked like they were dead and gone and they fought their way back to go play eight overtimes to ultimately win that ball game. We’re going to have to play all of 60 minutes and maybe beyond, and we’re going to have to play a better version of football than we did the first time around. We were out of character, out of sorts. We had four turnovers, eight penalties, four of which were false starts. We were 2-of-15 on third down, 1-of-5 on fourth down, I think we only ran the ball for 29 yards in the game. We’re going to have to play better brand of football offensively. Defensively, I thought they did their best to kind of stop the bleeding. Georgia had a bunch of short field and took advantage of those things to get out to a 23-0 lead at halftime which for us is an uncomfortable situation. We’ve gone into halftime with leads in every game except for that one and so we’ve got to start better, execute better and ultimately, we’re going to have to finish better than we did. It’s a great challenge. Like I said, it’s a great football team on the road, essentially a road game for us going to Atlanta to play Georgia, so we’ve got to pack the things necessary to have some success on Saturday.

ON REVENGE: You look at all that stuff and for some guys maybe that serves as motivation but really the motivation should be, what did I do today that I’m going to be thankful for on Saturday. Everybody wants to win Saturday, but what are you doing today to put yourself in a better position to win on Saturday? And that’s the challenge that I’ve posed to the team and to them individually. What are you going to do today that we’re going to be thankful for on Saturday? If we can stay in that frame of mind, the external motivators are nice sometimes but the internal is what we should be focused on. 

I think we’re a pretty good football team. I don’t think we played very good against them the first time out, and I think ultimately they deserve to get our best shot. We’re going to get their best shot, and I think they deserve to get our best shot too. That’s what our focus is on.

ON GEORGIA RUSH: Kirby is a great coach. Schumann is a great coach. Will Muschamp is a great coach. Man, they’ve got three good minds on defense, not to take anything way from the other coaches on their defensive staff. It’s a very good staff and historically they’ve been a very good third down defense with their pressure packages. 

And it’s two fold. Part of it is recognizing what they’re doing and then having your ability to win your one on ones. They create one on one situations and you’ve got to have the physical ability and fundamentals and technique to block them, and then also you have to have the ability to get open and beat man coverage. We struggled at all three of those in the first game. We didn’t identify a couple of blitzes and had free rushers and got him. We struggled to block them at times one on one when we had those opportunities and then we struggled to get open against man coverage down the field. So there’s layers to this that we have to play much better if we want to be victorious Saturday. A lot to work on on that front.

RB QUINTREVION WISNER

ON FIRST GAME, WHAT DISAPPOINTED HIM: I would definitely say the thing that disappointed me the most was me just not stepping up for my guys, for my teammates, for the program whenever my name was called. Something that I’m doing to help me going forward into these matches, I’m just coming in each day of the week, locking into the little things, the little details we’re going over, making sure I got the game plan tied down and being ready for the guys.

DB JAHDAE BARRON

ON PAYBACK FACTOR: It’s not payback. We have it in the back of our heads what they done to us. We have respect for them, but we don’t fear them. We have to go out there and just play our game, be enamored with us. Clean up things we messed up in the past, buying into us, being one. I think we started off good today on a Monday practice. We’re just going to go from there.

RB JAYDON BLUE

ON LEARNING FROM LAST GAME: Yeah, the main thing that we took from this game is we had a lot of things that we could have improved on. The first thing was taking care of the ball more. When we turn the ball over, we gives teams a short field, give them a better chance of putting the ball in the end zone. For us, it’s just us taking things from that game and seeing how we could change and make those things different to where we can put ourself in a better position to be more successful.

OL JAKE MAJORS

ON CHALLENGES TEXAS OFFENSIVE LINE FACED VS. GEORGIA: I guess what we learned was we had a lot to improve on, whether that was technique, fundamentals, communication, and of course physicality. We had to learn a lot about ourselves from that game. When it comes to this week, it’s all about preparation. We got to dig into the film, prepare. Starting tomorrow we got to start with our physicality on Tuesday. From there we just got to keep preparing and dig into the details of the game plan.

STEVE SARKISIAN (THURSDAY)

OPENING STATEMENT: It’s an honor to represent the University of Texas in the SEC Championship game in Atlanta this weekend against the University of Georgia. First year in the conference, was definitely a goal of ours to be in Atlanta for this game. It’s been a challenging regular-season schedule to get to this point. Know it’s going to be a heck of a challenge as well on Saturday.

Georgia is a great football team. I think Kirby and the University of Georgia have been the standard of college football for about the last seven years or so. National championships, conference championships. Recruited at a really high level. Has a great coaching staff. It’s a great challenge for us, but one that I know we’re looking forward to. An opportunity that we want to make sure we make the most of.

For more coverage of Georgia’s matchup with Texas in the SEC Championship Game, be sure to head to the DawgsHQ YouTube channel and check out our preview/predictions podcast!