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For Texas football, team GPA correlates with team success

Joe Cookby:Joe Cook•04/30/25•

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Steve Sarkisian
Steve Sarkisian (Will Gallagher/Inside Texas)

About six years ago, Texas posted a graphic on its social media channels that celebrated a new achievement. The Longhorns posted a 2.89 GPA in the spring of 2019, something the program said was the highest in team history.

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The number was widely ridiculed. But as far as its place compared to some of the following years, it really was an achievement. Over the rest of the Tom Herman era, the Longhorns’ team GPA dipped. Now 2020 COVID-19 restrictions and the proliferation of remote instruction may have had something to do with that, but as Steve Sarkisian said Monday at the Touchdown Club of Houston’s University of Texas day, Texas’ B-‘s eventually became C+’s.

“I got hired in January of 2021,” Sarkisian said. “At the end of the spring semester, (Chris Del Conte) gives me my cumulative team GPA from the fall and spring semesters that year. It was a 2.33. I thought to myself, that’s not very good. I love UT. I get it, we’re the No. 3 public university in the country, but we should be better than that.

“Well what came of that? We were a 5-7 football team that fall that blew six straight second half leads. What came out of that? We had zero NFL draft picks.”

The Longhorns dramatically overhauled the roster between the 2021 and 2022 seasons, with players leaving for a variety of reasons. A few left because they weren’t culture fits, and those that replaced them (for the most part) were willing to do what it took to be part of the culture Sarkisian wanted to build at Texas.

As the team improved on the field, they did the same in the classroom.

“Year two rolls around, our team GPA comes back to me and we’re at 2.78,” Sarkisian said. “We went 8-5 and we had five NFL draft picks and one first rounder.”

More and more players bought into the demands of Longhorn football, which set up for a massive 2023.

“Year three rolls around and we’re at a 2.98 team GPA now,” Sarkisian said. “We go 12-2, we win the Big 12, and we get 11 players drafted in the NFL draft. Kind of a common thread happening here, right?”

As Sarkisian’s tenure continued, the team on average began to scrape its head on the B+ floor.

“Next year rolls around, we have a 3.27 team GPA,” Sarkisian said. “We go 13-3, we go to the SEC championship game, we go back to the CFP semifinals, and we just had 12 players drafted this weekend. It’s crazy to think, from a player’s standpoint, and I put this stat up: who you are some of the time is who you are all the time.”

Culture often is one of Sarkisian’s biggest emphases, and academic success, or at the very least reasonable academic ability, is part of Sarkisian’s cultural demands.

“If we want to be a really good football team, if we want to be a really disciplined football team, we’ve got to be a disciplined football team off the field as much as we want to be a disciplined football team on the field,” Sarkisian said.

The moment when Sarkisian will learn his team’s 2024-25 GPA is fast approaching, and it’s one that he looks at with far more optimism these days compared to when he took the job four years ago.

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“I’m holding my breath to see what the heck CDC is going to give me here in about two weeks for our team GPA this year, because it’s probably going to serve as a pretty good precursor for what we can expect this fall,” Sarkisian said.

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