Overall talent is the best it's been at Texas in over a decade
If you didn’t watch Steve Sarkisian’s press conference, you missed quite the show.
Not the glitz or glamour, but the name-dropping.
[Join Inside Texas today and get the best Texas Longhorns insider team info and recruiting intel!]
The head coach named nearly the entire roster as looking good or showing promising signs during the scrimmage or first couple of weeks of camp. And…he said virtually the entire team emerged healthy.
So how are we not supposed to drink the Kool-Aid?
**
I continue to maintain that Texas is as talented as they’ve been as a team in more than a decade.
People ask what I mean by that, and it’s really simple.
From seniors to freshman, there are more future NFL players on this roster, both high-end talent and blue-collar talent than the last decade. Furthermore, the talent on this team is more widely dispersed across various positions than others.
And that second part – the talent being dispersed among various positions – is one of the reasons why I think this team will be much tougher to beat than previous ones the Longhorns have fielded.
After all, Texas has had strong position groups in the last decade. A secondary with Kenny Vaccaro, Quandre Diggs and Adrian Phillips is more than solid. A running back crew of Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson is as stout as it gets. Devin Duvernay, LJ Humphrey, and Collin Johnson were a good trio of wideouts.
But each of those teams also had clear weaknesses where NFL talent elsewhere on the team was either non-existent or too young and inexperienced.
Not anymore.
**
To be clear, I’m not saying the 2023 Texas team is perfect, or the best ever. It’s just that the roster is well-rounded and talented.
For the first time in quite a while, I feel strongly that the program has a chance to win games in multiple ways – outscoring people on offense or beating them just as well with a really good defense.
That depth is why Sark has to drop so many different names at a press conference. It’s also why Texas is better positioned for a long haul of a college football season than any in recent memory. No Kool-Aid is needed.
