State of the Program: Sarkisian, other Texas coaches a big hit in Texas Fight Tour event in Houston
On the latest video episode of On Texas Football’s State of the Program, Inside Texas’s Bobby Burton and Eric Nahlin get us caught up with the happenings with the Longhorns, including the latest stop in the Texas Fight Tour in Houston.
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Nahlin talked about the positive reception for Steve Sarkisian and his fellow Texas coaches at the event, which was attended by more than 400 people. Plenty of the excitement in the crowd came from the announcement that the Longhorns’ game at Alabama in week 2 of the upcoming season would be a 6 p.m. kickoff in Tuscaloosa.
“They’re excited,” said Nahlin, the publisher of InsideTexas.com. “You know the game was gonna be on everybody’s mind regardless just because of the magnitude, but with a time being announced and it being a night game that gets people a little bit more excited. I think people that were otherwise on the fence about going were definitely more interested a lot.
“And there’s also there’s also some optimism that Texas is going to be able to play a competitive game and maybe even pull out a win. So there’s a lot of optimism that Texas is going to make some noise in that game.”
Speaking of optimism, Sarkisian made in very clear that he’s excited about his offense for the coming year on the basis of returning 10 of 11 starters from last season and improvement across the board.
“(Sark) thinks the offense is going to be better than it was last year despite losing Bijan (Robinson),” Nahlin explained. “And they’re starting to look like what they want to do, looking like how they want to be on offense, having a lot more speed on the outside.
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“Definitely we know that he’s going to run more RPOs and a lot more 11-personnel to take advantage of Texas’ talented wide receiver group, but he didn’t really get into too many specifics about that,” Nahlin continued. “He did mention that he likes that they’re big up front and they’ve got speed and he thinks they’re starting to get SEC ready in that regard.”
Burton mentioned that Sarkisian has developed some central tenants to what he wants to really try to do by the time Texas goes into the Southeastern Conference in 2024.
“The fun part about follow recruiting is you can tell exactly where the offense is gonna go by who they recruit,” Nahlin said. “Sark mentioned that you’ve got to be big up front, you’ve got to be physical and then you have to have speed on the perimeter. Maybe he doesn’t have the exact experience that he wants to get on offense, but it’s turning in that direction.”
“Does Sark think his program is ready for the SEC?,” Burton asked.
“He didn’t necessarily say that but he said, ‘we’ve got one more year in the Big 12 to worry about the goal, which is to win the Big 12 Championship,’” Nahlin said. “He wasn’t necessarily worried about the SEC, but he made it pretty obvious that, you know, he’s starting to get the pieces he needs to be successful in the SEC.”
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