Steve Sarkisian happy with progress in Spring drills, growth of team heading into the fall
The Texas football team is nearing the end of an impressive six weeks of work in Spring drills that will help determine the Longhorns’ pecking order for the coming season. Coach Steve Sarkisian and his staff have put the players through the ringer, tested them in one-on-one and team drills as well as scrimmage situations that will carry real weight when the lights go on for real in September.
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By all indications, Sarkisian’s third Spring on the 40 Acres has been the team’s best in his tenure, with Texas moving to a position to compete for its first Big 12 Conference championship since 2009.
There will be two more practices in the Spring – on Thursday when the Longhorns will work on situational sets and plays determined by down and distance and position on the field, and on Saturday, when Texas will get to show off some of the strides it’s made when Sarkisian chooses the sides for the annual Orange-White Spring Game.
Once the dust settles on Saturday afternoon’s showcase, there will still be plenty of work to be done in the rest of the Spring and the Summer months. Sarkisian said Tuesday that he feels very good about the progress his team has made.
“If we roll the ball out, I’m gonna feel really good about our guys that take the field and that we can perform and play championship-level football,” Sarkisian said. “We’re not there yet – like I just got done talking the team, we’ve got work to do. We’re not a finished product. But I feel good about the progress that we’ve made.”
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One of the mantras of Sarkisian and his coaches is that he expects everybody to be intentional every time they take the field – to take a step forward, to continue to grow continue to get better.
“Because in football, there are no flat roads,” the coach explained. “If you are not getting better then sooner or later you will start to gradually get worse and that’s when you retire from the game. We see it all the time – the game retires you, you don’t retire from the game.
“So we’re trying to impress upon our guys is that we only get 15 Spring practices, one of which is a game,” Sarkisian continued. “How do we maximize each and every one of those opportunities to take a step forward and to improve our game whether that’s mentally, whether that’s physically, whether that’s schematically? What does that look like? Because after Saturday, we’re not going to be back on the grass with helmets on until August.”
Sarkisian said he wants “to squeeze every ounce of this orange here on Thursday.”
“We want to maximize that and then go out and play and perform and have fun playing football with confidence on Saturday to get ourselves ready for summer workouts and summer conditioning and to ultimately get ourselves ready for fall camp,” he said.
