Steve Sarkisian hopes to play as many players as he possibly can against Colorado State
Steve Sarkisian wants a win for the Texas Longhorns on Saturday, and he prefers that as many players as possible have a hand in guiding the No. 4 ranked team in the country to a victory over the Colorado State Rams.
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“For me, the biggest thing that I’m looking for now more than ever is our ability to play a lot of players, especially in the first half of this game,” Sarkisian said Monday. “We have a two-deep, when in reality our ones are our twos and our twos are our ones. Getting all those guys involved in the game and seeing the comfort level maybe of some of our younger players, then getting them more comfortable as the game goes on, I think is important for us as well.”
This isn’t a new development or desire for Sarkisian. Last year in the season-opener against Rice that also kicked off in the sweltering afternoon heat, 70 Texas players saw action. Fifty-six played against Wyoming two weeks later, a smaller number compared to other blowouts considering that game was in question until the fourth quarter. Sixty-two played in the games at Baylor and against Kansas to close out September, where the latter matchup had a game-time temperature of 91 degrees.
Playing a lot of players, even some third-stringers, is by design for multiple reasons. As linked above, Sarkisian believes his team has the chance to be playing for the national championship on January 20, 2025. If the Longhorns are to make it that far, Sarkisian will need to ensure more than just his first-string players are prepared for action in high-leverage games. Football is a violent sport and injuries happen. The Longhorn running back room serves as evidence of that reality.
But by the same token, roles for the 2024 season have not been set in stone. A significant amount of players will have the opportunity against the Rams on Saturday to earn more snaps going forward, just as they did during preseason practices and scrimmages. That not only applies to the top of the depth chart, but to the middle of it too.
“I try to keep that open in week one so that guys can continue to show their development and improvement from week to week to week,” Sarkisian said. “This is an important week for a lot of our younger players to continue to develop.”
So with the possibility of triple-digit temperatures or miserably muggy conditions on August 31, what might Sarkisian change or keep the same from when his team played in a similarly uncomfortable environment on Campbell-Williams Field to open the 2023 season?
On defense, he might not change that much.
“I think definitely defensively, we’ll keep what we did,” Sarkisian said. “I think last year in the first half of the Rice game, we might have played 32 or 33 players on the defensive side of the ball in that first half alone. So playing multiple players on the defensive side of the ball I think will be big.”
On offense, Sarkisian wants his players to be able to overcome adversity if the Rams put something unexpected on the field, especially after the Owls deployed a different defense than the one the Longhorns anticipated in 2023.
“I think, inevitably, what we’ve learned from an offensive perspective coming out of the Rice game is that whatever’s on tape probably isn’t what we’re going to see,” Sarkisian said. “Colorado State has had nine months to get ready to play us. So we’re going to see things that aren’t anywhere on tape so we’re going to have to trust our training and execute our plays regardless of the looks that we could be getting.”
No matter how many players see the field on Saturday, Sarkisian wants every one of them to know that the Rams lining up across from them will pose a challenge to the Longhorns’ ability to go 1-0.
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“We’ve got a very tough opponent,” Sarkisian said. “Coach Norvell has done a really good job of building that program back up at Colorado State. They were 5-7 last year, but there was a lot of close games that could have went either way.”
