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The best lessons from Steve Sarkisian's mentors may have been their failures

by:RT Young•06/25/25
Pete Carroll, Steve Sarkisian
Pete Carroll, Steve Sarkisian ( Kirby Lee-Imagn Images)

When Steve Sarkisian was hired at Texas, he wasn’t a retread. You see that happen in coaching appointments often. The results rarely change. I’m looking at you NFL teams and I mean no offense to John Fox. But, retreads are uninspired moves. They’re the equivalent of an organization or school tossing their hands up in the air and saying “eenie meenie miney mo” at familiar looking names. Sarkisian was different. Like his two mentors, he had failed before. And those failures paved the road for their success. 

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On the latest episode of 3rd and Longhorn, Sarkisian mentioned the old adage of “you’re not a real coach until you’ve been fired.” He had been, but that didn’t define him. When he got to Austin Sarkisian knew that just like Pete Carroll and Nick Saban, his best coaching was still ahead of him. 

Sarkisian’s flameout at USC in 2015 was public and embarrassing. Carroll too had been let go. First by the New York Jets and then the New England Patriots. He was far down the list of the Trojans candidates before he eventually got the USC gig and cemented his legend status. Saban was a .500 coach at Michigan State and a .500 coach in the NFL. But Sark “studied them” both and saw their best coaching happened well into their 50s, not when they were viewed as a wunderkind in their 30s. 

That revealed to Sarkisian that when he had been a star young coach at Washington and USC in his 30s, he “didn’t know what he was doing.” 

Sarkisian spoke about what else he learned from the two coaches he studied under at USC and Alabama, respectively. Sarkisian remembered calling Carroll and expressing frustration that the team he inherited could run the stuff Tom Herman had done really well, but struggled in what the new staff attempted to implement. Carroll implored him not to change his philosophy, to not change “what he believed in.” Sarkisian didn’t take the low hanging fruit and Texas fell to a dismal 5-7 record in 2021. He called it a “really hard” season. But it revealed to Sarkisian that the Longhorns had a culture problem that wasn’t just manifesting itself on game days. 

“Who you are some of the time is who you are all the time” is a mantra he learned from his mentors. Sarkisian repeated it throughout the episode. That belief allowed him and his staff to maintain consistency in who they were and in their expectations. Because of that and early standard bearers like Roschon Johnson, the program changed. It didn’t always play out in conventional ways, like in the team’s GPA or causing players to get to know each other, but it created consistency. Consistency in who the coaches were and in who the players are has caused a gigantic transformation. It has led to a conference championship in the Big 12, two straight semi-finals and a record number of Longhorns drafted in 2024 and 2025. 

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Sarkisian learned from some of the greats not to let failure define him. And it’s clear the best is yet to come, still.

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