Unleashing the dogs: Sarkisian’s blueprint for an elite Texas defense

Steve Sarkisian knows elite defense.

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While Sark himself helped build the 2000’s USC Trojans into a football machine known for their explosive offenses, the true differentiator for most of those teams was Pete Carroll’s defense. When Sark rebuilt his career under Nick Saban before taking the Texas job, he was again doing so under an elite defensive coach. This helped shape his understanding of how to build offenses to attack those defenses and also what the defense at his Texas program needed to look like.

“The best defenses are the best trained dogs, because they’re so rule based,” Sark explained recently during an interview with 3rd and Longhorn.

Every defense is governed by strict rules so that all 11 players can all react the same way to what’s in front of them and work as a pack to bring down their prey. Each defensive call has “if/then” rules for who covers who from what angles and who fits where in building a wall to stop different runs. If everyone doesn’t play with the right leverage, holes will come open and the defense will get beat.

“But the elite defenses are the ones that know their rules, know their assignments, they’re so obedient but yet when you let em off the leash they’re still gonna run,” Sark added. “Those are the ones that are the hardest because they have that mentality to go off script when they need to.”

For Sark, the trick to building a truly great defense is to make sure everyone is well trained with good rules to govern their behavior, but still have special players are able to make plays off script when they see opportunities. Sark achieved that goal in 2024 and he was able to explain why Texas was able to do it.

“I never try to recruit a linear player who can just do one thing in one sport. I like guys that can play multiple sports,” Sark explained. “Especially on defense, spatial awareness matters. What’s going on around me that I can’t see?”

Sark wants Longhorn defenders who can do a lot of things well because they have universal athletic traits, not because they are a prototype at a given position. The more “position flex” each player has to be able to play multiple positions, the better the overall defense can become.

“I’m trying to get the best 11 players on the field. If you have some position flex (can play multiple positions), it’s a lot easier to find ways to get you on the field. Last year I didn’t know how it was gonna play out with Jahdae Barron back and Jaylon Guilbeau coming off of injury, because they were both playing the same position the year before. So Jahdae’s willingness to go play corner gave Guilbeau the opportunity to get on the field.

“It’s no different than what we’re doing with Trey Moore right now. Everyone is under this impression that Moore’s not gonna rush the passer anymore? I’m not that dumb. The dude had six sacks last year and probably missed another 12. He’s gonna rush the passer, I’m just trying to expand his toolbox for the next level knowing he’s going to need to play off the ball backer.”

Next year’s plan for Texas will unsurprisingly make hay around the “position flex” Texas has at the Edge and linebacker posiitions.

“These guys can do multiple things,” Sark said of those rooms. “If you add up just those four guys (Anthony Hill, Brad Spence, Trey Moore, and Colin Simmons) it’s almost like 30 sacks. Now if I’m an opponent, where’s Simmons? Where’s Hill? Where’s Moore? Where’s Spence? We can interchange them and we can make the same call defensively and two guys are just changing positions and the whole picture looks completely different for the opponent.”

When you have a lot of dogs, you want to let them chase the quarterback but you still need to do it within a structure. The way this is achieved is through the art of zone blitzing, which was a calling card for Pete Kwiatkowski’s defenses at Washington and has slowly become a primary method for the Texas defenses culminating in last year’s unit.

The more positions a given defender can play, the easier it is to slide guys around and create different defensive looks which all have the same structure but create confusion for the quarterback. The end point of this is being able to play the same main coverages but with different Edges, linebackers, and defensive backs dropping in and out of each other’s assignments.

If Texas has enough versatility to bring more of the sorts of disguises and zone blitzes the Longhorns used against Ohio State in the playoffs last year, such as this 2nd-and-10 Tampa 2 zone blitz…

…they’ll be quite formidable. This looked exactly like Cover/Match 3 before the snap only for Michael Taaffe ($) to race down into the middle like a linebacker, Liona Lefau (W) to run by the guard into the backfield, and Barron (C on bottom) to suddenly play shallow and aggressive on hot routes after Andrew Mukuba (F) dropped deep behind him. Ohio State quarterback Will Howard saw Lefau and Simmons racing at him and tried to hit a quick flat route to the running back only to find Barron sitting on it.

The Thorpe Award winner probably might have taken this one to the house if Simmons hadn’t tipped it first.

It sounds like there’s a lot more where that came from.

“PK’s back there in the lab with all those guys, now he has (Duane) Akina back in there,” Sark noted of his defensive staff. “I walked in there and was like, ‘I gotta get the hell outta here,’ I mean they were there for two hours talking playing the bootleg in Cover 2, I’m like, ‘we’re still on this topic?’ On offense we’re already onto the next but there it’s like every little thing gets down to a science. And how many ways can you play Cover 3? How many ways can you play Cover 2? What are the rules in those things? We can change the picture a lot so long as long as we know the rules within the parameters of the defense.”

Even now the Texas defensive staff is testing how many rules they can teach to their dogs on defense so they know when it’s okay to chase the intruder and how to work together to catch him when they do.

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The chase will be on in 2025.