What Steve Sarkisian said about week 1 of the Texas Longhorns 2024 season

Steve Sarkisian took the podium today to talk about the Texas Longhorns football team and their upcoming season, which begins this coming Saturday at 2:30 p.m. in Darrell K Royal – Texas Memorial Stadium against the Colorado State Rams.

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Sark had a number of notes about the Rams in particular and more universally about the 2024 Longhorns and how they’ve prepared for this coming season. The goals for Texas this week center mostly around starting the season off with the right approach to the game.

“It’s important that we re-establish our brand, our style of football,” Sarkisian said. “There’s a level of physicality with which we want to play the game. There’s a speed element, the speed with which we want to play the game. There’s an attacking manner in which we want to play the game, and there’s a football intellect, a football IQ that we want to play the game with. We have to re-establish that and that starts Saturday.”

The Rams should test the Longhorns in a number of ways, chiefly with wide receiver Tory Horton, who drew praise from Sark and will have Texas’ attention this coming Saturday.

“With (Horton), first of all where is he lining up?” Sarkisian said. “They move him around a fair amount. Then having the ability to win at the top of the routes against him, he’s got good length. Then you got to get him on the ground. When he opens his stride up and gets into the open field he can run away from you.”

Sark added, “we might miss some tackles in week one. It’s okay sometimes to miss so long as three or four more tacklers are coming behind.”

The game will be played in the August Texas heat and Sark has been learning more and more about what goes into playing week one as the Longhorns. He noted they expect to play first and second team players on both sides of the ball and as far as opposing gameplans go…

“What we’ve learned from an offensive perspective from the Rice game is that whatever’s on tape, probably isn’t what we’re going to see,” Sarkisian said. “Colorado State’s had nine months to get ready to play us, and so we’re going to see things that aren’t anywhere on tape and we’re going to have to trust our training and execute our plays regardless of the looks that we could be getting.”

The 2023 Rice Owls prepared some three-high safety defense for Texas they hadn’t run previously, mixed in a number of exotic blitzes, and got into a lot of Tampa 2 defense. It took Texas a while to adjust before it got its bearings and imposed their will.

Overall the 2024 Longhorns have big expectations for the year despite questions about replacing 11 players selected by the NFL and producing in the run game despite losing two players there to injury. Regarding the Texas run game in 2024, Sark was adamant things would change despite the injury to Texas’ bigger starter, CJ Baxter.

“We’re going to run it between the tackles,” Sarkisian said. “They learn how to run the day they show up here. Three years ago I couldn’t have said that about Jaydon Blue but he’s been an understudy to Bijan Robinson, Roschon Johnson, Jonathon Brooks, and he’s more than capable. Tre Wisner, Jerrick Gibson, all these guys. When we go to team run, we’re a physical football team and we believe in running the ball and we believe in stopping the run. Inevitably you learn how to run our style… they’re going to run between the tackles and they’ll do great.”

Texas hopes to not only maintain an identity as a running team but improve in red zone and third down situations over what happened a year ago.

“In the red area, when you analyze it, we have to be better at not stubbing our own toe in the red area,” Sark said. “False starts, penalties, negative plays, our efficiency is drastically improved when we just continue to move the ball forward.

“Kinda similar to the red area, where I felt like we were in way too many third-and-long situations a year ago and part of that I felt like is because of some self-inflicted wounds. Too many false starts, too many penalties or negative plays that knocked us back, the conversion rate is just not good when it’s 3rd-and-7+. It’s not good for anybody, and when those are the bulk of your conversion plays, we need to be better there. We need to move those into 3rd-and-5s and 3rd-and-4s.”

Part of this will include figuring out which of Texas’ six or seven quality receivers will be featured weapons in the offense this season. As of now, it appears Sark is waiting for the actual games to clear up which guys are ready to lead the team.

“Time will tell as we go,” Sarkisian said. “A lot of these guys are going to play. There’s certain guys that the ball finds them. There’s other guys you have to design plays for them. So that’s something we’re going to have to monitor early in the season, who does the ball find naturally and then who do we have to make sure we design a few things for early in games to make sure they get involved and they get their touches.”

Other changes include a different approach to the season as a consequence of having a potential playoff appearance at the tail end of the year. Sark talked to multiple successful NFL coaches to get a sense of how to orient his young team to be able to play their best football in a sport with a playoff system.

“I was leaning into those guys, just look at the run New England went on with Bill Belichick, look at the run Kansas City has been on with Andy Reid, and you can look at what Kyle Shanahan has done with the 49ers,” Sarkisian said. “They go deep into the playoffs year in and year out, and then they have to turn around and get their team ready again, and then they go deep into the playoffs again, and then again, and again. It’s more about workload management of their players, and that’s a fine line because you want to make sure your players are prepared physically and mentally ready to play but yet you also want to try and see the big picture that you’ve got the bulk of your roster and your best players really healthy when they’re needed in that playoff run. Those guys have had a lot of success doing that.

“Now they have veteran players who have done that for a long time, we have younger players that we’re still developing. But I just tried to tap into their expertise and their experience of all of this. There’s a few things that we’ve already started to implement and will continue to implement as the season goes on.”

Perhaps we’ll find out what sort of workload management tactics Sark has been developing for the coming season during the year, but he also had this note about last year’s team and how it sustained enough success to win 12 games.

“We won 12 games last season,” Sarkisian said. “Eight of those 12 wins were one-score games in the fourth quarter. It wasn’t like we just walked our way to victories, we had to find ways to win late in games in some adverse situations. I think that was in part our culture and in part our leadership and we’re going to need that again this fall.”

Perhaps in the new era of the expanded playoff, running up large margins of victory will take a backseat to workload management of star players at schools like Texas.

One new Longhorn Sark is hoping won’t need his workload to be managed is freshman punter Michael Kern. Asked if the specialist will be trusted to take the field immediately Sark laughed, “Oh yeah, he’ll be on the field… well hopefully he’s not on the field but he’ll be on the field.”

Overall Sark is confident he has a talented team, although it’s composition is different than a year ago.

“We should always be hovering around 10 draft picks,” Sark said in response to a question about how much NFL talent this squad could produce. “If we do this right, if we recruit the right way, if we develop our players the way we should be developing them, if we have the team success which ultimately then lends itself to the individual accolades, awards, and honors, one of which is being an NFL draft pick, we should always hover around that 10 number.”

This team doesn’t have the same dynamics as previous groups though. Described by Sark as a “close-knit” team, they are evidently quite democratic in their approach to team-building and preparation.

“I don’t think we have these one, two, or three dominant leaders that are the absolute voice of our team,” Sarkisian said. “A couple of years ago it was Roschon Johnson. When Roschon spoke, everybody listened. Last year it might have been Jordan Whittington and Byron Murphy, when they spoke, everybody listened.

“Now I feel like we have so many voices, and they’re great voices and they’re speaking really good wisdom and great words. That’s what makes this team special. They’re all in together. There’s not any sort of hierarchy and they know they need one another to make it happen. So that’s probably the special ingredient for this team.”

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Sark sounds confident coming into this season and describes a team that’s eager to get started.

“This is a very hungry football team and they have worked extremely hard,” Sarkisian said. “They have pushed one another, they’ve held each other accountable, they’ve picked each other up, they’ve been driven, they’ve been focused. And so now this is their first (opportunity) to take the field.”