The late, great, Dick Tomey used to tell coaches, “you’re either putting a team together, keeping a team together or putting it back together.”
Texas football head coach Steve Sarkisian arrived in Austin and immediately began putting the Longhorns back together following the often times dysfunctional tenure of Tom Herman’s era and a 5-7 first season.
“Trauma forms bonds,” linebacker Jaylan Ford told the media prior to this year’s Big 12 Championship Game. “Sark always talks about the love that each player has for each other. That year (2021) is definitely a highlight for us bonding. When Sark got here, it was hard for everyone to buy in because, respectively, he wasn’t the guy that recruited all of these players.
“We (the seniors who stayed in the program) kind of had to be leaders and we kind of had to believe in Sark. We pushed the other guys to have a standard, or start creating a new standard. I think for everyone who bought into it – you look up and here we are 11-1. It was a lot of clawing and digging, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but it was all worth it.”
Having survived that first season, Sark went immediately into build mode, bringing in an elite recruiting class, including Quinn Ewers who transferred in from Ohio State and of course, that incredible offensive line class which has already made its mark.
Last season was all about keeping the team together. Sark introduced the “culture Wednesdays” focusing more on the players and what they’ve gone through in their personal lives. It was all about building those deep, lasting bonds that tie the guys together.
“He’s around us a whole lot more, which is really cool to see,” Ewers said at the end of the season when asked about how Sarkisian has changed since he got to Austin. “You can tell he really cares about us as people, not just as players on the field. He wants us to grow as young men. He talked about it before Senior Night, how he wants us to leave this program better men than how we came. He wants us to be that strong father and leader of our household.”
Sark himself has said he became a better coach when it stopped being only about the X’s and O’s and he began to focus more on the players as humans.
The team building and culture building paid off with a 12-2 season, Big 12 Championship title and one play away from playing for a national championship.
Now, Sark is right, smack dab in the middle of putting his 2024 team together, and I think he’s having fun doing it.
