Shortly after Steve Sarkisian left Alabama to take over as head coach at the University of Texas, my wife turned to me and asked, “what do you think?”
The one word that immediately popped into my mind after listening to Sark speak was, “genuine.” Whatever you might think about Sarkisian as a coach, he is nothing, if not genuine.
So far, Sarkisian’s interactions with the media have born that out to be true.
Sarkisian mentioned several times that the running game was an area that he wanted to see how it would play out. He wasn’t saying it was a negative, just that he wasn’t sure how the running game would shake out. Those warnings continued even as recently as last Monday ahead of the Rice game.
“I think naturally, when you lose two players in Bijan (Robinson) and Roschon (Johnson) who carried such a bulk of the load for us a year ago, what is that going to look like?,” asked Sarkisian. “Who is it going to feel? I think that’s going to be a little bit of a process for us, and that’s ok.”
It’s still a work in progress. Texas wasn’t bad running the ball against Rice, but they weren’t great either.
“There were moments where it looked really good,” Sarkisian told the press Monday. “I thought we started to find a little bit of a rhythm there. But my evaluation of the run game might be different than others. It is, how do we run the ball when they know we’re going to run the ball? That’s really critical. It’s something that we take a lot of pride in, the emphasis with which we do it.
“I thought some of the errors that occurred in the run game, why some things weren’t as clean as we maybe would have liked, we didn’t trust our training well enough. That’s something that we need to improve upon because we can’t guarantee what every front is going to be or what every pressure and line stunt is going to be. So we have to trust our training and use our fundamentals and use our techniques and improve upon those to make sure that regardless of the look that we get that we block it accordingly and that we do it with a level of physicality that is up to our standard.”
In other words, when Sark talks about an area of concern or an area that is “a bit of a process,” then you need to pay attention.
Here’s what you need to pay attention to this week …
