FORMER ROUGHRIDER SARKISIAN LEADS TEXAS INTO SUGAR BOWL

NEW ORLEANS – Remaking a roster has never been easier in college football for a coach taking over a new team.

If the players aren’t to the new guy’s liking, they can be nudged – or even shoved – into the transfer portal to create room for potential upgrades.

At Washington and Texas, extreme makeovers weren’t needed. In fact, the holdovers from the previous regimes for the second-ranked Huskies (13-0) and third-ranked Longhorns (12-1) formed the core of two College Football Playoff teams that will face each other Monday night in the Sugar Bowl.

The programs Washington coach Kalen DeBoer and Texas coach Steve Sarkisian inherited weren’t necessarily lacking talent. What they needed was for the players to embrace a new message.

Sarkisian took over a Texas team after the 2020 season that had gone 25-12 in the previous three years under Tom Herman.

“When you take over a program, you’re trying to figure out what are the issues and I don’t think anybody ever felt like our issue was lack of talent or lack of resources,” Sarkisian, a quarterback with the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders from 1997-99, said. “I just felt like culturally, we needed to get better. We needed to get more connected. We needed to get more vulnerable, we needed to get honest with one another, so that we played more for one another than playing for ourselves.”

Sarkisian said former Longhorns running backs Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson, both NFL rookies this season, were critical in building the culture he felt was missing at Texas.

“I thought those guys really carried the flag for what we were trying to do in our program, when very easily those two guys could have went somewhere else,” Sarkisian said.

There are 16 players from the 2020 team still playing for Texas, including some of the Longhorns’ best: All-America defensive tackle T’Vondre Sweat, leading tackler Jaylan Ford, defensive back Jahdae Barron and starting offensive linemen Christian Jones and Jake Majors.

Initially, the change was jarring.

“You do something a certain way for three years. And then they basically came in and was like, the way that you’re lifting is wrong, the way that you’re running is wrong, the way that you’re practicing is wrong, everything that you’ve done wrong, and this is right,” Jones said.

Jones also noticed quickly that Sarkisian was trying hard to connect with the players. Jones recalled Sarkisian, less than a week into his tenure at Texas, asking about his girlfriend.

“He cares about everything that’s a part of your life because he knows that it all ties into the product on the field,” Jones said.

Sarkisian instituted Culture Wednesdays in an attempt to get his players to open up, the way he does to them about his past struggles with alcohol that cost him the head coaching job at Southern California and led him to rehab.

“I really believe that culture is organic. I don’t think it’s a sign up in your team room,” Sarkisian said.

By building upon what they found, DeBoer and Sarkisian didn’t need to go searching for what they needed to win.

(Associated Press)