OTF Premium Texas dealing with growing pains while striving to play to a championship standard

AUSTIN, Texas — When the dust settled on last Saturday’s 38-7 win over San Jose State, Steve Sarkisian parked himself in front of a television at home with his son, Amayas, for the afternoon and evening slate of college football games.

Sarkisian's respite came after No. 7 Texas was assessed the second-highest number of single-game penalties (12) and yards (112) in his tenure. Even while achieving a 31-point margin of victory over the Spartans, the Longhorns fell short of their championship standard.

Texas struggled at times to get out of its way at the same time as No. 2 Penn State was making a 34-0 win over FIU “harder than it needed to be in a lot of areas,” coach James Franklin said afterward.

“Get better” was Georgia’s message after the Bulldogs slugged through a 90-plus-minute weather delay in a 28-6 win over Austin Peay.

Clemson trailed Troy at home, 7-0, when play was stopped due to the weather. The Tigers rallied for a 27-16 victory, avoiding what would’ve been a disastrous 0-2 start to a season that coach Dabo Swinney’s team entered with sky-high expectations.

“This group really hadn’t had the rat poison,” Swinney said on Monday. The two-time national championship-winning coach put his own twist on a metaphor made famous by Bill Parcells and Nick Saban to summarize his team's struggles.

“They’ve just had the ‘you suck’ poison.

The Tigers’ only loss remains a 17-10 defeat at the hands of LSU in the season opener. The Bayou Bengals dealt with their own issues in Week 2, winning a 23-7 decision over Louisiana Tech, after which coach Brian Kelly saying he wasn't “happy with the production across the board.”

The issues in State College, Athens, Clemson and Baton Rouge don’t absolve the Longhorns from the mistakes they must fix in their two remaining non-conference games before opening SEC play in the Swamp against Florida on Oct. 4. Still, it can’t hurt Sarkisian, his coaches or his players to know that they’re not the only highly-ranked team dealing with varying degrees of issues through two games.

“You think, 'Is this just us? Are we screwed up?' Well, some pretty good teams were struggling,” Sarkisian said. “There were some other teams that looked really good. Maybe they're a little ahead of the curve? I don't know.

“I just trust in our process of getting our guys ready to go."

Even though Trevor Goosby and Arch Manning were among the talented prospects waiting in the wings to move up the depth chart into more significant roles in 2025, Texas only returned 40 percent of its offensive production from a 13-win, College Football Playoff semifinalist. ESPN’s Bill Connelly ranked the Longhorn offense No. 103 nationally in returning production, which contributed to Texas ranking No. 81 in overall returning experience.

The multi-year impact of the transfer portal and the expiration of pandemic-related eligibility extensions made the conditions ripe for inexperience to be a significant problem across college football. According to Connelly, the national average for returning overall experience at the FBS level has declined every season from a 76.7% mark in 2021 down to a 53.2% national average in 2025 (with 51 percent of the production back from 2024, the Longhorns are below the national average).

The lack of experience, even for one of the most talented rosters in the country, could explain why adjectives like 'sloppy' and 'undisciplined' accurately describe the product Texas has put on the field through two games. It could also be the root the Longhorns, as Sarkisian put it on Monday, giving in to human nature and failing to show up with the required levels of mental intensity and focus for the San Jose State game.

“You come off a really big game on the road for your season opener and human nature is, 'Let's take a deep breath and relax.' We don't get to relax,” Sarkisian said. “Our mental intensity needs to be as high as it needs to be. We need to play with the right type of discipline throughout the week — on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That discipline is what's going to lead to the proper habits of how we practice, which, ultimately, will lead to the consistency in our play, which will lead to the growth that all of us need to make."

The process of showing up every day with the right frame of mind, Sarkisian said, starts with him and the coaches, a group dealing with their own growing pains. Sarkisian’s Texas staff wouldn’t be the first to miscalculate the issues inexperience can create after coaching clubs chock-full of talented veterans to the doorstep of the national championship game each of the last two seasons.

If the Longhorns want to find out whether or not the third time is the charm, things need to come together sooner rather than later and result in a cleaner, more detail-oriented product on the field. For that to happen, Texas must show for Saturday’s game against UTEP (3:15 p.m., SEC Network) more prepared to play to its lofty internal standard compared to how it handled last weekend's home opener.

“Our standard is the only scoreboard that matters,” Sarkisian said. “We've got to play to our standard. The scoreboard up there will take care of itself.”