Paul Finebaum calls out Steve Sarkisian for Florida comments, throws stray at James Franklin

Paul Finebaum was baffled by Texas coach Steve Sarkisian and how he rationalized the loss to Florida over the weekend. Heck, Finebaum came out swinging Tuesday as when he criticized Sarkisian, he even threw a stray at Penn State coach James Franklin after the Nittany Lions were stunned by UCLA for their second straight defeat.

Sarkisian chalked up Texas’ 3-2 record at this stage as not stunning at all, then challenged other teams, the other 135 in fact, to play at Ohio State and at Florida and “see how they do.” Naturally, Finebaum didn’t like those comments as Texas, the preseason No. 1 team, is now unranked through five games.

Finebaum argued Florida was a borderline disaster going into the weekend, so that excuse doesn’t exactly fly. Now, Sarkisian and the Longhorns have to do some damage control to try and right the ship.

“Let me tell you about the Swamp, I was down there Friday and Saturday, doing our show, and I tried to say something nice about Billy Napier Saturday morning, just saying that he’s well liked by the fans, even though his record is terrible,” Finebaum said on Get Up. “And the fans started chanting, ‘fire Billy, fire Billy.’

“That is just an absurd statement by Sarkisian. And he knows better, because he’s an elite coach. He normally says the right thing, but I think he is so shell shocked, yes, he’s more than stunned. He’s shell shocked about where he is and where Arch Manning is … it almost looks like James Franklin wrote his speech for him.”

There’s a lot of season left to go with games against Oklahoma in Red River on Saturday as well as versus Vanderbilt and Texas A&M and at Mississippi State and Georgia left. Unless there’s some improvement, specifically offensively, from here on down on The 40 Acres, the Longhorns are unlikely to win out against that slate, which would cost them their preseason expectations of competing for the SEC or making a third-straight trip to the College Football Playoff.

So is it time for Sarkisian and Texas to panic? Maybe not yet, but Saturday’s loss didn’t help them in the grand scheme of the season.

“I think this is where you find out about the culture that you have,” Sarkisian said. “It’s what we just talked about as a team. We’ve got to get tighter than we’ve ever been. We’re going to have to quiet the noise because there will be plenty of noise coming out of this game. We need to get back to work, and we need to play our brand, our style of football that we’re capable of playing.”