Pre-snap penalties causing Texas problems, Steve Sarkisian says

The 2023 season is rapidly approaching and with that comes Fall Camp and scrimmages. This is also when teams try and work out any kinks they have before the games count. For Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian one of the biggest things to keep working on is pre-snap penalties.

Following a recent scrimmage, Sarkisian highlighted some of the issues that Texas has been having with pre-snap penalties.

“Naturally, there’s always things you want to clean up coming out of a scrimmage,” Steve Sarkisian said. “For us, pre-snap penalties, we need to improve.”

When coaches talk about pre-snap penalties, they’re typically referring to things like false starts or similar procedural issues. These tend to be the most frustrating penalties because they should be the easiest to prevent, unlike effort penalties like a holding call that happens in the middle of a play.

In particular, given the nature of Steve Sarkisian’s offensive system, it’s going to be important to clean up those issues.

“We were not clean pre-snap. As you guys know, we like to motion and shift and do different things before that ball’s snapped, and too many false starts, illegal procedure stuff that we can clean up.”

In 2022, Texas averaged 6.08 penalties per game. It wasn’t great but it easily could have been worse. Still, penalties can absolutely kill drives and without the benefit of Bijan Robinson, Texas needs to find its reliable contributor on the offensive side of the ball. Starting behind the chains isn’t going to help that process.

Of course, Sarkisian knows about those issues and still has time to work on them before the Longhorns kickoff against Rice.

Steve Sarkisian on Quinn Ewers’ scrimmage performance

A huge piece of Texas’ success this season is going to fall on the shoulders of quarterback Quinn Ewers. He’s shown improvement from last season and resiliency. Following Texas’ most recent scrimmage, Steve Sarkisian praised his performance leading the offense.

“I thought Quinn played really well. He had a really good day,” Steve Sarkisian said.

“You know, it’s unfortunate, the interception in two-minute was not on him, but that’s rapport with his receivers that we need to keep working on. But I thought he was really efficient. There was a moment there where the defense had a really good period. We had a third down, fourth down competition, the defense had a good period but I thought Quinn really rebounded in the backed-up segment, the goal line segment, and our red area period. So, that was good.”