Steve Sarkisian shares Texas' key areas of improvement still needed

The Texas Longhorns regular season is officially over, and now they must play the waiting game to see what bowl game they are selected to. While they wait, the Longhorns head coach, Steve Sarkisian, has a few things he wants his team to work on and recently shared Texas’ key areas of improvement.

“Two areas where I want us to really improve upon that I know we can be better is the passing game,” said Sarkisian. “There’s a lot of layers to the passing game. Saturday, Quinn was throwing good; we didn’t protect very good. There’s been other games we’ve protected great, and we haven’t thrown the ball very good. There’s been other games we’ve done those two things, but we haven’t caught the ball very good. So, the passing game, like the running game, it takes all 11, and it takes precision and execution. That’s an area where we’re gonna spend a lot of time on and cleaning that up.

“I think third-down conversions play a part to that. We were not nearly as good on third down this year as we’ve been historically. To extend drives and stay on the field, we need to be better on third down.

The Longhorns rank 75 in the nation in third-down conversion percentage, just shy of 39 percent (.387). And Sarkesian’s take on the Longhorns’ passing game could be better, is proven by Ewers’ passing efficiency rank. The redshirted freshman comes in at 76 behind a list of quarterbacks lacking the arm talent he possesses. Still, it is not all on Ewers. The Texas offensive line has had a few games where they struggled to keep him and Hudson Card upright; Ewers has been sacked nine times and Card eight.

Sarkisian wants to see improvement on the defense

The other key area Sarkisian wants to work on is on the defensive side of the ball; not giving up the big plays through the air. As he put it, that’s 50 yards that could’ve helped put points on the board for Texas and not their opponent.

“On defense, as good as we play, I think we can look back at games and say, “man, just don’t cut that guy loose on that one route.’ And that’s 50 more yards that maybe we would get back in a touchdown. That kind of has reared its ugly head a little bit. So again, just that communication on the back end. Those are all high-level things. We haven’t drilled down hard enough into all the particulars on a lot of these things, but just some high-level things that come to mind.