Steve Sarkisian shares why Texas has committed to developing young offensive linemen

As Texas eyes another College Football Playoff berth and looks to break through the semifinal level into a national title appearance, Steve Sarkisian is weighing his roster. It’s got some definite strengths.

One of those is expected to be the offensive line, despite the loss of star tackle Kelvin Banks. The Longhorns feel good about what they’ve got, good enough to avoid going to the transfer portal much.

“I think it’s important in that we’ve recruited pretty good here the last four years,” Steve Sarkisian said at the SEC spring meetings on Tuesday. “And not just the O-line, but a lot of positions. And other positions maybe not so well.”

Steve Sarkisian was asked about his philosophy on building through the transfer portal if necessary. He’s tried to avoid it when possible, particularly on the offensive line.

“We’ve utilized the portal like a lot of schools have to fill needs,” he said. “We haven’t tried to build our roster through the portal, we’ve tried to fill needs in the portal. And we just haven’t felt like we’ve had those needs at the offensive line. We’ve recruited it well. Coach (Kyle) Flood is a great teacher, he’s a great coach. We’ve got good continuity in that room, we’ve got good leadership in that room.”

As far as his team this year, Steve Sarkisian believes his offensive line unit has a lot of experience, even if not quite at the starting level. That will come with time.

In the meantime, it’s just about ironing out the kinks. Do that and Texas should be in great shape again.

“I think one of the natural things, I was asked this earlier, people say we’re going to be a young football team this fall,” Steve Sarkisian said. “We’re not necessarily young, we’ve just got some new faces. Guys who have been in our program who have been working on their craft, who have been developing, and now it’s their opportunity. They’re not necessarily young, these are guys in their third and fourth years in our program that now it’s their time to compete and show what they’re capable of doing.

“Part of that, for us, is to live through maybe some of the growing pains that we just don’t have the continuity that we’ve had the last couple years, but there’s still a lot of good players that if we felt like they weren’t good enough maybe we would have gone to the portal. But we felt like we had more pressing needs that we needed to address and that room was going to be good enough for us to compete at a high level.”