Steve Sarkisian: Texas must come together after Florida loss, tune out noise

The Texas Longhorns got stunned to open up SEC play by the Florida Gators, losing in The Swamp. Now, head coach Steve Sarkisian wants to see his team respond by coming together and tuning out the outside noise.

“I think this is where you find out about the culture that you have,” Steve 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.”

For Texas, this was their second loss of the season, to drop the Longhorns to 3-2. In a season where they had national title aspirations, they’re now firmly behind the proverbial eight-ball. Still, there’s plenty of season to go, and there’s no reason why Texas can’t still achieve those goals.

In the loss to Florida, the Gators jumped out to a 10-0 first quarter lead and for the rest of the game the Longhorns were playing catch-up. Sarkisian’s offense was inconsistent, though, in the face of a good Florida defense. That was a defense that forced Texas quarterback Arch Manning to throw two costly interceptions on the day. Meanwhile, Texas would go just 3 of 11 of third-down conversion attempts. All of that helped Florida keep Texas at an arm’s length away on the way to a 29-21 final score.

“We just didn’t do it tonight. That’s a good team. We knew it was going to be a good team coming in,” Sarkisian said. “We knew it’d be a tough environment, we knew we needed to play well and we didn’t play good enough.”

Two losses aren’t going to end Texas’ season by any means. Sarkisian knows that. After all, just a season ago, Ohio State won the national championship after losing two conference games in the regular season. Texas only has one SEC loss. So, making the SEC Championship Game and the College Football Playoff is still on the table. The Longhorns just can’t afford another slip-up.

“We’ll hunker down. We’ve done it before. We know how to do it. It’s going to take everybody staying really well connected. We’ve got to be really tight, we’ve got to march forward,” Sarkisian said. “We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.”

Steve Sarkisian and Texas don’t have long to figure things out. Next week is Red River, where they’ll be facing a very talented Oklahoma team that wants to pay the Longhorns back for last season’s 34-3 blowout.