Enough is on the line when Texas faces Kansas that Steve Sarkisian doesn't have to reference 2021
One of the things Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian told his team in the McLane Stadium visitors locker room following the No. 3 Longhorns’ 38-6 win over Baylor was to celebrate the victory. Winning is hard, and Sarkisian wanted to note that, but he also wanted to note that a number of Longhorns who helped engineer the win to open Big 12 play lost a heartbreaker to the Bears two years ago.
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While referencing the past was part of Sarkisian’s motivational message in the immediate aftermath of the game with Baylor, he’s not utilizing a similar strategy ahead of Texas’ Saturday afternoon matchup with No. 24 Kansas. Several of the same players who celebrated the win in Waco suffered a 57-56 overtime defeat to a Jayhawk team in 2021 whose only other win was versus FCS South Dakota.
“We’ve come a long way as a program in a lot of phases: schematically, the roster, the culture, the environment at DKR,” Sarkisian said. “We don’t have to go backwards. We’re going to keep forging forward. We’ve got a lot of goals that we’re trying to obtain this year and we’re trying to reach.
“We recognize Kansas is a good football team, but to try make our guys feel bad for losing a game two years ago that sucked for everybody, I don’t know what benefit that has. We’ve got to focus on the task at hand, and that’s playing this Kansas team because this Kansas team is a lot different than that Kansas team two years ago as well.”
The progress Lance Leipold has made as head coach in Lawrence backs up Sarkisian’s statement. The Jayhawk team that knocked off Texas had Jalon Daniels, Devin Neal, Jared Casey, Kenny Logan, and Cobee Bryant on the roster, all in the early stages of their careers. Now, they are standouts for a Jayhawk program that reached the Liberty Bowl last season and have gotten off to 4-0 starts in back-to-back campaigns for the first time in a century.
On Daniels, who is 56-for-75 for 705 yards with five touchdowns over one interception this year, Sarkisian said: “he’s a heck of a player. We saw him first-hand in his first start here a couple of years ago. We know what he’s capable of.”
On Neal, who has 57 carries for 394 yards and five touchdowns along with 11 catches for 145 yards and one score: “A heck of a runner.”
And on Bryant and Logan? “Really good ballhawks in the secondary.”
Even with talent on the roster to earn a No. 24 ranking, Sarkisian was cognizant of what Daniels himself is capable of doing to a defense.
“I think the natural thing is we think about the runs he has for explosive plays, but he throws the ball all over the place,” Sarkisian said. “They’ve got great schemes and concepts. It’s not by any means gimmicky. They run real pass concepts that stress your coverages, and then they have the run concepts with his legs as an added element to it.”
Daniels made his first career start versus Texas during that 2021 contest. The Lawndale (Calif.) High product was 21-of-30 for 202 yards and three touchdowns, and added 45 yards and a score on the ground. He found Casey for the game-winning two-point conversion in overtime, dishing the Longhorns their most embarrassing defeat of a 2021 campaign that featured seven of them.
Both teams have come a long way since then. Kansas is a legitimate Big 12 contender after going 2-10 that season and 6-7 in 2022. Texas, of course, is the No. 3 team in the nation and looking to win its first Big 12 title since 2009. Sarkisian said he believes that 57-56 loss two years ago was tough to take at the time, but it revealed areas needing improvement that the Longhorns have since addressed.
“In a weird way, I’m kind of glad it happened,” Sarkisian said. “It exposed some warts in our program that needed to get removed. If we hadn’t removed those warts, we might not be where we are today in our program. Not all storms come to cause issues in your life. Some storms come to clear the path. I feel like that storm cleared a path for us in what we needed to do to move forward.”
For Sarkisian, battling ghosts is of little benefit to the Longhorns if they want to make tangible progress toward defeating the No. 24 Jayhawks and eventually winning the Big 12. That’s what Sarkisian emphasized to his team ahead of Monday practice, not the 2021 campaign, and it’s the message the Longhorns will hear all week leading up to kickoff at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.
“Our goal is to get to Arlington in December and compete for a Big 12 Championship, and this game is going to matter a lot in if we have that opportunity or not,” Sarkisian said. “This game has got our undivided attention. We talked about it at length with the team this morning that our focus is on the next mission, and Kansas is the next mission. They need all of our attention.”
