Everything Steve Sarkisian said after the overtime win over Kentucky

Here’s everything Steve Sarkisian said after Texas’ 16-13 overtime win over Kentucky.

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Steve Sarkisian: “I always feel like once a year you have a culture win where the game’s not pretty but the team, because the team is so close, finds a way to win the game. Tonight, these guys found a way to win when the game was sliding in the wrong direction. Absolute credit to our defense. What a tremendous goal line stand in overtime. What a tremendous job by our special teams, Mason (Shipley), Jack (Bouwmeester), Ryan Niblett, that punt return unit to the way they played in that phase of the game. All in all, as I told the team, half the SEC lost today. We’re on the other half that won. We’ve got plenty of work to do, but man, what a win. I’ve said this all along: when you go on the road at night in the SEC, this league is tough. It’s hard. For us to find a way to win this game tonight, I’m very happy about that.”

On what he can do to get the offense going especially when other SEC games have been high-scoring: “We’ve got quit the self-inflicted wounds. You guys see it when there’s penalties. Granted, we do some things that are obviously very frustrating. We get a hold the first play of overtime. We get a false start in the fourth quarter when we’re trying to put the game away. We catch a pass with a minute to go and we go out of bounds without getting the first down where (we could have) stayed in bounds and made them use the other timeout. There’s little things we’re not doing offensively. We miss open throws. Clearly, I’m not calling enough stuff for our guys to feel good about what we’re doing. At the end of the day, we can have high scoring games and I could air it out and lose. If our style of game and our style of play is we’re going to play hard nosed football, we’re going to play great on defense and great on special teams, we need to be more efficient on offense with the opportunities that we get. That’s what we need to do offensively. We need to minimize the self inflicted wounds and become more efficient. We weren’t efficient enough.”

On the Longhorns special teams, specifically Ryan Niblett and Mason Shipley contributing to the win: “It’s been huge. There’s a reason we went and got Mason and Jack (Bouwmeester). I think Jack had six punts inside the 20. What a massive punt there late to pin them deep for us to get some decent field position coming back out on Ryan’s punt return. All the phases of special teams, Mason’s field goals were all big. The first one was 52 or something like that, the other two: that one at the end of the game and the one in overtime. We’re always trying to be the most complete team we can be. You always want all three phases to be a well-oiled machine right now. We’re just not quite there yet on offense. It’s truly good to know that if you can play defense and play good special teams, you’re always going to have a chance. We need to get going offensively. That’s our task and that’s our job to get that done.”

On Arch Manning’s performance: “We need to play better up front to protect him. It’s not fun when you’re at quarterback and you’re getting hit. It was way too leaky for him, and in turn that can create some uneasiness when you have opportunities to make throws and you don’t. I do think there was a couple of critical passes that he didn’t make. The third down conversion to DeAndre Moore was a huge play for us, that play to DeAndre that we hit out of the backdoor. But we’ve got to find ways to get him more completions. That’s our job as a staff to find that comfort level for him because there were some really good plays in there. That ball to Emmett (Mosley) across the middle for an explosive. There are good things there, but there are some layups that we’ve got to hit for him too, that he needs to hit, but we need to find more of those opportunities.”

On if he’d consider a change from Arch Manning: “No, I wouldn’t.”

On if riding his defense to wins is what his team needs to do: “I think at the end of the day, you play to the strengths of your team. The strengths of our team right now is our defense and our special teams. Every team around the country is different. If we won today 43-35, you’d guys be asking me about our defense. Well, we’re fortunate enough that we’re playing really good defense right now. That’s a good place to start, playing good defense. We’re playing good special teams. You can ride that. To do that, you’ve got to play efficient offensive football. And we’re not playing efficient enough. We’re going to keep riding those guys because they deserve it and they’re doing it. We’re going to continue to try to shrink the game and slow the game down. These guys running upwards of 90 plays, sooner or later the dam will break. We’ve got to be more efficient offensively to keep our defense off the field.”

On Kentucky’s defense: “They’ve got really good coaches. I’ve got a ton of respect for Coach Stoops. He’s been doing it for a long time. They played good at the line of scrimmage. I thought they played well in the secondary. They hit some timely blitzes that caused some issues in the backfield, in the run game, and in the pass game. They got pressure on the quarterback. They minimized the explosive plays, which is the way they play. They can start shrinking the field on you. We never were able to get them out of that. We had opportunities to do it. We didn’t take advantage of it. Credit to Kentucky. They came to play defensively tonight and they did a nice job.”

On Arch Manning’s mentality after a rough outing: “I think he’s a competitor like all those guys in that locker room. He’s a great teammate. He sees how well the defense is playing and wants to play well for those guys too. The competitor in him, he’s grinding it out. Leading, everything that’s going on. In my opinion, I thought he got a targeting shot at the end. He’s running the ball. He’s fighting. He’ll play better. But as I said, we need to be better around him, we need to be better as coaches, and he needs to be better too. We all have to be better offensively. We’ve got to try to get that done. That’s got to get done quickly.”

On the run game: “I think that’s not uncommon in the run game. You’re going to have some of that (inconsistency). I’d love to get five yards every time we ran the ball. Our inability to create any explosive runs tonight showed up. I thought we had some opportunities to do it. I’ve got to look at the tape. We have to be able to get ourselves out of third and long. When you play in third and long, then you lose the rhythm of the game and the flow of the game. To help the run game, you’ve got to get the completions in the pass game too or else they’re going to continue to hunker down in the run game. Which I thought, again, Kentucky did a good job of that tonight. I thought we missed some opportunities in the run game to maybe be a little bit better. We as a staff have got to make sure we’re putting our players in position to have success. I have to evaluate the tape to make sure that those opportunities were there. Consistency in the run game and efficiency in the run game is critical. We weren’t efficient enough tonight in that aspect of the offense either.”

On missed tackles: “I thought we missed opportunities. There were two fumbles that were on the ground that I’m still trying to figure out how we didn’t recover. Then there’s two punt return fumbles that were on the ground that I’m still trying to figure out how we didn’t recover. Those were some opportunities, as good as we played defensively, that could have really swung the momentum of the game that we just didn’t quite capitalize on. We’ve got work to do to try to figure that out.”

Leaving: “It’s good to be 2-1 in the SEC.”