Steve Sarkisian has a "hungry" team, but it's by no means starving

After Texas won the Big 12 Championship and made the College Football Playoff following the 2023 season, Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian told the media he had become “borderline obsessed” with winning championships and hoped his team would follow suit.

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“Obsessed” became the tagline for the 2024 team that played in the SEC Championship during the program’s first year in the league and made it back to the semifinals of the College Football Playoff.

Taglines can change, but the overall message remains mostly the same. And while it’s not a tagline quite yet, Sarkisian has noted that his 2025 squad has an appetite to play and win at the highest level.

“There’s a real sense of hunger on our team right now that I’m as much or encouraged by of anything they’ve done this summer,” Sarkisian said at SEC Media Days. “You can see the intent with which they’re working. We’ve got a ways, but the intent is there and the mindset is right to go be a champion. That’s something that you don’t just do one time. You have to live that life every day.”

As he has in the past, Sarkisian mentioned that a number of his players come from championship programs. Off the top of his head, he mentioned his contingent from Austin Westlake and DeSoto. There are plenty of other state champions on the team, including players from Duncanville, Denton Ryan, South Oak Cliff, and North Crowley. That’s just the players from Texas, as state champions of other members of the union are also on the Longhorn roster.

Those are players who are used to winning. As Sarkisian mentioned, they have to live that life every day. But their experience in winning isn’t just from their high school days. Almost every single player on the roster has been part of a winning Texas football team.

Take the 2023 class, for instance. Of course, a number of players committed to the Longhorns just after they went 5-7 in 2021. They believed in the opportunity Sarkisian and his staff would provide and wanted to bring Texas back to prominence.

There were plenty of players who decided to commit to Texas after they saw the makings of a rise to the upper echelon of college football. Anthony Hill, Colton Vasek, and DeAndre Moore Jr. are players that come to mind.

For them, they’ve been a part of a winning Texas program since they committed. As opposed to the struggles of the 2010s, the only thing most members of the Texas roster know in their time in burnt orange is winning.

“You think about Arch (Manning), Anthony Hill, Manny Muhammad, that group and class of guys going into year three, and they don’t even know any different than playing in a conference championship game, playing in the College Football Playoffs, and going to the semifinals,” Sarkisian said. “That’s been their college experience so far.”

Those players are no longer trying to bring Texas back. They’re hungry to keep Texas as one of the top programs in college football. They aren’t starving for wins, they want more, more, more.

That shift in mentality, from starving to insatiable, translates on the recruiting trail, too. Players in the class of 2026 were freshmen in high school in 2022. Recruits aren’t often college football die-hards. They like the sport, but they may not sit down for hours on end on Saturday’s watching game after game after game.

But what they will see is that during their “football consciousness,” Texas is a team that wins, competes for titles, and sends players to the NFL.

That’s what most of the Texas roster has seen, after all.

Forty-seven of Texas’ 84 scholarship players are first- or second-year players. That doesn’t include players who are third-year sophomores like Manning and CJ Baxter. Add them, and 59 of Texas’ 84 scholarship players are sophomores are younger. These numbers include transfers, but even they know Texas as a winner.

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They’re young and they have a hunger, as Sarkisian mentioned. It’s not one caused by a lack of previous wins as it was for Texas teams past. It’s one caused by receiving a taste and yearning for more.