Steve Sarkisian's massive offseason has Texas poised for success
I tend to revisit old posts this time of year because covering Texas football is a serial with a continuing plot. Granted, Texas football may have seemed like a situational comedy over the last decade. Who can forget Headbutt! and The One With the Coin Flip? While funny in a step-on-a-Lego-all-you-can-do-is-laugh sort of way, those time periods were serials, too.
[Get ONE MONTH of Inside Texas Plus for $1!]
By the end of last season Steve Sarkisian appeared destined for the half-hour TGIF time slot, but after a promising start, this season is looking like a gripping, gritty, fast-paced drama that Netflix and Amazon Prime would fight over. Or ESPN and Fox if that fate wasn’t already sealed.
In early August I wrote how the successful offseason, at least to that point, would be determined by fall camp. In other words, there were questions about the program that could be addressed throughout the offseason, but it would be impossible to know if they were properly answered before the players returned to the field. Here are a couple paragraphs:
This successful offseason goes for naught if the program doesn’t show marked improvement this season. That makes August extremely important as all these aspects are collated together. During the lost decade we’ve seen Texas teams, no matter the head coach, discovering who they are through the adventure of 12 Saturdays. Actual games should be used for fine-tuning, not finding out who you are.
The greatest task for August will be to establish team identity on both sides of the ball. To accomplish that, the staff needs to understand what players can and can’t do, and therefore which schemes, plays, and personnel packages work and don’t work. Even Texas pessimists trust Sark to navigate this on the offensive side of the ball, but great head coaches are able to do the same on the opposite side of their background.
Fortunately, I think Kwiatkowski has a plan more custom tailored to his personnel for this season and we should see improvement. We’ll be covering that throughout August, along with many other storylines.
August intel was encouraging, particularly on defense, but we still needed to see for ourselves. Being only two games in we are limited in sample size, but the coaches, players, and fans have to be excited by what they’ve seen thus far. This team had an identity the second it hit the field versus Louisiana-Monroe and the game versus Alabama showed that identity wasn’t disguised by playing poor competition.
[That newfound identity extends to scheme as well]
Now with a clear understanding of who they are, we’re seeing the type of well-coached, confident, fast, physical team we haven’t seen in a long time. Part and parcel with that, we’re seeing a large amount of individual improvement which we’ll discuss shortly.
I have no idea what the win-loss record will be this season, but I do know if they keep playing within this program-wide identity, they’re going to win a good amount of games and do it in not only entertaining style, but also a style that honors the game. In that vein, I an old letterman called me on Monday to discuss how happy he was with what he saw on Saturday.
It’s not official yet, but Steve Sarkisian’s massive offseason has this program poised for success.
