Steve Sarkisian has experienced Southeastern Conference football before, but the magnitude of his current school’s move to the conference hit him before he arrived at media days Wednesday in Dallas.
“So we flew in this morning, we landed, and we get off the plane, we get in the Sprinter van and we got a police escort to media days,” Sarkisian told reporters before cheekily quoting the SEC’s official motto. “‘It just means more?’ It just means more right there. The fact that we had a Sprinter van with a police escort to come to this was tremendous.”
As the nation’s premier football conference welcomes Texas and Oklahoma to its ranks this summer, the head coach of the Longhorns was sure to make it clear that he doesn’t expect to paint the league burnt orange right away.
“As far as our transition into the Southeastern Conference, I think the key word is respect,” Sarkisian said. “We have a ton of respect for this conference. We have a ton of respect for the teams, the coaches, the players and the fans. This is the elite conference in college football, and we’re fortunate enough to be part of it.
“We won’t do anything without having a level of respect of who we play, where we’re playing them, the types of players that they have, the coaching that they have, and I think on the flipside of that, we have to go earn their respect. We’re not going to get anything in this deal. Nothing is going to be free. We’re going to have to go earn the respect of our opponents, the opposing coaches, the opposing fans, and that’s going to be kind of on the forefront of what we do.”
Sarkisian, the former Washington and Southern California head coach, spent 2016 as an offensive analyst for Nick Saban at Alabama and 2019 and 2020 as his offensive coordinator before taking over in Austin. Saban attended SEC media days despite retiring last winter, and Sarkisian expressed his gratitude for the future Hall of Famer helping save his career.
“I would not be standing here today without you and what you’ve meant to my career, to my life, and I can’t thank you enough, and the impact that you’ve had on our game has been second to none, and I just can’t thank you enough,” Sarkisian said to Saban. “I want to be able to publicly do that to you, Coach.”
As for Saban’s earlier declaration that Texas “is not gonna run the SEC,” Sarkisian joked, “Yeah, I gotta talk to him about that.”
Texas joins the SEC coming off its best season in more than a decade. The Longhorns made the College Football Playoff for the first time, where they fell to Washington in the semifinals. They brought back quarterback Quinn Ewers and have Arch Manning, nephew of Peyton and Eli, waiting in the wings.
“We’ve been fortunate to coach some pretty good quarterbacks. We’ve been fortunate to do it for some decades now,” Sarkisian said of his program. “We’ve been fortunate to have some really good quarterback rooms, and I think the Manning family is pretty well aware of that.
“I think they trained Arch to try to put himself in the best position to try to play in the best conference in America and then ultimately put himself in the best position to further his career playing in the National Football League.”
–Field Level Media
