Texas Football: 5 best QB’s Steve Sarkisian ever coached

This week, we’re going to start taking more deep dives into what the offense will look like in practice this fall with new Texas football head coach Steve Sarkisian at the helm. Texas hired the former Alabama Crimson Tide offensive coordinator/the reigning Broyles Award winner Sark to be the next head coach back on Jan. 2 to replace the former head coach Tom Herman.

When the Longhorns hired Herman following a disappointing conclusion to the 2016 season, it came with the idea that he could help take this offense to a new level. But all of the pieces never clicked for Herman as Texas head coach. His tenure was more successful than that of his predecessor Charlie Strong. That only allowed him to stick around for one year longer, though.

The hope with Sark is to take some of the progress that Herman made as head coach since the 2017 season, and finally take this program back to the level of a national contender.

But to understand where the Longhorns could be headed under Sark, we have to take a look at the foundation he built for his coaching career. Sark made his name as an offensive-minded coach that took a lot of the concepts he learned as a quarterback with the BYU Cougars to become one of the better minds in college football.

Steve Sarkisian as a long and established track record with talented quarterbacks before joining Texas football

The first job Sark ever held was with El Camino College, as the quarterbacks coach back in 2000. He held various assistant coordinator and positional coach roles at the college and NFL ranks with teams like the Oakland Raiders, Atlanta Falcons, USC Trojans, and Alabama. He was also a head coach with USC and the Washington Huskies for roughly five years between 2009-2015.

It was a lot of the work that Sark did to take skill position players to the next level that made him infamous in recent years. But it is the quarterback that is often times the make-or-break force in a Sark offensive scheme. Texas has enough athletes at the skill positions to make it work. But either Casey Thompson or Hudson Card will have to step up in the spotlight this fall.

With that in mind, let’s take a look back at five of the best quarterbacks that Sark previously coached to taking the head coaching job with Texas.