Sarkisian offers eye-opening glimpse into how he handles Texas’ position battles

Steve Sarkisian gave us some valuable insight into the way that he handles or views the team's position battles both in the offseason and regular season during a recent media session in Austin.

When asked about the ongoing position battles and how he deals with players pushing for more snaps, Sark responded with:

"We battle for 17 weeks, you know. As much as I would like to say, and we know exactly who's going to play, where, when, every single week. I think we got a lot of really good battles. We have guys that might be nicked up and that would allow, hey, the next guys probably gonna play better than this guy nicked up. And so we're constantly pushing our two-deep, they're all '1's' you know. They've got to play like ones. You got to prepare like ones."

Though it sounds like a pretty simple mindset to have, not everyone thinks this way and that could sometimes shroud a coaches ability to trust a certian player or backup. When you're confident in your two-deep, it gives you the freedom to stress less if an injury happens.

"We're constantly pushing those guys to all prepare, think, play that way. So those battles go on. I hesitate to say it's always just a position battle, because they're all going to play. A lot of the time it's 'who takes the field first' but we play all our guys a lot, especially early in the season. So I'm not too consumed with, hey, this is our starting 11 knowing, especially on defense, I mean, we'll probably play over 30 guys, in the first half of this game."

It's extremely interesting and fun to get into the heads of coaches and find out the way they look at different things every once in a while.

This mindset is also why the Longhorns are unusually deep at each position when it comes to preparedness every year. A good recent example was when Trevor Goosby had to step in right away for an injured Kelvin Banks Jr. against Georgia in 2024, and faired pretty dang well.