Steve Sarkisian has to stick to his guns, no matter the final SEC-NFL eligibility ruling

As Lane Kiffin, Brent Venables, Shane Beamer, and other coaches across the SEC try to bend the rules to their will, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is staying true to his word, and he has to continue to do so.

Kiffin and the LSU Tigers truly started this whole NFL-players-returning-to-college debacle, or at least turned it into a true debacle, after the SEC ruled that it would not allow teams to roster former professional athletes.

Despite the conference's ruling, the Tigers have poked and prodded and pushed to bring former NFL players into their depth chart anyway.

Of course, the whole fiasco has exploded into a court battle that currently has a Louisiana judge granting a preliminary injunction for the players to return to college and the SEC filing a federal lawsuit against LSU.

Meanwhile, Sarkisian and the Horns seem to be avoiding the mess like the plague, and because of how strongly the Texas head coach spoke about the situation earlier this week, they may have to do so for the rest of... well, forever.

"These players on all of our rosters, not just [Texas's], have been working for nine months for this moment on Saturday," Sarkisian said. "The fact that somebody out there is gonna take a player off of an NFL roster and tell somebody who's been doing it for nine months, 'Go kick rocks?' That doesn't sit well with me. I think that's wrong. That, morally, is wrong."

Well, Sark, there's no going back from that one, no matter how the final ruling unfolds.

Texas is going to have to stick with not signing former NFL players to the roster, at least for as long as Sarkisian is the head coach, or it is going to look like his "morals" are as unimportant to him as anything.

Steve Sarkisian is aligned with the SEC's NFL eligibility ruling

Of course, 15 of the 16 members of the SEC voted unanimously to approve the conference's addendum to ban professional players (whether it be the NFL, NBA, WNBA, etc.) from dropping back to the college level. LSU's representative was the only one to abstain from voting.

"I think our Presidents, ADs, and Chancellors got it right, and we'll support it, and we'll fall in line," Sarkisian said of the SEC representatives voting to bar NFL players from returning to the NCAA.

And Sarkisian has stuck to that over the last week as the eligibility status of these NFL players has gone back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth.

He has done so even as Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables and South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer, whose University representatives voted in agreement with the conference's ruling, have moved to roster former NFL players.

Sarkisian, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte, and the rest of the Longhorns are going to have to stick with their initial beliefs on the matter, or they're going to have to do some serious backtracking before rostering anyone who has competed at the next level.

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