Spring football finally kicks in for real today (Wednesday) with the pads coming on for the first time.
But Texas has been dealing with a rash of injuries, even before the popping became real.
DeAndre Moore and Ryan Wingo are both out for the rest of spring. Tight end Jordan Washington is getting an MRI on his shoulder. And CJ Baxter is still recovering from an injury sustained last fall.
The injuries, along with the departure of more than a dozen players now off to the NFL, has opened the door for younger players to step up.
“Just right now in spring alone, I have 22 kids that should still be in high school that are enrolled on our campus – true freshmen - and five transfers,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian told Colt McCoy on his ‘Clean Pocket’ podcast. “That’s 27 new faces. But I would much rather have them now than in June. So the process is underway, right? Every new team takes on a personality of its own, leadership changes, different voices start to arise in the locker room, some guys leave and now the next guys step in.
“That’s part of the reason spring ball is going to go the way we go. We’ve got to make sure we build a really solid foundation on this team and then grow quickly.”
Sark says he feels like he has built a roster that is capable of reloading and returning to the top of the college football world.
“I’m hearing the same stuff. ‘Oh, they’re not going to be able to do it again.’ ‘How are they going to replace all of those guys?’ But that, to me, we built a program here that year in and year out can withstand,” said Sarkisian.
Sark’s conversation with McCoy was perhaps the most in-depth I’ve heard the coach talk about roster management in the age of NIL and the transfer portal.
The spring portal window opens up two weeks from now (April 16) and the Longhorns will need to be active participants if they want to shore up some of their depth problems, exacerbated by the springtime injuries.
“We don’t live in the transfer portal but we utilize it,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said this week. “We built this thing the right way and now I don’t want to just sustain it, I want to find ways to keep getting better.”
The portal window is an opportunity for Texas to get better, but it is also a chance for other teams to come raid the Longhorns' roster.
“The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the portal is making sure we keep the right players on our team,” said Sarkisian.
Sark says NIL has allowed Texas to compete with the other schools that may have been paying players long before the NCAA allowed it. But while he says the Horns now have a seat at the table, he says they are not going to go crazy with spending.
“When we think a guy is overpriced, we let them go, whether they are our own or whether it’s another guy that maybe we’re competing for with another school,” said Sarkisian. “We look at the value of the player on our roster and where he might sit and then we put a number on it and it is what it is. It’s definitely an NFL model and approach that we have.”
And while whoever Sark and the Horns bring in this spring have to have the talent to compete for playing time, talent alone won’t be the deciding factor on who wears burnt orange.
“Never sacrifice character for talent,” Sarkisian said. “There’s a lot of talented players, but when you believe in culture, you have to make sure you look at character too.”
Sark clearly believes in culture – he talks about it more than probably any other topic.
The culture for the 2025 team is just now starting to get written. Winter conditioning is usually when it starts, but the loss to Ohio State in the CFP semifinals took a lot out of the team.
“I had to go in my cubby hole there for a couple of days,” said Sarkisian.
He wasn’t alone.
The players had two weeks off after the Cotton Bowl before starting winter conditioning.
Strength and conditioning coach Torre Becton told Sark that it took the players about three more weeks of conditioning to shake off the blues of the Ohio State loss. But he says when they turned the corner, they came on strong.
And now? The word that Sark used multiple times to describe this 2025 squad is “hungry.”
There are 150 more days until those guys get to eat.
FROM PIGSKIN TO HORSEHIDE
The Texas Longhorn baseball team let itself down in losing 5-3 to the Texas State Bobcats Tuesday night. That’s the fourth loss in a row to Texas State while playing in the friendly confines of Disch-Falk Field.
“I apologize for losing the ballgame,” Texas head coach Jim Schlossnagle said after the game. “We’ll be ready to go this weekend. We’re facing a top-five team in the country. There will be a lot of great players on the field.”
There will be a lot of great players when the Georgia Bulldogs come to Austin. But Longhorn pre-season All-American Max Belyeu won’t be one of them. The loss of Belyeu’s bat puts even more pressure on Texas’ pitching to come through.
That makes Texas pitching coach Max Wiener the most important person in Austin. Wiener has revitalized the Longhorn staff and instilled a killer instinct that was missing before. It’s all summed up with the motto of “dominate the damn zone.”
“He was very clear from the beginning, this is what is going to win baseball games for us and this is what we are going to do,” pitcher Luke Harrison told the press last week.
Despite the Tuesday night wobble (which had more to do with defense than pitching), the Horns have won a lot of games this season.
That mentality will be needed with the Georgia Bulldogs coming to town. UGA leads the nation in home runs. But despite the big challenge this weekend, Wiener’s approach won’t differ. Keep it simple and throw strikes.
“He makes it really simple for them,” said Schlossnagle. “We just throw pitches to the middle of the plate to the point where we may give up some 0-2 hits, which is supposed to be some kind of cardinal sin in baseball. But when you listen to Greg Maddux, that’s when you have the hitter in the best scenario and the more pitches you throw, the more information they get.”
Wiener’s simple approach has worked. The Longhorns have the third-best ERA in the country.
That’s what makes this weekend’s matchup so fun. It’s the unstoppable force of Georgia’s offense going up against the immovable object of Texas’ pitching.
Get your popcorn ready!
TWEETS OF INTEREST:
Texas baseball didn’t lose all of its pop when Belyeu went out injured. Will Gasparino turned in the best week of hitting of anyone in the country.
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Chris Beard may not be happy about how things ended at Texas, but even that isn’t enough to motivate him to turn his burnt orange blood maroon.
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If you want even more A&M butt hurt, don’t miss what happened to the A&M baseball team this past weekend as they were on the verge of losing yet another series.
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The NCAA has denied Colorado and Syracuse’s request to hold joint practices in the spring. Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy wanted to do the same with OU. But what is a man to do when someone tells him he can’t do something?
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Former Texas recruiting staffer Jake Langi has been out of college football for a couple of years, but he’s back now after landing a job with SMU and he ran into a familiar face on his first day on the job.
FYI, Langi is one of the nicest guys in the business – a real class act.
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Hot damn! This may be enough to get me to cheer for Coastal Carolina this season … even though Tim Beck is their head coach.
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I’m not even sure if this would be enough to improve my golf game.
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