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Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian has embraced this new era of college football better than some of his colleagues.
The transfer portal and NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) have many cranky college coaches seemingly screaming “Get off my lawn.” Coaches making seven figures a year and have coached at different programs throughout the country are clutching their pearls because players can do the same thing. They complain about how NIL and the portal are ruining college sports. Life was so much better when players were getting paid under the table and boosters only had to pay a handful of athletes. They remember the good ol’ days when a coach could block players' transfer options, forcing them to attend a lower-level program or sit out a year. We are old enough to remember former Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury attempt to limit the transfer options of Baker Mayfield, a walk-on quarterback without a scholarship, in 2014 — that sanctimonious group of coaches.
While former Alabama coach Nick Saban complains about this new era of college football like a grumpy old man seeing kids play in the street, Sarkisian has been a breath of fresh air. He is not keeping every ball that lands in his backyard. Instead, Sarkisian is the understanding adult who tosses that ball back over the fence. Sarkisian has never complained about the transfer portal. He does not whine about NIL. Sarkisian understands this new world, successfully navigates it, and succeeds.
That is why Sarkisian excels in this new era while some of his peers struggle to adjust.
Texas acquired 8 players through the transfer portal after the 2023 season. Seven of those players are currently on campus and participating in spring football. Each player has an opportunity to contribute this season.
More importantly, Sarkisian is spending the offseason integrating them into his program.
“I know there's a lot of opinions on it. Is it a positive? Is it a negative?,” Sarkisian recently said about the transfer portal. “For us, it’s a positive. We are never going to major in recruiting the transfer portal in a way that's going to make up our roster. We still want to recruit the bulk of our class from the high school ranks. Highly competitive, high-character kids coming from great programs, get them immersed in our culture, develop them in our program, year one, year two, year three. But what the portal does for a school like us, it can help you fill the voids when the voids happen.”
Sarkisian is a former NFL coach.
He understands free agency.
Most teams that attack free agency do it to address a void. The void typically occurs when a draft pick never panned out. Once a team realizes a player will never meet their expectations, the organization looks for a plug-and-play option in free agency.
Sarkisian has implemented that strategy in college football.
Here are the players Texas acquired through the transfer portal after the 2023 season:
DL Tiaoalii Savea (Arizona)
TE Amari Niblack (Alabama)
WR Isaiah Bond (Alabama)
LB Kendrick Blackshire (Alabama)
WR Silas Bolden (Oregon State)
WR Matthew Golden (Houston)
Edge Trey Moore (UTSA)
S Andrew Mukuba (Clemson)
“We lost two receivers that declared early for the NFL draft in Xavier Worthy and AD Mitchell," Sarkisian said. "We had a few other receivers decide to transfer on their own. All of a sudden, after that Sugar Bowl, I looked up and I had three scholarship receivers on our roster. We had three receivers committed out of high school. That left us with six. So we went and signed one more high school kid in Aaron Butler to get us to seven. Then we went and took three transfers that got us to the number 10 at the receiver position, which is more of an ideal number to have on your roster. That was really helpful and beneficial for us. We talked about the tight end position. We talked about the defensive line position. Andrew Makuba coming on board. All sudden you have a couple of guys that graduate. All of a sudden, Jerrin Thompson decides to transfer, Kitan Crawford decides to transfer. We have got to fill up our roster. And we can't go into every season with me sitting here in August telling you we're a young football team. We've got to have some experience. We've got to have some depth there.”
To be fair, getting players out of the transfer portal is risky business.
Coaches often find themselves competing for players who may not fit into their locker room. Once a player enters the transfer portal, the clock starts ticking. Players have been known to commit to a school only a few days after entering the portal without visiting the campus. They make speed dating seem like a slow process.
The challenge is finding good players – and teammates.
“That's probably the biggest challenge of the transfer portal,” Sarkisian said. “The high school kids when they come in, we've been recruiting those high school kids for a year, two years, two and a half years. Think about how long we've been recruiting Colin Simmons, for example. You know so much about them and what their makeup is. The portal is very unique because these guys go in the portal and sometimes four days later they're on your campus on an official visit. We really have to be diligent in doing our process of getting to know them, tapping into the right people that have worked with them, whether it was a high school coach, trainers, sometimes their own coach from the school they're coming from, to make sure they can fit in our culture. That they will thrive in our culture because we just don't want someone who is just going to survive. We want people that are going to thrive in this environment. So far, a couple of months into this thing with these guys being here, it seems really good.
“Andrew Makuba is awesome. He's wired really well. He's a great team guy, Amari Niblack, Isaiah Bond. I mean some of these guys have been really good. Trey Moore has been unbelievable in what he's brought. I credit our recruiting staff. I credit our coaches for the work they've put in to find the right blend of players.
“Some of them, yeah, there’s been a little bit of a transition, but then they look at it, and they really enjoy it. I was talking to Isaiah Bond halfway through practice about how much he enjoys now practicing in the morning and waking up every day in the morning. [He said] man, I feel more fresh. I feel better. You never know what a guy was at one place. Maybe we can even get a better version of him here.”
Having a previous relationship with players in the transfer portal is a bonus, according to Sarkisian.
“it definitely helps,” Sarkisian said. “Especially the length of which we recruited him. Matthew Golden, I was very confident and very comfortable with because we had recruited him at length the first time around. He had been on campus. We had been around him been around his mom. That process was really easy. Isaiah was a little bit different just because we recruited him but he had never really been here, but we still knew him. Kendrick Blackshire? Coach [Jeff] Banks had recruited him so hard in high school. We had a very good understanding of him coming out, so they're all at different stages.
“It is extremely helpful, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to recruit other kids. I mean, like Silas Bolden, for example, we hadn't recruited him, but I had a really good relationship with Jonathan Smith [Oregon State football coach]. We got him on campus. You could tell the good nature of the young man and what he was made up of. So, they’re all different. But it is helpful when you have a little bit of previous history and relationship with them.”
Sarkisian excels in this new era while some of his peers struggle to adjust.
“I do think the portal has been advantageous to us,” Sarkisian said. “Now, we got to get those guys acclimated to our culture, our team, how we go about our business, and that's one of the fun parts. That's one of the challenging parts that we definitely are looking forward to.”
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Sports On A Dime
1. That was a disappointing end to the Texas men’s basketball season. I give the team credit for battling throughout the game. Unfortunately, the shots did not fall for Texas on Saturday. Hopefully, the incoming guards will make a difference next season.
2. It might be time to buy your Christian Clark stock (assuming Ketch does not own all of it). The buzz surrounding this freshman running back is getting louder.
3. Sarkisian on using helmet communication during practice: “We're in kind of that phase where they're allowing us that opportunity to do that. In working with the SEC and with the NCAA, that looks like it's going to be a go for us … I think you can do both, quite frankly. Again, it's a lot easier to say five words than signal five words, but yet you can give more information and you can have some real dialogue to where you can speed up, slow down. Hopefully, I can give him some information that allows him to play a little bit faster within plays as well.”
4. Sarkisian’s response when asked if the helmet communication will help him save preparation time during the week: “I don't know if we're going to totally abandon that. Today (Tuesday) was day one of working ourselves through it. We’re in total base install mode. We're not in a game plan mode. We're still teaching the foundation of our offense, which is signaling. As we get closer to the season, we get started getting into training camp, I'm sure we're going to have different modes and mechanisms of getting play calls in. But again, we want to teach the foundation of signaling because God forbid the headset goes out in DKR for whatever reason, I still got to get the play into our players. We want to always want to kind of have contingency plans available. We still want to teach the foundation of our offense, which is signaling, but yet getting used to the new way of having the ability to communicate to the quarterback.”
5. Sarkisian’s response when asked which defensive player might use the helmet communication: “We're still going through that. I think the natural thing in the NFL, it's one of your linebackers, the guy who's connected to the front and the back end that can that can communicate. But because of the space of college football, and because of the hashes and the width of the field, we've kicked around it possibly being a defensive back, maybe our Star because of where he aligns and that ability to communicate. We'll see. We’re still working on that. Again, it's still very new. And the idea that people aren't going to go no-huddle, just because there's a headset really isn't true. You’re still going to have to signal some defensively as well.”
6. Sarkisian on receiver Johntay Cook II’s development: “I think, again, player development is something that we take a lot of pride in, in our program, on and off the field. I think one of the challenges is when we first got here, JT (Ja'Tavion Sanders) might have been the only 5-star in that class, that was a top 20-25 player in the country, according to you guys. Hopefully, we're recruiting more high-quality players over time, and there's going to be more guys that are going to be in that developmental process early in their careers. Johntay being one of those guys. He had an opportunity last year to play behind possibly two first-round draft picks and another guy who's going to play in the NFL. How much do you attack that year to try to improve your game? I thought Johntay had a really good practice day from the naked eye without looking at the tape. Kind of doing what we was asked of him, made plays when the ball came his way, had really positive energy out there on the field. But there's a lot of guys that are in that fold that hopefully they can continue to grow in the program as the years move forward.”
7. Sarkisian’s response when asked to explain his definition of obsession after tweeting about it before the first spring practice: “I think being obsessed is something like, one, you got to love what you do. You're obsessed with what you love to do. You have confidence in what you're doing. You do it in the absence of fear. You're committed to the cause. You're committed to what you're doing. And ultimately, the positive of that is that you're striving towards something and that you're committed to it. The negative with it [is that] you go overboard with what you're trying to do. The challenge for us is being obsessed with this mission that we're on. But yet, make sure that we're finding balance in our lives and that we're committed to the classroom. We're committed to who we are as people as much as we are committed to being the best football players that we can be.”
8. Jordan Whittington’s inability to fully participate in the pre-draft process has been disappointing. He will likely have to make an NFL team as an undrafted free agent. However, Whittington will be successful in life, regardless of what happens with his football career.
9. This dude mansplaining how to swing a golf club to Georgia Ball, a professional golfer, is pathetic.
10. Age and inactivity have caught up with Keith Thurman.
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