Big 12 Media Days: Steve Sarkisian is Tempering Immediate Expectations at Texas

The new Texas coach wouldn't commit to a number of wins or an appearance in the Big 12 Championship Game as a measure of success in Year 1.

ARLINGTON, TX — Steve Sarkisian isn’t promising a massive overhaul at Texas, at least not yet.

Taking over a program that finished 7-3 last year, Sarkisian is focusing on building a team atmosphere in Austin.

“The thing I’ve been most impressed with for me in our team here is the buy-in of our players,” Sarkisian said. “We have a roster that I think is more than capable of being competitive at a high level.”

Sarkisian said that it doesn’t matter how great the players are, if they aren’t all bought in to playing together as a team, it’s difficult to win a championship.

“We can’t sit back and relax and think that because we’ve got a great stadium, because we’ve got great resources, because we’ve got 5-star and 4-star players that we just sprinkle a little magical fairy dust and all of a sudden we’re a really good football team,” he said.

After a head coaching career at Washington and USC that has put Sarkisian at 11 games over .500 as a head coach, he said he’s ready to take on the mammoth that is the Texas job.

“This is my third go-around at doing this head coaching thing, and you don’t accept a job and you only get part of the job. You get all of the job. And at the University of Texas, the expectations are very high. The standard, the bar I set, is very high,” he said. “You have to embrace it and understand what they are. The next part of that is, OK, understand what they are but then what are you doing to achieve? What is that standard?”

Sarkisian said he’s not going to promise a certain number of wins or a Big 12 Championship from the jump, however.

“There’s a lot that goes into this” he said. “It’s easy to look at a number and say 'X number of wins is successful,' or 'winning a championship is successful.' That’s the easy part. But for me as a coach, I’m looking at it from a daily basis. What do we look like? Are we growing, are we getting better as a team? For, ultimately success is our style of play. Who we are as a program, the consistency we do it with.”

The new coaching staff at Texas is just focused on teaching the players not just the schemes, but how and why they’re doing things. If the players can start to piece together not only performances on the field, but knowledge of why they’re doing things from a mental standpoint, that’s when Sarkisian said he’d truly know there’s been growth.

“Success is going to be the level of consistency at which we do things here in the fall,” he said.