Sark: Texas ‘on a mission’ in last Big 12 season

Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff WriterAug 1, 2023, 12:50 PM ET
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Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said Tuesday that while Big 12 teams might have revenge on their minds in the Longhorns’ last season in the league, the Texas locker room does too.

“I think this team is on a mission, they’ve taken this mindset of being on a mission. They’ve kind of adopted the John Wick mentality,” Sarkisian said at a news conference. “I think that they’ve kind of assumed this mentality of, ‘Embrace the hate.’ We get it. We’re the University of Texas, we get it. This is our last year in the Big 12. We can sit there and be a punching bag, or we can go attack the people that we’re going to play. And I think that they’ve assumed that responsibility to say, hey, we’re gonna go after everybody else too. I think that that’s the right mentality to have.”

For the first time since 2009, Texas was picked in the media poll to win the league. Sarkisian spoke of the optimism around Austin and of how he feels as if he has a deep roster capable of winning games in a variety of ways.

“There’s definitely a lot of excitement,” he said. “When you look at the season-ticket sales in June, being sold out in June, over 68,000 season tickets. … I know our student tickets are on a record pace right now of what’s to be sold. So, I think there’s a lot of excitement in the air. … Now it’s time to put in the work.”

One reason for optimism is the continued offseason buzz around quarterback Quinn Ewers, who Sarkisian said naturally has a better grasp of the offense in his second season and has shown he’s willing to put in the work to improve.

“You see the dedication the guy’s put into his overall body composition; he really has bought into his diet. He’s bought into the workouts,” Sarkisian said. “That takes a lot of discipline and dedication and focus. I think clearly, you know, he’s in a great frame of mind. This feels like his team. He leads that way, you can hear how he talks to the team that way.”

Off the field, Sarkisian said former TCU coach Gary Patterson, who was a special assistant to Sarkisian last year, is not with the program currently but did not elaborate on whether he’d return.

“Gary was a tremendous asset for us a year ago,” he said. “He did a really good job with the program, stepped away at the end of the season. As of right now, he’s not part of the program. We’ll see where it goes from here.”

Sarkisian also joked about freshman quarterback Arch Manning‘s record-setting $103,000 football card sale this week, after being asked whether he was the one who bought it in an online auction that benefited a local nonprofit with the help of St. David’s HealthCare and St. David’s Foundation.

“I did not,” he said. “I don’t have that much money. But I will say this … I don’t touch on NIL deals like that. But I do think, what a cool notion, and the fact that it’s supporting St. David’s and what it all kind of played out to be and hopefully everybody kind of took the time to research what that card was about and what it was supporting. Because I do think it’s a really cool deal.”