You have have to get up early. We arrived at The Superdome a few minutes after 7 am Saturday morning and walk on the field that was setup with a bunch of stages and tables to talk with players, and also coach Sarkisian. After the players, we spoke with ESPN Analyst and broadcaster Greg McElroy.
Before the players arrived we walked and stood on the 50 yard line to take it all in. Lady Gaga was singing her hit song from the movie Maverick over the stadium speakers, and the entire place was empty except for about 30-40 media folks getting setup. Then we decided to run a touchdown into Texas’ endzone.
Coach Sarkisian talked Texas’ culture and how he opened up with the players saying, “I just felt like, culturally, we needed to get better. We needed to get more connected. We needed to get more vulnerable. We needed to get honest with one another so that we played more for one another than playing for ourselves.
And to do that, it just felt like it was important for me to show them how and what that looked like. And so I became very open, transparent, honest. I didn’t want them to judge me by what y’all wrote. I wanted them to judge me for who I was.
We asked coach Sarkisian this, “Everyone knows you as the great play caller. Coach [Kyle] Flood talked about yesterday your ability to change the plays in realtime. Players recognize it. They’re on the sideline when you get going. This morning, I saw your post, and you said “relentless.” When you construct your game plan, is that what you’re after and then being relentless for the entire game, not letting up?”
Coach Sarkisian first said, “Well, I think, you know — I appreciate you following my posts.” Then followed up with, “All I really try to do when we’re calling the game is put our players in the best position to be successful so that, hopefully, we can win the ball game. It’s natural, as a fan — I’m that way, too. When I’m the fan,
the plays that work, those are the good calls, right? and the plays that don’t, Why did he call that? So I try to remove the emotion of it, and I try to call the best plays available to put our players in position to be successful. Sometimes they’re the really cool, fun plays. Sometimes they’re the not-so-sexy, you run the ball in between the A gap, and you pound it in there because there’s some attitude behind that.”
After talking with coach Sarkisian, we spoke with running backs CJ Baxter and Jaydon Blue. We will be post those videos later today. Stay tuned.
We scored a TOUCHDOWN!
Discover more from Horns Illustrated
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.