Texas Longhorns football team kicks off preseason camp
AUSTIN, Texas - Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns have set the bar set high as Sarkisian gets ready for the upcoming football season.
Sarkisian says, "As you guys get an opportunity to get around our players, I think you'll feel that, what a difference a year makes of just where we're at from a team perspective. There's this whole adage of be where your feet are and we're not in that other conference yet, we're in the Big 12 and our job this season is to go try and win a Big 12 Championship!"
A Big 12 title would be nice in Sark's second on the 40 Acres, but there are 35 brand-new faces among his 85 scholarship athletes counting freshmen and transfers.
One of those newcomers is a 5-star transfer Quinn Ewers who will continue to compete with Hudson Card for the starting quarterback spot.
Sark has hinted that his quarterback decision might come a little sooner than last year's did but he wouldn't give any indication which way he was leaning saying that both have done the right things heading into fall camp.
"Clearly, they're at different phases of their development, right, and a lot of it for Hud (Hudson Card) was, what does his comfort level really look like in our system, now in year two in operating, it's not just about him, but how that exudes to his teammates in his performance of everybody around him, not just himself," Sarkisian says.
"For Quin (Ewers) it's knowledge based of the system, it's one thing to talk the offense and to talk about it in a meeting room, it's another to actually do it and then do it consistently on the football field, which I've touched on Quin, I give him a lot of credit. Everything that we've asked of him to make a correction from one day to the next, he's really worked at it and tried to do it. So, I'm excited for both these guys," Sarkisian adds.
As for the UT scoring defense that ranked 99th of 130 FBS teams? 2nd year defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski addressed the growth and how new UT special assistant Gary Patterson is helping.
"We're definitely in a better place, as far as us trusting the guys, guys feeling better about us, trusting us. The communication, there's not that communication barrier, I think everybody is in a better head space, as far as what the expectations are," Kwiatkowski says.
"Him (Patterson) being here, I look at it as, he's a resource to me and all our coaches, as far as, he's been in the conference for twenty something years, he has the lay of the land in the state of Texas. So, there's a lot of information that he has," Kwiatkowski adds.