DALLAS — Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian, if you haven’t noticed, is busy, surely too preoccupied amid his team’s College Football Playoff run for a one-on-one phone interview.
Somehow, though, Sarkisian between team meetings and broader media obligations found a few minutes to talk, anyway, seemingly because he’d been told the Dallas Morning News wanted to inquire about one of his favorite topics.
Quarterbacks. Plural, in Texas’ case.
Specifically, how has Sarkisian and his staff, in four years, built a culture that has positioned Texas to become college football’s latest Quarterback U — if it isn’t already?
The Longhorns (13-2) will come to AT&T Stadium for Friday’s Goodyear Cotton Bowl clash against Ohio State (12-2) armed with inarguably the best quarterback tandem of not just the four CFP semifinalists but all 134 Football Bowl Subdivision schools.
Southlake Carroll product Quinn Ewers was the nation’s No. 1 Class of 2021 quarterback recruit. His Longhorn backup Arch Manning was No. 1 in 2023. How has Texas not only lured, but so far kept both during this volatile name, image and likeness and transfer-portal era?
“One of the things we do is be ourselves,” Sarkisian said. “We believe in relationships. We believe in connection with all of our players but most notably the quarterback.
“I think when you’re authentic and real and honest and you start forging that relationship, it lessens that barrier between coach and player and allows a relationship to form.”
It certainly helps that Sarkisian, 50, was a standout quarterback at BYU and has one of college football’s most innovative offensive minds.
The Sarkisian-Ewers relationship, in particular, was on vivid display during Texas’ CFP wins over Clemson and Arizona State and is an integral part of the 89th Cotton Bowl’s most notable subplot.
Ohio State, after all, is the school and coach from which Ewers transferred to Texas on Dec. 12, 2021, after one season of backing up C.J. Stroud for the Buckeyes.
“He decided he wanted to play (right away),” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said Friday during a Cotton Bowl media conference call. “It was disappointing for us, but we certainly understood.”
Ewers’ decision to transfer was, in a sense, a full-circle moment. Before his junior season at Carroll, in the summer of 2020, he had committed to Texas, his lifelong favorite school, only to decommit and flip to Ohio State three months later as UT’s Tom Herman Era soured.
At Ohio State, where he became the first college athlete to earn more than $1 million in NIL money, Ewers took only two snaps, both handoffs against Michigan State.
Bolting back to Texas wasn’t without risk. The Longhorns had just finished 5-7 in Sarkisian’s first season of succeeding Herman — who from 2011-14 had been Urban Meyer’s offensive coordinator and quarterback guru at Ohio State.
Sarkisian and offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach A.J. Milwee were able to woo Ewers back to Austin, all the while recruiting Manning starting in Jan. 2021, amid the covid-19 pandemic.
Day and Ohio State? Since Stroud’s 2022 departure to the NFL’s Houston Texans, the Buckeyes have cycled through quarterbacks Kyle McCord, Devin Brown and this season’s 23-year-old starter, Will Howard, who played his first four college seasons at Kansas State.
Day, embattled entering this CFP run because of his 1-4 record against Michigan, almost certainly has wondered what might have been, recalling Friday how he first offered Ewers a scholarship when he was an eighth grader at Ohio State’s summer camp.
“From afar I’ve watched him, and he’s got a lot of talent,” Day said. “He’s a really good player. He comes from a great family, and he’s had a great career at Texas. A lot of people here still have good relationships with him and think the world of him.”
While reporters and Texas fans speculate whether 21-year-old Ewers will enter the NFL Draft or the transfer portal for a reported $6 million NIL payday, all other FBS schools would love to have the Longhorns’ “problem” of having 19-year-old, eminently pedigreed Manning in the wings.
When Ewers suffered an oblique strain early in the second quarter of this season’s third game, against UTSA, Manning almost seamlessly stepped in to finish that win and lead blowout victories over Louisiana-Monroe and Mississippi State.
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In the program’s bigger picture, Texas has non-binding oral commitments from Class of 2025 No. 15-ranked quarterback KJ Lacey and 2026′s No. 3 quarterback Dia Bell.
Sarkisian saidhisformercoachatBYU,LaVellEdwards,hadawayofinstillingconfidenceinhisquarterbacksduringgameweeks,andwithhis“KISS”approach—KeepItSimple,Stupid.
Naturally, Sarkisian didn’t mention his name among the BYU greats.
“Those guys were all tremendous leaders,” he said. “I don’t know if any of them were the most talented physically. I don’t know if you went to a combine and said, ‘Boy, he’s the biggest; he’s the tallest; he’s the fastest; he’s got the greatest arm.
“But they threw catchable balls, and they instilled belief in everybody in Provo, Utah. I can tell you that. That’s why they won a bunch of games.”