Most of football’s offensive wizards are like all the self-acclaimed geniuses in your life who’ll prove how brilliant they are if they have to read you their Wikipedia page word for word. Coaches are more subtle but no less intentional. They’d sooner whip out a flip phone than rely on a running game.
Steve Sarkisian, on the other hand, seems to be of the belief that whatever moves the offense is just fine, even if Bijan Robinson has to pull the team bus from Austin to Dallas this weekend.
Sark also has this going for him: He’s not Urban Meyer.
Not even a year ago, Texas was ready to put together a Jimbo Fisher-like package to lure the Urban Legend out of retirement. He considered it, too. Then Jimmy Johnson reinforced Meyer’s belief that he’d accomplished everything he ever wanted in college football, and he needed a new challenge.
Blowing up his reputation as one of football’s greatest coaches was, indeed, quite a challenge. Yet the clock has already started on his nuclear countdown in Jacksonville.
Frankly, when I wrote that Texas should go all in on Meyer, I had no idea that he was capable of anything as disgusting as what we’ve witnessed lately. And let’s not even get into what happened in that Ohio bar.
Meanwhile, Sarkisian has been quietly mending a season torn asunder by a 40-21 loss to Arkansas. He played no small part in that disaster. Hudson Card may be a natural-born football spinner, as Sam Ehlinger says, but he’s like most quarterbacks who can’t get out of the way of trouble. They tend to function at less than optimal levels when under duress. Casey Thompson is no Heisman candidate, but at least he’s got an escape clause in his game plan. Sark should have realized the upside going in.
Just the same, Sarkisian’s rookie season in Austin could have gone to pieces after the Longhorns lost for only the fourth time in Fayetteville. Instead, like Bob Stoops used to do after an occasional loss to Texas, he put his season back together again. He did that by building the offense on the back of Robinson.
The result: Texas smoked Rice and Texas Tech, then beat TCU, 32-27. Beating the Horned Frogs in Fort Worth might not seem like much of an accomplishment these days, but Tom Herman couldn’t do it. Neither could Charlie Strong.
Maybe even Herman would have figured out that Robinson was his best plan of attack, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I mean, he could have used him last year, when Robinson ran for 703 yards on 86 carries. This year, he’s got 652 on 105 in five games. You could even say Sark overdid it against TCU.
Last week, Robinson rolled up a whopping 216 yards on 35 carries and caught a couple passes for 22. Thirty-seven touches. Nearly half of Texas’ plays. The last time I saw a back carry that kind of load, Earl Campbell was running down Isiah Robertson’s throat, not to mention his reputation. The Oilers’ offensive philosophy in those prehistoric days was to stick the ball in Earl’s stomach and count how many still were standing once he ran out of gas. It was something to behold, all right, but Earl’s legs paid the price of entertainment.
Sarkisian needs to dial it back a little bit against Oklahoma if he wants Robinson to come out the same height that he went in. He’d averaged 17.5 carries going into the TCU game. A workload in the low to mid-20s ought to be about right to keep Robinson healthy and available down the line.
Because Texas might actually have something going in Sark’s debut. No, the Horns aren’t going to the College Football Playoff. They lost by 19 to a team that lost to Georgia by 37. Texas fans hired Sarkisian off Nick Saban’s staff because they wanted a head coach who could win games against the likes of the SEC elite. The Longhorns aren’t close to that class yet.
For that matter, Sark got outcoached in Fayetteville by a good ol’ boy with half as many stars on his recruiting lists. The good news for Texas fans is that Sarkisian seems to have learned from Sam Pittman’s lesson. Running the ball against Oklahoma might be an even tougher test. The Sooners are giving up just 79.4 yards rushing per game, seventh-fewest in the nation. But then they haven’t seen a running back as good as Robinson, either.
Pull off an upset of Oklahoma, and Sarkisian might jump-start his tenure. He’s off to a good start already this week. No one’s wishing for Urban Meyer anymore, except maybe Jerry Springer.
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