There are a little under 100 days until Texas football starts its 2026 campaign, but head coach Steve Sarkisian is already stirring controversy across the college football world.
The landscape of college football is ever-evolving, and whether that is something to celebrate or not, Sarkisian is not afraid to make his opinions known.
Speaking to reporters on the first day of the Southeastern Conference spring meetings on May 26, Sarkisian shared his dissatisfaction with inequities regarding transfers and academics.
When critiquing that aspect of the system weeks earlier, he specifically took a jab at Ole Miss, first sharing his opinion the week before the meetings started.
“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian told USA Today. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50% if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”
Sarkisian’s comment was met with waves of criticism, with Ole Miss even urging the SEC to look into Sarkisian’s comments under its sportsmanship policy.
While Sarkisian was not reprimanded by the conference, he said that his words were taken out of context, arguing that some schools have an easier time bringing in transfers because of more lenient academic requirements that allow institutions to accept more transfer credit hours, thus creating a disadvantage for schools like Texas that don’t.
Sarkisian later said at the meetings that his use of basket weaving was a “poor choice of words on my part.”
The same week before SEC spring meetings, Sarkisian also shared his thoughts on the importance of strength of schedule, especially regarding the College Football Playoff (CFP) selection criteria.
When asked how the CFP committee should factor strength of schedule more heavily into its decision-making, Sarkisian appeared to take another jab at a program that made last year’s playoff despite a weaker schedule.
“There’s a team in our state that plays in another conference that has a schedule that I would argue if I played with our twos and our threes, we could go undefeated, and they’ll probably make the CFP this year,” Sarkisian said.
Sarkisian appeared to be referring to Texas Tech, which went 11-1, won the Big 12 Championship and then lost its first CFP game in a blowout to Oregon.
According to ESPN’s strength of schedule metric, Texas Tech played the No. 46 schedule nationally, behind the No. 9 schedule faced by Texas. The Longhorns missed the CFP after finishing with two regular-season losses and one nonconference loss.
Sarkisian again clarified his comments, saying he is more frustrated by the lack of clarity from the CFP committee on how it weighs strength of schedule and difficult nonconference games.
“We need to find a way to find equity in strength of schedule or reward those teams that are playing that type of strength of schedule,” Sarkisian said. “That’s where all of our gripe is with the committee, is that we don’t know the value of (high-quality opponents), and how do you quantify those games in a way that lends us to believe we should continue to play those games into the future?”
Bringing up inequities in scheduling and recruiting reflects has been an offseason theme for Sarkisian. Regardless, once Sept. 5. arrives, the discourse will be muddled by how the Longhorns perform on the field. The pressure remains on Sarkisian to produce wins no matter what circumstances he’s under.
