Texas coach Steve Sarkisian started to watch Texas A&M’s game against LSU on his iPad on the plane ride home from Nashville.
“Then, we took off, and so I had to connect to the wifi and all that, and I decided to take a nap, if you can believe that,” he said. “I haven’t napped in a while on a plane. So by the time I woke up, it was 38-23 and the game was done.”
There’s almost no rest for anybody this college football season, especially for those daydreaming about a national championship or having nightmares about what’s required.
Sarkisian spends every waking moment striving for perfection with sixth-ranked Texas (7-1, 3-1 SEC). Can any one- or two-loss team make it into the 12-team College Football Playoff? Sarkisian doesn’t know for sure, nor does anyone else at this point.
There’s only one thing he can say with remarkable clarity. “We’re not a finished product. I think our best football is still ahead of us, and we’re looking forward to that.”
“I’m always like the glass half-full guy, but yet I can always see the half-empty part,” Sarkisian said. “And I think that’s probably a healthy balance to have that I’m not just looking at things through a straw.
“You know, we’re so close,” Sarkisian added. “Like this past game (against Vanderbilt), if you would have said the game would have finished, you know, 45-10, it wouldn’t have surprised me if you just watched the film and watched some of the execution that was happening.
“But yet, we have things that are happening in game that are causing the game to remain a little closer than we would have liked, whether it’s holding penalties, whether it’s tip ball interceptions, whether it’s a couple penalties on defense that swing the score. And so I’m always striving for, what does perfection look like?
“And then I go in this morning with the team, and I walk them through, hey, this is the difference in 42 or 45 to 10 as compared to 27-24 right? I showed a 21-play cut up to them this morning, but in reality, that was about six or seven plays that swung that game in that direction.
“So that’s what we strive for at some point. I don’t know if we’re ever going to have to play a perfect game, but we’re going to have to play closer to perfect to go achieve the things that we want to achieve, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The Longhorns are idle this week and won’t play again until Nov. 9. That’s when Florida comes to Royal-Memorial Stadium, starting the regular season’s homestretch of four games capped by the road trip to Texas A&M on Nov. 30. Nobody will be napping then, rest assured.
So don’t worry about the CFP. All Sarkisian wants the players focused on is being the best version of themselves. As he says repeatedly, “Be enamored with us.”
“I had to remind our players, you know Georgia came into our game with a loss already, right?,” Sarkisian said. “So things happen. It’s hard to go undefeated in this conference. It’s hard to go undefeated in college football. The point being is, can you just continue to grow and get better?”
