Steve Sarkisian had something he wanted to get off his chest at the start of his weekly media teleconference on Wednesday.
Like he had weeks earlier, the Texas coach refuted any rumors that he was looking to leave Texas. He started the call by unequivocally stating how he wanted to be at Texas and had no desire to leave.
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Here is his statement in full:
“I’d like to comment on something before I get into our team, something that has been bothering me now the past few weeks,” Sarkisian said. “And that is people reporting that, or insinuating that there is a possibility I could leave the University of Texas. And that is absolutely false and untrue.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Never do I do this because I never want to be a distraction, so I never address these things, but at this point now, I feel like it is important that I do do this because it’s important for our team, it’s important for our university. I’ve had no discussions, not with my agent, not with the university not with any other school, not with any NFL team about ever going anywhere else. I came here to win championships. I’ve got two kids enrolled at the University of Texas — one in law school and one on our team. I’ve got a third that hopefully decides to enroll at the University of Texas next fall and my wife and I just had our son here in Austin.”
“This is our home. We came here to win championships. We’ve built a damn good football program over the five years we’ve been here. We’ve been to two College Football Playoffs, we’ve won a Big 12 championship, we went to the SEC championship game in Year 1, we’ve had 23 players drafted the last two years, which is more than any other school in the country and our team GPA is at an all-time high.”
“So can we please stop putting things out there that you have absolutely zero evidence on and then can we please stop retweeting, putting it back out there as if it’s true as if it’s the gospel. It is not true. If you have a question about my future, call me or call Chris Del Conte, our athletic director, and we can set the record straight for you. So everybody will understand, so moving forward when some Joe Blow decides to put something on social media out there, we all don’t run with it like it’s the gospel. Can we all agree on that on this call? And if you have a question about my future with the University of Texas, ask me on one of these calls, ask Chris Del Conte, he’ll be more than happy to take your call, so that we can set the record straight so that we can focus on our football team which is really what we should be doing.”
Sarkisian’s teleconference came two days after ESPN analyst and Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard posted a video to social media where he posited that Sarkisian could leave Texas in a “mutual” decision at the end of the season.
Texas, the No. 1 team in the preseason AP Top 25, lost to Georgia in Week 12 to drop to 7-3 overall and were ranked No. 17 in Tuesday night’s College Football Playoff rankings.
In late October, Sarkisian’s agents Jimmy Sexton and Ed Marynowitz issued a statement saying that Sarkisian had not had communication with NFL teams. The statement came after a note in an Athletic column that said reps for Sarkisian “have let NFL decision-makers know he would be interested in potential head-coaching openings.”
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Texas beat Mississippi State in overtime the day of that report. After the game, Sarkisian said that “it really pisses me off that one person can make a report that, in our, the entire media sports world runs with as factual.”
The Longhorns are the third college team Sarkisian has coached. He replaced Tom Herman after the 2020 season and Texas has posted four consecutive winning seasons after it was 5-7 in 2021 and made the four-team College Football Playoff in 2023 and the 12-team playoff in 2024. Overall, Texas is 45-20 in his time at the school and faces Arkansas on Saturday before hosting undefeated Texas A&M on Black Friday.