Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian: Honesty with players, due diligence key in portal
Even as Steve Sarkisian and his staff prepare for Saturday’s finale of spring practice at the annual Orange-White football scrimmage, the NCAA transfer portal continues to pinprick the Texas roster.
The Longhorns have lost several reserves this week. Offensive lineman Payton Kirkland and edge rushers Billy Walton and J’Mond Tapp entered the portal during the spring transfer window, which opened Tuesday and stays open until April 30. More players could conceivably follow them, and Texas may just have a spot for one or two more new faces even though the team remains at the 85-scholarship player limit even after Tapp’s departure Wednesday.
So how does the program juggle those demands, especially when a portal window is open at the same time as a practice window?
“It takes a lot of work,” Sarkisian said Tuesday. “I mean, it's not easy. You start adding up all the schools and guys just start populating the portal. How do you do your due diligence? We can say, well, yeah, we'd love to get an interior defensive lineman. But just because a guy jumps in and you guys (reporters) say he's good, we should take him? He might not be a fit for us.”
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Steve Sarkisian: We don't give 'false dreams' to our players
Before a school such as Texas begins courting players in the portal, it wants clarity for its own locker room. Texas, like other preeminent college programs, has a roster full of blue-chip prospects who often have more recruiting stars that college snaps. That can lead to logjams at certain positions.
Kirkland, a redshirt freshman offensive tackle from Florida, had several players ahead of him on the depth chart as well as some highly recruited new arrivals coming in. Same with Walton, a redshirt freshman from South Oak Cliff. And with Tapp, a sophomore from Louisiana.
Sarkisian said transparency and truthfulness with players and their potential playing time has always been important, and it’s even more critical in the portal era when rosters can undergo personnel tweaking several times a year.
“I think one thing our players hopefully appreciate, for me and for us as a staff, we're really honest with our players,” he said. “I try not to you give false dreams, you know? I give them where I think they can go, where they're at currently, and what the role will look like come the fall.
“That can change predicated on how well we do on getting better at some of the things we're working on. But I never try and bring a guy in and just tell the guy ‘Hey, you're going to get 25 carries a game’ when he's running with the fours right now. Because what am I going to get come August 31? I'm going to have a disgruntled player on the sidelines saying I lied to him that that we're not following through with what we said we were going to do.”
Based on that approach to the transfer window, Kirkland, Tapp and Walton knew their respective positions when it came to any potential depth chart. There’s likely a handful of other players on the team in the same spot.
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Steady tweaking of portal rules an issue for coaches
To make things more difficult, the portal rules seem to change on a regular basis since the NCAA established the transfer window system in August 2022. Heck, the rules change based on the conference; the SEC — which Texas will join on July 1 — is the only conference that forces transfers to sit out a season if a transfer moves to another school within the SEC.
“It’s constantly just changing,” Sarkisian said. “I almost feel like weekly, there's more things and there’s a new rule.”
The upheaval in a transfer process that’s not even two years old continues to raise questions for Sarkisian and virtually every other college coach.
“Is there forever going to be two windows for the transfer portal?” he asked. “Is it going to go to one? As of right now, these are the rules we got. And then, how do we navigate those rules in the best interest of our current players?”
But those questions won’t be answered this spring, which means the Texas staff continues to keep working its portal possibilities. In addition to a handful of high school recruits, Saturday’s Orange-White game will reportedly include a visit from Arizona nose tackle Bill Norton, a 6-foot-6, 325-pound run stuffer who entered his name into the portal on Tuesday.
Orange-White game
1 p.m. Saturday, Royal-Memorial Stadium, LHN, admission is free
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas football's Steve Sarkisian juggling roster during portal window
