Josh Pate says Texas has ‘failed this year’ — and Steve Sarkisian knows it
Josh Pate breaks down why Texas is struggling, what Steve Sarkisian’s comments really meant, and how the Longhorns can still fight to salvage their season.
Texas walked into November with championship expectations and walked out of Athens on life support. The 35-10 loss to Georgia dropped the Longhorns to 7-3 and sent a message the College Football Playoff committee didn’t need spelled out: Texas is no longer being judged as a preseason No. 1. They’re being judged as a flawed team that hasn’t lived up to its own billing.
Now, with two games left, the question isn’t whether Texas controls its destiny. It’s whether Texas can even stay in the conversation.
Josh Pate calls out Steve Sarkisian’s desperation
On his latest show, college football analyst Josh Pate didn’t sugarcoat it. He called out both the optics and the desperation behind Steve Sarkisian’s recent press conference exchange, when the Texas head coach bristled at the suggestion his team had underachieved.
“According to who?” Sarkisian shot back.
Pate didn’t miss the subtext. “What I made of that is that is a message for the playoff committee,” he said. “Their only hope right now to make the playoff is they’re a three-loss team and the committee looks at the criteria through the proper lens — like the lens Sark just gave you.”
Sarkisian defended his roster by pointing to the gauntlet Texas has faced. “By the end of the season, five of our twelve regular-season opponents will be top-ten teams when we played them,” he said. He added that Texas still has a chance to do something no one’s done since Joe Burrow’s LSU: beat three top-ten teams in a single regular season.
Pate understood the argument. He also called it what it was.
“That’s just messaging,” he said. “He’s got to do it. You would do it. I would do it.”
The uncomfortable truth as Josh Pate sees it
The reality Pate laid out is a tough pill to swallow. Texas has fallen short of its own expectations, and everyone in that building knows it.
“They have failed this year,” Pate said. “That staff’s fallen well short of the expectation they should have for themselves.”
Pate emphasized that Sarkisian’s job now is damage control — navigating the season as cleanly as possible while knowing the real work comes later. The uncomfortable changes. The soul-searching. The hard decisions arrive when the season ends and the noise fades.
That’s where the Longhorns stand. Not dead. Not thriving. Just incomplete. And running out of time to convince the committee otherwise.
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