Steve Sarkisian held strong ‘come to Jesus’ meeting with Longhorns to cut down on penalties
Make no mistake, Texas’ inability to cash in good field position for touchdowns is what cost the Longhorns in the SEC championship game. You can’t win by kicking field goals. Penalties played a huge role in short-circuiting drives, pushing the offense back and causing major headaches for coach Steve Sarkisian. In the days leading up […]
Make no mistake, Texas’ inability to cash in good field position for touchdowns is what cost the Longhorns in the SEC championship game. You can’t win by kicking field goals.
Penalties played a huge role in short-circuiting drives, pushing the offense back and causing major headaches for coach Steve Sarkisian.
In the days leading up to the first round of the College Football Playoffs, the coach kept it real with his locker room. It'll take more clean football in the CFP quarterfinals to beat fourth-seeded Arizona State in the Peach Bowl, too.
“Yeah, we had a real come-to-Jesus meeting after the SEC championship game when we essentially lost that game because of penalties,” Sarkisian said. “And we just said, we’re not going to do that anymore, and we're going to play as clean a football as we can play, as fundamentally sound football as we can play.
“Still be aggressive. We never want to lose our stinger and we never want to lose our aggressive, but we can play smarter.”
WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE: Follow A to Z Sports’ Texas Longhorns channel on YouTube.
The Horns had 11 penalties in the SEC championship game, which resulted in a 22-19 overtime loss. They had only two against the Tigers last Saturday at Royal-Memorial Stadium.
One penalty was a false start by Trevor Goosby, the versatile lineman who played left tackle against Texas A&M and Georgia but moved to right tackle in a backup role against Clemson. The other penalty was a roughing the passer call on freshman Colin Simmons.
From the sound of it, Sarkisian probably highlighted the Simmons call during his weekly Good, Bad & Ugly film session with the team.
Here’s why Bevo is banned from Peach Bowl and College Football Playoffs national championship game in Atlanta
Source: CFP officials determined there wasn’t enough space, so SEC and Peach Bowl officials made uniform decisions
“Honestly, I critiqued one of the penalties that we got (Monday),” Sarkisian said. “You can’t hit the quarterback late, and that was one of our two penalties Saturday. We’re continually trying to preach playing smarter football as well as playing hard and playing tough and playing physical.
“Quite frankly, that just came out of a come-to-Jesus meeting coming out of the SEC Championship game.”
This season, Texas averages 6.2 penalties per game. The Horns have drawn double-digit flags only twice — 10 at Vanderbilt on Oct. 26 and the 11 against Clemson.
