The interview was where so many take place during the college football hiring season: a nondescript hotel near the Dallas Fort Worth airport, which serves as a convenient middle ground for covert meetings. The Texas contingent consisted of athletic director Chris Del Conte, president Jay Hartzell and board of regents chairman Kevin Eltife. They were there to see Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian.
Counter to popular interview trends in the sport, Sark did not arrive armed with a binder full of detailed plans. This meeting was less about showing off his football acumen or organizational skills and more about presenting himself as a human being. “I want it to come from me and how I feel and not some book that a (graduate assistant) put together the night before the interview,” he says. “I didn’t have to flip to page 48. It was coming right out of me.”
What came out of Steve Sarkisian during that meeting was an unflinching honesty—about who he is and where he’s been and how hard he landed at rock bottom. Sark owned all of it—his firing from a dream job in 2015 at USC due to alcohol abuse, his time in rehab getting sober, a stretch where he said he couldn’t get a foot in the door for jobs—and laid it on the table for Texas to consider.
“He said, ‘I’ve lost everything,’” Del Conte recalls. “He’s very open about his own personal struggle, which allowed him to walk into the room and talk about what he’s lost and what he’s gained. He had a humility about him. Ego is the enemy. He saw the adulation and the fall, and he took ownership of it.”
Hartzell says he was struck by Sarkisian’s authenticity. “He spoke with candor about his past and optimism about his future. He came across as humble, insightful, thoughtful and genuine.”
When the interview ended, the Texas administrators were sure they had found their man. “We had to contain our excitement a little bit,” Del Conte says. “We had to go . We couldn’t offer it to him right then so we said, ‘We’ll get back to you.’”
It didn’t take long to get back to him. Interviews with other candidates were canceled. Roughly five hours after Texas unexpectedly fired Tom Herman on Jan. 2, 2021, it announced the hiring of Sark.
Three years later, Sark will lead reborn Texas in the Sugar Bowl Monday night against the school where he had his first head-coaching job: Washington. After more than a decade of stumbling through the wilderness of mediocrity, Texas is back. That’s now a statement of fact, not a punchline mocking so many premature pronouncements since the Longhorns last contended for a national title in 2009.
To get the Horns back on top, Sark has won over his team the same way he won over the Texas brass at that DFW hotel interview. He’s opened up to his players in a manner that established a trust and a bond that supersedes his considerable coaching gifts. Sark hasn’t elevated an underachieving blueblood to 12–1 just by drawing up the best plays in the country (although he does, and that certainly helps); he’s done it by strengthening the intangibles that every winning team needs. This Texas season is a triumph of trust.
They call it Culture Wednesdays. Every week, the Longhorns do something that is meant to enhance their team culture, to get to know each other on a level deeper than football. Players are encouraged to share things like the best day of their life, the worst day, their biggest regret, biggest hero, and so forth.
But the first meeting of every season starts with Sark telling his story.
“I just wanted them to know who Steve Sarkisian was in my own words and not what they read on the Internet, not what other people wrote about who I was,” he says. “So to do that, I had to be authentic. I had to be transparent. I had to be vulnerable. I had to share things that most people probably wouldn’t share with some of their closest friends, but I had to do that to really start to gain their trust and also to give them the idea that, ‘Hey, in here, on this platform, you can be you. You can be vulnerable, and we’re here to support one another.’
“So they got my story, nuts and bolts. And it wasn’t the PG version.”
The trickle-down effect has been palpable, according to the Longhorns, especially in this third season under Sarkisian. A program that never lacked talent has gone from 5–7 to 8–5 to 12–1. After going 2–5 in one-score games last year, the Longhorns are 3–1 in those contests this year—a sign to Sark that his team has a greater belief in itself now. They’ve avenged four of their five losses from last season, and Washington will provide the opportunity for a clean sweep.
“I believe it does relate to football,” Sarkisian said. “I believe that it equates to getting a fourth-down stop against Kansas State. I believe it relates to a third-and-12 conversion against TCU. I believe it relates to a fourth-and-1 stop against Houston. In those tough moments that you can count on one another, rely on one another, that it’s not just about me. It’s about everybody doing their part.”
A lot of things have gone into that improvement, including the vague-but-real impact of team culture. “His ability to build a culture for the program starts with him owning his own story,” Hartzell says.
And that starts with Culture Wednesdays. When a coach decided to lead by humbling himself in front of his players, that encouraged them to do the same.
“The idea is to understand your teammate beside the helmet, besides ,” says offensive tackle Christian Jones. “You understand their background, where they’re coming from, how to approach a person. It brought everyone closer.
“We all just get very vulnerable. That’s something I don’t think men do a lot. At first it’s a little weird … but then people actually buy in and you see the benefits of it.”
