The Longhorns are a heavy favorite in their first SEC game, but nothing will change for Texas heading into Saturday.
The Texas Longhorns are in a much different place than they were more than three years ago when the move to the SEC was announced. Texas was coming off of a coaching change, bringing Steve Sarkisian in from Alabama, the third head coach in the eight years since Mack Brown stepped down.
Now, in Sarkisian’s fourth year, the Longhorns are the No. 1 team in the country and a five-touchdown favorite over the Mississippi State Bulldogs heading into the school’s SEC opener on Saturday in Austin. Despite all of the change and the elevated expectations, nothing will change for Texas as they prepare for Saturday’s matchup.
“Business as usual,” Sarkisian told the media Monday. “Like I said, we believe in our formula for success and what that looks like. This is our first SEC game at home and we’re going to embrace that side of it, but it’s not going to affect the way we prepare for the game.”
Unlike other top teams in the country and part of how they earned their No. 1 spot, Texas has yet to struggle with an opponent this season, dominating through the first third of the regular season, outscoring opponents 190-22 in those matchups — despite three of four games including significant garbage time. The team’s level of competence and confidence shone brightly through for games, thanks to that same business-as-usual mindset they still embrace now.
“Our guys believe in our formula for success. I think they believe in preparation. The preparation, the practice that creates the confidence to just go play,” Sarkisian said. “They’re so focused on what we need to do that we stay really consistent in our approach throughout the week, and we stay really consistent in pregame warm-ups. We stay really consistent when we come out of the locker room. This group’s confident. And their confidence comes from the belief in the preparation that they put into it.”
Now that the preseason is over for Texas and the schedule turns to SEC play, that level of preparation and intensity becomes more paramount if the Longhorns hope to meet both their goals and the expectations fans have for them.
“I feel like at Texas, when you take this job, it just means more here, too. You know that there’s a standard here that is very high and there’s an expectation of performance,” Sarkisian said. “There’s an expectation that we’re going to compete for a conference championship, year in and year out, and there’s an expectation that we’re competing for a national championship. So the conference may have changed, but our standards and our expectations really haven’t.”