The report comes days after Nebraska’s Matt Rhule announced the likely end of the spring game for the Huskers because of the NCAA transfer portal and tampering.
In the rapidly-changing landscape of college football that includes the expanding College Football Playoff running into late January, the future of spring football could look much different than it has in the past.
Those changes are already occurring at the individual program level with Nebraska Cornhuskers head coach Matt Rhule hinting at the potential end of the spring game in Lincoln and a report on Tuesday from Horns247 that Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian is considering alterations to the spring schedule on the Forty Acres, including the possibility that the Horns don’t hold the annual Orange-White game.
With Texas participating in the Cotton Bowl against Ohio State on Jan. 10, the Longhorns started winter conditioning later than usual and Sarkisian is reportedly still concerned about the physical demands of the 16-game season ahead of a final decision about the spring schedule and the spring-ending scrimmage.
“Whether we can reset the calendar to some degree to fit what the playoffs would look like or we take a hard and a real serious look at more of an NFL model to where free agency doesn’t begin until maybe the spring or players transfer during the spring,” Sarkisian said in December.
“Maybe we don’t have spring ball anymore. Maybe we have OTAs and mini camps and we adjust it completely — we’re at the beginning stages of something that is brand new to us right now.”
Sarkisian believes that spring football will eventually become a casualty of the new model and doesn’t believe that it would be a bad thing, allowing for the type of three-phase season that the NFL employs, starting with strength and conditioning, then practice, then mandatory minicamps prior to the preseason.
“Right now, we’re just operating with too many things happening all at once and then we’re gonna have all this dead time come the spring, and then we’re gonna open free agency up again after spring ball, and we’re gonna do it all over again. So it just seems like it’s a little bit of a broken model, but it’s the model that we have right now, and so our job is to try to navigate this model to the best of our ability, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Sarkisian said.
For Rhule, the issue with the spring game is related to the rampant tampering that is happening across college football.
“The word ‘tampering’ doesn’t exist anymore,” Rhule said on Saturday. “It’s just an absolute free open common market. I don’t necessarily want to open up to the outside world and have people watch our guys and say, ‘He looks like a pretty good player. Let’s go get him.’”
After last year’s spring game for the Huskers was televised on the Big Ten Network, Rhule said that he dealt with other programs contacting his players afterwards with six players eventually entering the NCAA transfer portal during the spring window.
For a Texas program that now boasts one of the most talented rosters in college football, that’s also certainly a concern as tampering can increase the price of the overall roster by forcing the Longhorns to increase compensation to compete with other offers for players currently on the roster, a tricky aspect of roster management that Sarkisian and his staff just went through to retain players for the spring.
Texas has already dealt with the issues caused by the showcase that the Orange-White game provides for young players — two years ago, then-redshirt freshman quarterback Maalik Murphy was reportedly contacted by multiple Power Five programs after going 9-of-13 for 165 yards and a 79-yard touchdown pass in the spring game, eventually remaining on the Forty Acres when he received a new NIL package.
When two starts in place of an injured Quinn Ewers revealed Murphy’s continued need for development, he entered the portal and landed at Duke, a worse outcome for Murphy.
Sarkisian’s adamant refrain that individual accolades come from team success has helped the Longhorns avoid defections or having to overpay for players already on the roster, but something has to give in the current model and that means that spring football could look drastically different for Texas this year and moving forward.