Texas officially cancels the 2025 Orange-White game

The Horns won’t hold their spring-ending scrimmage this year, Steve Sarkisian said in an interview with Kay Adams.

Time will tell whether changes to the college football landscape will permanently impact the annual Orange-White game for the Texas Longhorns, but head coach Steve Sarkisian did confirm during a Thursday interview with the Up and Adams show that the annual spring-ending scrimmage will not take place this year.

A report that Texas could cancel the game emerged earlier this month.

Sarkisian cited concerns about the number of games his team has played over the last two seasons — the Horns played in the Big 12 Championship game and the College Football Playoff semifinal in 2023 and then played in the SEC Championship game and three College Football Playoff games this year, finishing the longest season in school history on Jan. 10.

“We’ve played 30 games over the last two years and that’s a lot for college football,” Sarkisian said.

There’s also a lot of young players on the roster with 25 invites to the NFL Combine over the last two years, including 21 early enrollees.

“The development that’s needed for these guys to get ready for the fall is a little bit different than it used to be, so our approach is going to be a little bit more NFL-driven, more of an OTA style early on, and as we grow into more of the scrimmage formats in the second half of spring ball, I just don’t know if rolling the ball out and playing a game if we only get 15 practices is the best for us to maximize the opportunities that we get,” Sarkisian said.

So it’s going to be a little bit of a different approach, but I think college football is changing right now and we need to do a great job as coaches of adapting to college football and that’s what we’re trying to do and I think it’s going to be good for our team.

While the season was still ongoing, Sarkisian spoke openly about the demands of the new schedule, how it might impact spring football, and the possible move to a more NFL-style system, a three-phase schedule 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 in December.

Spring games are increasingly imperiled across college football with Nebraska canceling theirs due to concerns about tampering.