Steve Sarkisian couldn’t score an interview, much less a job in coaching the offseason after USC fired him in October of the 2015 season. As it became clear that Sarkisian wouldn’t be on a team’s staff for the 2016 season, he reached out to contacts at FOX to become a color commentator that season. He was hired in June and his first scheduled game was a Week 1 matchup between Oklahoma State and Central Michigan, which ended up an instant classic and a major upset.

But Sarkisian would never call that game. Or any other game. The months of July and August are hard on college football junkies. Sarkisian never experienced that drought because he was always on a team, as a quarterback at El Camino Junior College or BYU or with the Saskatchewan Roughriders and as a coach at stops such as USC and Washington. This was his first true offseason. He didn’t like it.

Sarkisian told his wife that he couldn’t handle going July and August without being around football. He decided to take a tour and stop at a handful of college and pro training camps to cure his itch and keep his name and face out there for future employment opportunities after a year in the television booth.

He went to the Atlanta Falcons to see Dan Quinn and to the University of Florida to visit Jim McElwain. The next stops were to see Gus Bradley with the Jacksonville Jaguars and Dirk Koetter with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His football-centric summer tour was to end at Alabama with Nick Saban two weeks before the start of the college football season. He found himself in Saban’s office two or three times a day during his stop, analyzing Jalen Hurts and different defensive schemes that the Crimson Tide would face that season.

Sarkisian and Lane Kiffin both joined Pete Carroll’s staff at USC heading into the 2001 season. Kiffin oversaw the tight ends while Sarkisian led the quarterbacks. They both eventually became head coach of the Trojans and both were run out of town. Kiffin was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Alabama when Sarkisian made his stop. The current Ole Miss coach suggested that his old pal stay in Tuscaloosa as an analyst. Coach Saban agreed and offered Sarkisian a job.

But Sarkisian already had one. He was set to call his first game in two weeks. Sarkisian returned home and Saban, the best recruiter in football, called and gave a final pitch. Unsurprisingly, Saban landed Sarkisian’s commitment. He was a football coach, after all. That whirlwind tour only served as a reminder of what Sarkisian had lost, and what he’d love to regain.

“What hit was being around guys I respected at all these different places and I lit up. I lit back up,” Sarkisian said. “I was infused with energy again. Of like, this is what I want to do. There may come a time I want to sit behind the camera, I don’t know, but I do know what I love to do right now.”

Sarkisian called FOX and told them he was moving to Alabama to become an offensive analyst for the Crimson Tide. Their first game was against USC. Sarkisian didn’t want it to look like Saban hired him or that he took the job to get over on the Trojans, so he stayed home that week and watched football all day. Including that upset win for Central Michigan over Oklahoma State. The next day, he was in Tuscaloosa for good and ready to start chasing a dream he thought was on an indefinite pause.

Sarkisian’s base salary as head coach at USC in 2015 was $2.99 million. He worked at Alabama in 2016 for roughly $28,000 dollars, the minimum required in the state of Alabama for an employee to earn benefits for their family. His office was an old, deserted team room with a partition and a desk in the middle that he shared with Mike Locksley. The two nicknamed their makeshift office the “submarine” and it became the go-to spot in the Alabama facility. Sarkisian didn’t have to recruit or go to position meetings. He sat in the submarine and nerded out on football. He game planned. He studied. And mostly, he had a blast.

“It wasn’t about the money or the office or the car, none of those things that most people think are the best part of being a head coach,” Sarkisian said about his year as an analyst in the bowels of the Alabama machine. “It was literally for the love of the game and the job and being around the camaraderie that only football buildings provide.”

-----------

Sarkisian earned his Bachelor’s in the Saban school of program building during that first year as an analyst. He returned after a two-year stint in the NFL calling plays for the Atlanta Falcons to earn his Master’s. “I feel like I didn’t have all the answers when I left after a year,” Sarkisian said. “I spent years studying Carroll while I worked for him. I wanted more time with Nick to see that, too.”

Sarkisian began to compare and contrast his two most influential coaching mentors – Saban and Carroll. Saban earned his stripes as the defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns under head coach Bill Belichick. The Browns were 31-33 over four seasons. He then became the head coach at Michigan State and was 25-22-1 over his first four seasons with the Spartans. He was also 15-17 in two years as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins from 2005-2006.

Saban’s first winning season as a head coach came at LSU in 2001. It was his eighth season as a head coach and he was 49 years old. Saban won his first national title at 51. Sarkisian noticed a similar trend when looking back at Carroll’s climb to college football royalty. Carroll was 33-31 in four seasons as an NFL head coach before landing at USC and finishing his first season with a 6-6 record. His first 10-win season as a head coach in college came in 2002 when Carroll was 51.

“For the first 20 to 25 years of both of their careers, they were still trying to figure it out,” Sarkisian concluded. “If Saban retires after the Dolphins stint, no one is writing books about him and calling him the greatest ever, right? Same for Pete if he hangs it up at 50.”

Saban and Carroll are opposites in most visible ways. Saban is defined by discipline and structure. Carroll is more fun – more West Coast. He’d bring a basketball hoop to the team room and play the piano. But Sarkisian noticed that what they did share was a sense of self. They knew who they were.

“They didn’t have to act in front of the team,” Sarkisian said. “Teams take the personality of the head coach, and so while I’m in my second stint at USC, my project on the side kind of becomes, okay, who is Steve Sarkisian? Who am I?”

Sarkisian left high school in Torrance, California, without any football offers so he landed at USC as a walk-on middle infielder before transferring home to El Camino Junior College as a shortstop. He revived his football career there in 1993 and landed at BYU and was eventually the WAC Offensive Player of the Year and a second-team All-American as a senior when he led the NCAA in passer rating and led the Cougars to a 13-1 regular season record.

Those numbers didn’t help Sarkisian get drafted into the NFL so he played for three seasons in the Canadian Football League for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. His professional career ended after the 1999 season when he threw for 16 touchdown passes and 21 interceptions for a team that finished 3-15. Sarkisian joined the real world and began a career in the dot.com space while volunteering as the quarterbacks coach at the junior college he played at almost a decade prior.

Sarkisian eventually landed a graduate assistant job on Pete Carroll’s staff at USC because of his old coach, Norm Chow. That put Sarkisian on the fast track in the coaching world, working his way up the ranks at USC and then the Oakland Raiders before becoming the offensive coordinator for the Trojans by 2007. In 2009, at only 35 years old, Sarkisian was the head coach at Washington. By 40, he was leading the USC Trojans.

And then came the fall. A very public firing that led Sarkisian to take the summer tour that landed him in Saban’s carwash. In the process of asking himself who he was after all that, Sarkisian decided to give himself some grace and recognize a trait that kept him upright. Sure, he was knocked down. But he never stayed down.

“That took a lot of toughness, a lot of resiliency, a lot of grit to do all that, right? To stay in the fight,” Sarkisian said. “I do think toughness is part of my DNA. I decided if I ever got back in this chair, I’m going to make sure we’re a really tough football team. Nobody is going to be tougher than we are. We’re going to have a level of mental and physical toughness about this team and this organization that is going to be unparalleled around the country.”

---------

Toughness wasn’t the first word associated with Texas football when Steve Sarkisian was hired as the 31st head football coach in program history on January 2, 2021. It wasn’t the third or fourth word, either. The Longhorns were 78-53 and without a conference championship or a berth into the four-team College Football Playoff in the 11 seasons between 2010 and 2020. In the 11 seasons prior to that, the program was 119-24 with a national championship and two Big 12 championships.

Jordan Whittington’s first taste of Sarkisian’s brand of toughness came early in fall camp in 2021 when he missed a block on a bubble screen and was told to stop being soft by the new head coach with some colorful language mixed in. For some players, being cussed out in practice is a negative. For Whittington, it was a sign of a positive future. Of accountability and toughness. Of a new, gritty Longhorn program. A brand of football that Whittington would come to illustrate multiple times in the next couple of years.

“When someone gets on you like that and you have the right mindset, you take it and turn it into something positive,” Whittington said. “I’m glad he didn’t hold back.”

Even Sarkisian’s toughness and resolve was tested in Year 1 as his Longhorns blew multiple second-half leads and finished 5-7 in 2021. Texas and Oklahoma announced future moves to the SEC prior to the season but the team in Austin looked lightyears away from contending in the best football conference in America. How could a team that lost to Kansas in overtime be ready to play the Alabamas of the world by 2024?

Sarkisian spent the first year as head coach evaluating the program. He reserved judgment when hired and tried to avoid any preconceived notions about what ailed the Texas football program. He gave everyone in the building – players and staff – a clean slate during his first team meeting so that he could develop his own perspective on what needed to change on the Forty Acres. Sarkisian decided the answer was culture. Sure, the roster and the schemes and the development needed tweaking, but the root cause of Texas’ fall from grace was deeper.

“We had players that would pick and choose when they want to do things the right way,” Sarkisian said. “We had players and people in this organization that were entitled because they put the Longhorn logo on every day and think they deserve success. We had people that want to be good but have no idea what it means to be great.”

Texas wouldn’t need to wait until 2024 to test itself against the cream of the SEC because of a scheduled home-and-home against Alabama in 2022 and 2023. This wasn’t the first time Sarkisian faced a former mentor. He beat Carroll back in 2009 while he was the head coach at Washington. His Horns came one point short of knocking off the Crimson Tide at home in 2022, but the close loss provided his team with confidence and motivation for the meeting in 2023.

To be great, however, the Longhorns needed to learn how to finish. How to rise to the challenge. Talent provided them early leads in games. Toughness was required to get over the hump. Sarkisian challenged his program, on and off the field. As their team GPA grew, so did the success. The Horns entered 2023 with hopes to win the Big 12 championship and reach the College Football Playoff. But the first challenge was a trip to Tuscaloosa. The place where Sarkisian resurrected his coaching career would be the place the Longhorns returned to life.

“Our motto going into that game was, ‘win or die.’ When we land in Alabama, man, just take that plane back to Austin and leave us there because we’re not going home without a win,” Whittington said. “It was a statement game for us. We knew what it was, what everyone outside the program was saying about us. We weren’t trying to prove them wrong, though. We wanted to prove us right. “

The matchup against Alabama followed a familiar script for the Longhorns. They led 13-6 at halftime before the Crimson Tide stormed back to score 10 points in the third quarter and hold the lead in the fourth quarter. In the previous two years, Texas would’ve left the stadium with a loss. But this was a new Texas team. A tougher, more resilient brand of Longhorn. Texas won the fourth quarter 21-8 and ran the ball down Alabama’s gullet late to ice the game and earn Sarkisian’s first marquee win as the head coach at Texas.

Texas went on to win the Big 12 championship in its final year in the conference and reach the College Football Playoff for the first time. The Longhorns waltzed into the SEC the next season and reached the conference title game and another semifinal in the College Football Playoff. Sarkisian isn’t satisfied, however. He learned from Carroll and Saban to keep the foot on the gas. After all, how you do anything is how you do everything. It is the motto of the Texas football program. The last rung on the ladder is a national championship. Sarkisian feels like the culture and toughness of his program allows that goal to be realistic.

Sarkisian and his staff made the deliberate decision to recruit winners after the 2023 season. Players from high school programs that cultivated the same culture and toughness required to win in the SEC. Texas was improving, illustrated by an 8-5 record and a higher GPA in 2022, but a 13-12 record over two years wasn’t the standard. Not anymore. Sarkisian laid the foundation and created a better culture. Now, his Horns needed to win.

The 2023 recruiting class at Texas was headlined by Arch Manning and littered with state champions. Anthony Hill from Denton Ryan. Malik Muhammad from South Oak Cliff. Quintrevion Wisner from DeSoto. Even players from elite programs outside the state of Texas like CJ Baxter, DeAndre Moore, and Liona Lefau.

“This group wants to be the team that gets over the hump,” Sarkisian said. “Now, we have a ton of work to do, but I do think there’s a mentality that you have to have to get it done and we have that mindset and pride within this locker room.”