“We’ve got a very talented group of individuals in this room and now our job is to become a really talented team.”
The address that Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian gave his new team after the arrival of 22 high school signees and 18 transfer portal additions set the stage for one of the key adaptations the sixth-year coach has made this offseason in response to the sport’s changing dynamics.
About half of the scholarship roster turned over for the Longhorns after the 2025 season, including the departures of 24 players to the NCAA transfer portal. In response, Sarkisian and his staff added 43 new players, increasing the importance of maintaining the program’s hard-won culture.
“We’ve probably done more work this time of year than we ever have in the past from a culture development standpoint,” Sarkisian said on Monday. “A lot of that culture work, we would wait until June and July, because that was the old model, that was when the majority of your players arrived.”
No more. High school signees enrolling during the summer is now so rare that it’s an anomaly not to enroll early. And with the NCAA ending the spring transfer window in favor of one January window, Sarkisian believes that he has only one portal signee who will get to campus in June.
Sarkisian has already seen the change pay dividends.
“I think it’s been very helpful, not only for the new players, the high school kids, the transfers that had come in, but I think our own current players, because we’ve got now players on the roster that are ascending into leadership roles, and so that’s been really good,” Sarkisian said.
The 19 portal additions have also provided valuable perspective to the coaching staff and their new teammates about how the unique way that the Longhorns approach culture building by forging personal connections through honesty and vulnerability.
The change was made by Sarkisian during his annual offseason audit of his program.
“The first area where I felt like I didn’t do a good enough job was exactly that — I was still stuck in the old model,” Sarkisian said.
“If I would wait until June to start our culture work, that’s five months or so of these guys developing their own culture organically, and that happens. There’s going to be some good aspects of that, and there’s going to be some bad habits that I’m going to have to break. And so what did I learn last year? Our culture started to form without us really pouring into it the way that I would have liked to do it.”
The failure to adjust quickly enough left Sarkisian and his staff trying to break habits through preseason camp and even into the start of the season.
“To me, that played a part of us maybe not playing as good a football early in the season,” Sarkisian said.
Texas opened the 2025 season as the preseason No. 1 team in both polls, but lost 14-7 to No. 3 Ohio State in Columbus in the opener, played poorly in non-conference wins over San Jose State and UTEP, and then got upset on the road by Florida in the SEC opener.
And though there are regular arguments about which loss was more damaging to the team’s College Football Playoff aspirations, there’s no question that the Longhorns would have made the 12-team field with a win in one of those games.
With Ohio State traveling to Austin to face Texas in Week Two, the hope is that the early culture-building efforts will better position the Longhorns for early-season success.
“We’ve had three culture Wednesdays so far and the response from all of the players has been incredible, from the vets who have been here three and four years to the guys who just showed up on campus, they’ve been really pleased with that aspect of it,” Sarkisian said.