FORT WORTH, Texas — Now that Steve Sarkisian has completed his time at the Nick Saban Center for Fired Head Coaches, Sark’s priority at Texas is to find a quarterback.
Texas has not had a good one since Colt McCoy.
His last year was 2009, when Saban’s Tide knocked him out of the BCS title game.
UT has had talented QBs since McCoy went to the NFL, but the Garrett Gilberts, the David Ashs, the Sam Ehlingers, et al., never did yield Colt, or Vince Young, results.
Sark was the Alabama offensive coordinator/QB coach in 2019 and 2020. His starting quarterbacks were Tua Tagovailoa and Mac Jones.
In 2019, Tua passed for 2,840 yards with 33 touchdowns and three interceptions before he suffered a season-ending knee injury. He was the fifth pick in last year’s NFL draft.
In 2020, Jones passed for 4,500 yards with 41 touchdown passes and four interceptions. Jones is expected to be a top five pick in this year’s draft.
Jones is a Sark fan.
“He makes everything [comfortable] around the quarterback,” Jones said Monday on a Zoom call with the media, one day before his NFL Pro Day. “We’re going to have those meetings, and it’s going to be, ‘Are you comfortable with this or do you feel comfortable with that?’
“So we’re on the same page to start out. A lot of teams, offensive coordinators do just what they do. Sark did a good job of tailoring to some of my strengths this year, but at the same time he’s going to call the offense he’s always called.”
Just because Sark is now the head coach at Texas means this sort of production will follow him to Austin.
When evaluating Sark, include his time at Washington and USC. If you’re a Texas fan, put more of your faith in that than his two years with Saban, and his armada of NFL players.
At Washington, Sark had Jake Locker and Keith Price. Locker was a first-round draft pick who had a four-year NFL career. Price was a nice college QB who played in the CFL for three years.
When Sark was the head coach at USC, his QB was Cody Kessler, who played three NFL seasons.
When Sark was the offensive coordinator at USC in 2001-03 and again in 2005-06, he had Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart. Both were first-round picks.
Sarkisian has been blessed with good quarterback talent, and he developed them, too.
“For me and him, our relationship just got way better as time went along,” Jones said. “He really understood me as a person, which is important. He knows when I’m kinda down on myself. Or, when I have a bad play, he knows how to get me back.
“He knows that sometimes I need a little bit of time to regroup. We got really good at that and that’s why we were able to operate a super high level.”
If the type of QB production Sark established not just in Alabama but in L.A. and Seattle, too, converts to Austin, Texas, will have solved its biggest problem for the last decade.
