Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian took part in an SEC teleconference on Sunday to discuss next weekend's SEC Championship Game against Georgia. Here is what Sarkisian had to say about the matchup and the Bulldogs.
"This is a heck of an honor to earn an opportunity to go to Atlanta and compete for an SEC championship. It was something that, clearly one of our team goals before the season began. W knew it would be extremely challenging. Any time you can make it to an SEC Championship Game, that means you kind of were able to survive to some degree the treachery that this conference has. We see it year in and year out, we saw it again this year, just how difficult it is to navigate this schedule, especially going on the road in some of these environments."
"It's a heck of a challenge. What Kirby's done at Georgia over nine years now has been pretty incredible. They've become the standard of college football. A couple of national championships, a couple of SEC titles. What they've just done on a consistency basis in recruiting, their style of play. So a ton of respect for what they've done at Georgia. And obviously this will be a heck of a challenge for us going to Atlanta, competing against them."
On the challenges of playing a team for a second time in a season: "Well, you know, I think the one thing that I've tried to lean into here today, as we're just kind of in the preliminary stages of it all, is kind of take myself back to the NFL. You get in your division there and you play teams, you know, multiple times a year. And then over time, a couple of years go by, you start playing them, you know, four times in two years. If it's the playoffs, five times in two years. You just try to, you know, A, try to do the things that you do well. B, you try to take in the information that maybe you can gather from seeing them in person, as opposed to what it looks like on tape. And then making sure that you're, you know, you have an idea of some of your own tendencies, that you're not, you're able to break some of those things. But at the end of the day, you know, our job is to put our players in the best position to be successful, whether that's physically, mentally, schematically, whatever that looks like. And so that's what we always kind of fall back to. But again, I do think there are some things you can take from the first matchup, good and bad. And clearly there was enough things that we need to fix from the first time we played them. You don't, you know, you don't get shut out in the first half, you don't have four turnovers in the game, you're not trailing 23 to nothing without having plenty of things to get better from the first time we played them."
On if he feels either team has a rest advantage in this game: "I don't know. I don't put too much, you know, thought into that. I just focus on what we need to do to prepare. It's a normal work week for us, you know. I'm sure they need the extra day. That was a long game. I stayed up and watched it. So that was a marathon. I was exhausted watching it myself. But in the end, it's a normal work week for us, you know. So I don't put too much thought into an extra day or not."
On how Texas compartmentalized the loss to Georgia and didn't let it beat them twice: "Just that. We talk that exact way and that we're not going to allow that to happen and that we are going to get refocused, and our sole focus is on the next opponent and our sole focus is on what do we need to do to improve. So I really just leave it at that. I don't speak negatively. I just say this isn't going to happen. This is what's going to happen, and here's how we're going to go about our business. The good thing is this year we were able to lean on the experience from last year because a very similar thing happened last year. Losing to OU, especially in the fashion that that game went, and our ability to rebound last year and then go run the table in the conference to get back in the championship game, I think gave a lot of the veteran players confidence that we could do it again and to follow the formula for success to make that happen."
