Texas coach Steve Sarkisian was among several college football coaches who canceled their teams’ spring games last season. In a growing trend across college football, several teams canceled their spring games due to fears that their players would be poached by other teams during the spring portal window.
The NCAA abolished the spring window that ran in April, removing the chief concern for most college football programs about their annual spring games.
Mack Brown Addresses Steve Sarkisian’s Spring Game Fears
During his town hall last week, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte revealed that the Longhorns were bringing back their annual spring game, slated for April 18 at Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium.
“Not too sure how the spring game is going to go,” Del Conte said. “We have a lot of young bucks. I talked to [Head Football] Coach [Steve] Sarkisian yesterday at lunch, and he goes, ‘Yeah, we’re going to give it a go.’ It’s going to be awesome.”
During Wednesday’s segment of “The Stampede” podcast, former Longhorns coach Mack Brown allayed Sarkisian’s fears of injuries to key players like quarterback Arch Manning by revealing how he dealt with his stars during the spring game.
“I did. And I talked to Coach Patterno and asked him, ‘Do you have a spring game?’ And he said no. Carter injured his knee in the spring game. The fear for the coach is somebody getting hurt,” Brown said. “So, what we started doing was having the young players play in front of a crowd, and they’re on TV, and people are screaming.”
“At Texas, you can have 58,000 people come to watch a spring game. What I did was take the Vince Youngs and Ricky Williams’ and say, ‘Don’t throw them to the ground.’ You’d still do everything full speed. You can thud and hit somebody. Just don’t fling them down. After 20 plays for Vince, I’d take him out and then go ahead and scrimmage and turn it loose.”
Brown was the Longhorns’ coach from 1998 to 2013, winning two Big 12 championships and a thrilling national championship in 2005, earning his place in Longhorns’ lore.
Last season, Sarkisian canceled the Longhorns’ spring game due to concerns that his team had played 30 games over the last two seasons and that the roster left behind, without NFL Draft prospects, was young and inexperienced.
Manning had preventative surgery in January due to a lingering injury and will be limited during Texas’s winter workouts, but should be back for the Longhorns’ annual spring game.
