Steve Sarkisian

I don’t question our effort, our intent or our physicality

I’m excited for these guys

The fact that somebody out there is going to take a player off of an NFL roster and tell somebody who’s been doing it for nine months to go kick rocks, that doesn’t sit well with me

I think for KJ, he continues to show us his gamer mentality

I will say Dia is as far along or maybe even further along than anybody we’ve had in that role

The two hardest-playing players on our team right now are Graceson Littleton and Emmett Mosley, and they’re playing at an extremely high level

(They are) two guys that push themselves every day, whether it’s in the pass game (or) the run game

We are counting on Jonah, and we’re pushing him

The length of the season has made me think more about it

It was very intentional in what we were trying to do — putting a roster together that could go the distance

I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t even know if it’s good or not

Now, we really can just keep developing all of our players

I credit the guys that are returning in the program for embodying what we believe in

There’s a lot of tall receivers with long arms, but it’s (Coleman’s) ability to have the right balance and body control and timing on balls

I didn’t like it

From the linebacker perspective, when you really think about it, and you think about the amount of nickel you really play in a season and what that looks like, you’re thinking about two backers the majority of time on the field

His strength is his catch radius, but beyond that, it’s the balance and body control

I feel like we’ve forgotten about Ryan Wingo

I feel good, and for as physical as this camp has been, I think that’s encouraging

He’s in real freshman moments right now

I don’t worry about it

I think all three of these guys exude the leadership that is needed, the commitment to the program, the commitment to their teammates and the mental and physical toughness to be a champion

Like anything in this world, if you want to be really good at something, then you have got to take risks

I don’t know yet about Notre Dame — we’ll see

I think in this day and age of the [Transfer] Portal and high school, you’ve got to have the ability to be strategic

Those are the moments that are going to get us through the tough fourth quarters. Those are the moments that are going to get us through some tough road games of where we’re headed this fall

To make the moves we make … we had to let DeAndre Moore go. We had to let Parker Livingstone go. We had to let Tre Wisner go. We had to let CJ Baxter go

We’re going to coach him. We’re going to develop him. When he’s ready, I think he’ll be good enough to play. How long that takes to get him ready? That’s going to be the race. That’s the challenge

Week 1, Week 4, Week 8? I don’t know. I do know he’s got the right competitive spirit. I do know he’s got the skill set and the ability to be a good player for us

He provides great length, great speed, tremendous man-to-man ability, very confident, very aggressive. All the attributes you want in a defensive back

Then we had some failures as a team

He didn’t play to the way of what he was capable of playing. Then those same people that were saying that about him wanted to criticize and demean him almost for letting them down because he didn’t live up to what they thought he was going to be. Very interesting concept right there.

I think he learned a lot about himself last year about dealing with adversity and overcoming. I think he learned a lot about his teammates and the support that they gave him and them recognizing the mental and physical toughness that he has to play the position, to be their leader. I think that he’s grown into a great leader for us

(Cole is) a guy that unfortunately didn’t get drafted, and so he puts himself in a bit of a different situation than maybe most guys that got done playing their fourth year in college

We made a conscious effort this year to try to get older

I think one way you can try to get a little older is trying to keep and retain your players that have been in your program for that fourth and that fifth year, which is tough to do.

Where we’re at as a state of a program is that we’re getting variable, varying players – some that may have an immediate impact, some that we’re trying to project from a developmental standpoint of what they can look like down the road

It wasn’t a slight against Tech

Honestly, truthfully, I would love to keep Notre Dame on our schedule

What’s going to happen to the CFP? That’s the hard part

You know, we haven’t had the discussion

I really do. I think he loves the University of Texas. You know, he does pretty good through NIL.

I think some of that is dependent upon, you know, how we play as a team this fall, how he plays individually, knock on wood, injury-free football, things like that

At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours

There’s a team in our state that plays in another conference that has a schedule that I would argue if I played with our twos and our threes, we could go undefeated, and they’ll probably make the CFP this year

We need to find a way to find equity in strength of schedule or reward those teams that are playing that type of strength of schedule

I probably shouldn’t have used ‘basket-weaving’ as my example for the class. Macroeconomics, I don’t give a damn whatever the class is. Yoga, we have yoga at UT. The class part of it was irrelevant

At UT, you have to complete half of your degree at the University of Texas. You have to do those 60 hours at UT to get a degree from the University of Texas. At a school like Ole Miss, I’ll reference it that way, they can take one class and get a degree … My point is that was one of the inequalities and discrepancies that we deal with in college athletics.

Arch could have dragged us over the coals for six million, seven million, whatever he wanted. That’s an extra five million that I can go get a Cam Coleman, go get a Hollywood Smothers and go get a Rasheem Biles

I would say probably for the first time I feel like we have the top-level talent across the board position by position on both sides of the ball

He had a lingering thing that he’d been dealing with over a couple of years that we just wanted to clean up