Steve Sarkisian insists the reason behind no spring game at Texas has nothing to do with tampering

While Texas has certainly not been the only team to decide to forgo the traditional spring game this year, they're arguably the most high profile program to make the decision.

The narrative around programs who have decided to not hold spring games has been that they don't want to publicly advertise the talent on their roster, especially before the start of the spring transfer portal window.

In the eyes of many, doing so could do much more damage than good, as it would only fuel roster tampering that is already rampant across college football.

Steve Sarkisian cleared the air yesterday by sharing that tampering and the portal are not the reason behind their decision at Texas.

The spring portal window opens April 16th (not the 26th as Sark refers to in the clip) and closes on April 25th - a Friday.

"We're not, not having a spring game so that people don't tamper with our players. They could go out and catch five touchdowns that Saturday and they couldn't go in the portal anyway."

"That's not the premise of what we're doing. People are going to tamper with our players whether we like it or not. That's fine. Hopefully we've built a culture and they believe in the development of the other guys before them in our program and they feel this is the best place for them."

Then Sark gets to the real reason they're not having a traditional spring game.

"We're not having a spring game because I've got 27 new faces on my roster that I need to take time to develop. That development starts at the beginning of spring ball, where we have really got to lay a foundation of the why's of what we do from how we practice, to the drills that we do, to the foundational aspects of the offense from the offense, the defense and the special teams of where we build and where we grow from there."

"The challenge for us as a coaching staff is to grow quickly."

In addition to those new faces Sark refers to, the Longhorns are also breaking in a few new coaches after losing key assistants like running backs coach Tashard Choice to the Lions and Blake Gideon to become the defensive coordinator at Georgia Tech.

Hear Sark's full comments in the clip.