'I really feel like our team's on a mission': Steve Sarkisian, Texas preparing for first season as Big 12 favorites in more than a decade

When the Big 12 preseason poll is released on Thursday, a new name will be on top: Texas.

The Longhorns carry into the 2023 season a reputation as one of college football's ultimate "Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane" programs. They seemingly recruit in the top 10, if not the top five, every season, yet oh-so-rarely play like it. Since 2010, Texas is 91-72 with more sub-.500 seasons (four) than AP Top 20 finishes (three). Anyone rolling their eyes at the hype surrounding Texas is entirely justified. After all, who can forget the not-exactly-scientific proclamations from Joe Tessitore and Sam Ehlinger? 

And yet this is the first time since the Longhorns' unforeseen 2010 collapse that Texas has entered a season with actual expectations. Of the 584 first-place votes awarded in the Big 12 preseason poll from 2011-22, Texas has garnered 24. Big 12 voters have properly seen Texas as a middle-tier team that occasionally challenges for the conference title but never wins it. 

And now, presumably, they don't. On the preseason All-Big 12 team, released Wednesday, Texas led the conference with five first-teamers players, led by defensive player of the year, senior linebacker Jaylan Ford. 

Most national polls and projections place Texas around sixth. If that comes to pass, it'll be UT's highest start since 2010, the year following a Big 12 championship and a national championship appearance. (Update: Texas was picked first on Thursday afternoon, drawing 41 of 67 first-place votes.) 

There are generally three ways coaches respond to preseason expectations. One is to embrace them. The second, and most common tactic, is to reject the expectations, taking on an "us against the world" mentality. This approach is almost humorously effective, most recently exemplified by Georgia defensive end Nolan Smith saying, "They thought we were gonna go 7-5" after the preseason No. 3 Bulldogs won their second straight national championship. The third tactic is to deny their existence, a "block out the noise" mentality. (Any coach who truly believes he can block out the noise in 2023 is lying to himself.)

Sarkisian's tactic is to acknowledge the expectations, good and bad. In a day and age where any 20-year-old with a TikTok following can be branded as an expert, this is easier than ever. 

"What I try to do is show them both ends of the spectrum," he said in an interview with ESPN's Always College Football podcast. "I can show somebody who says we're a potential Playoff team, and I can show a national reporter who's saying we have no chance at winning the Big 12 championship. When I can put both of them on the overhead side by side, it's really not what anybody else thinks, it's about what we do and what we believe in this room."

As for the attitude in the room... Texas believes it's going to win the Big 12.

"I really feel like our team's on a mission. We've been building to this, to win a Big 12 championship. They will all tell you that we missed an opportunity a year ago because of our own undoing. We made some mistakes in a couple games that cost us an opportunity to be in that game. These guys have been on a mission all winter, all spring.

"We were in a team meeting and I was referencing, 'So you guys are aware, they're going to release the SEC schedule tonight.' These guys wanted to put out our 2023 schedule to remind everybody who we were playing this year," he said. 

In fact, Sarkisian tweeted Texas's 2023 schedule on that June night when the SEC unveiled its 2024 slate.

None of this is to say Texas is a perfect team. The offense returns every single contributor save for Bijan Robinson and Roschon Johnson, but Robinson and Johnson were the best players from last year's offense. The 2022 offense leaned on its run game, and the run game was as running back-dependent as any in FBS.

Quinn Ewers and the passing game will have to carry the 2023 offense -- something that group was incapable of doing a season ago -- and the defense will have to find a more consistent way to convert QB pressures into sacks (t-71st in 2022) and getting off the field on money downs (94th on third down, 86th on fourth), two things that often go hand-in-hand. 

Improve in both those areas, and Texas will live up to the expectations the general public thinks it has every season. 

"Really the full allotment of our team now are players that I inherited that have now been with us for three years or they're kids that we recruited that believed in what we were doing and that's why they came here," Sarkisian said. "We really have a locker room full of guys that are believing in what we believe, and have really good leadership, and are putting forth the necessary effort to try to be a champion. That's why they came here, and hopefully we're giving them the platform and the tools to go do that."