Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian's process has gotten him to 11-straight road wins, and he plans to make it 12 after this weekend in Columbus.
Week 1 in Columbus, Ohio, marks the start of a grueling season of road games for the Texas Longhorns.
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The team that hasn’t lost away since October of 2022, a cool 11-0, starts its journey at the defending national champions, Ohio State, before taking on games at the likes of Kentucky, Mississippi State, Florida, and Georgia—a team Texas hasn’t been able to defeat at home or on a neutral field since joining the SEC.
It might not be the toughest in the SEC, but it features arguably the three hardest road environments head coach Steve Sarkisian has seen since taking down Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2023.
“We’ve talked about this at length before the season, but we’ve got a tough road slate this year, and this is the first one of a few to come, and so it serves us good to have to go on the road early, find out about ourselves, find out where we’re at, where we’re at as a program, where we can improve, and where we can continue to get better,” Sarkisian said. “We’re going to travel more than any other SEC team this year in our conference, and so this is a great opportunity for us to go do that naturally.”
Between the five true road games and the Red River Rivalry in Dallas, Texas will rack up over 4,700 miles of travel before even sniffing a conference championship game or the College Football Playoff.
The Longhorns have been the CFP’s most successful team on the road over the past two years, most notably winning in some of the toughest environments in the nation, like Tuscaloosa, the Big House in Ann Arbor, and Kyle Field for the return of the Lone Star Showdown.
“We believe in our process on the road. We’ve won 11 in a row on the road now, and they haven’t been easy. They’ve all been very difficult. Going on the road is tough,” Sarkisian said. “But this is a heck of a matchup for a great environment against a really good team who’s really well-coached, who’s had a ton of success.”
That belief in a process is something Sarkisian has echoed throughout the offseason and to the media over fall camp. Since his first year on campus, a disastrous 5-7 season, Sarkisian has used the same process to create a culture and chemistry within his roster.
The success that came with that process didn’t happen overnight; he had to recruit the right players and create his own team, but 2025 is the first year you can truly say this is a Texas team built purely on Sark’s foundation.
“I think we trust our process. You know, we’ve got a real process that we believe in, starting this morning and what our practice plans look like, and crowd noise that we work with, and then to Friday’s routine, to game day’s routine, and to really toning out what’s going on outside of us and focusing on what’s going on between the white lines,” Sarkisian said.
What specifically “the process” means is something that only players and staff on the Longhorns roster really know, but Sarkisian has made a few things clear. He puts major emphasis on pumping in crowd noise to his practices ahead of road games. He even joked that he should do it for home games as well, as his offensive line usually does better pre-snap on the road than at home.
It also means using the same schedule and routine between every position group, every week. Players who have been in the system for multiple years—the ones you expect to make big plays come Saturday—are accustomed to how the team will operate. They’ve seen players before them succeed with this routine and now want to emulate it.
“I think doing it with confidence, knowing that adversity will strike, and then having a next-play mentality, having the mental toughness to persevere, to get on the other side of some of that adversity, I think, is really important as well,” Sarkisian said. “But mostly it’s staying connected. It’s staying connected on the sidelines, being enamored with what we need to do, and not getting so caught up in what’s going on around us.”
Sarkisian’s team will need to persevere this Saturday, as the task of beating defending national champions two years in a row is no easy one. The Shoe is ready for the Longhorns, but the Longhorns might be even more ready for The Shoe.
Category: General Sports
