The 2023 Premier Coach of College Football Award Winner is Steve Sarkisian of the University of Texas Longhorns.
In college football, there are easy jobs, there are hard jobs, and then there is the job in Austin coaching the Longhorns. On the surface, the Texas job has everything going for it. Austin is a cool, youthful city, with plenty of money available through boosters and a fanbase/recruiting network that stretches from coast to coast. Add in the standard of high school football in Texas and the recruiting opportunities on the university’s doorstep, and you have what seems like an ideal job.
Those benefits, however, come with additional pressures that you just don’t get in other jobs. The boosters and fans demand success at Texas, and success to them is competing for a national championship year after year. That has not been the case, with Texas last having played for the national title 14 years ago. The university had become a meme.
Steve Sarkisian changed all that.
Sark cut his teeth with USC and the Oakland Raiders before his first head coaching gig when he took over (ironically) at CFP opponents Washinton before the 2009 season. He went 34-29 with the Huskies before taking the head coaching gig at USC in a role that didn’t work out. After spending time refining his coaching philosophy – most notably at Alabama – Sarkisian took the Texas job before the 2021 season with the program in disarray.
His first year was tough, and the jokes continued. The Longhorns finished 5-7 and 3-6 in Big 12 play. Improvement was stary in 2022, with Texas finishing 8-5 and flipping their Big 12 record to 6-3. Even so, the jump between Year 2 and Year 3 was shocking.
This season, the Longhorns won the Big 2 with an 8-1 record in conference and a 12-1 record overall. This included a shocking 34-24 win over eventual SEC champions Alabama in the Longhorns second game of the season. The win – in Tuscaloosa, no less – was the proof that Texas had arrived and that Sarkisian was doing great things with the Longhorns program.
A move to the SEC awaits, but Steve Sarkisian is the obvious choice as the 2023 Premier Coach of College Football Award Winner because took a dying program and turned it into a national title contender.