Texas goes old school in refusing to commit to new player pay rules

ATLANTA — Texas is gonna Texas. Then again, so is every other big money team that has bolstered its standing in the NIL era regardless of any whining by perceived low rent schools trying to keep up financially in big money conferences.

The company line throughout the week has been that coaches across the country need to commit to the new rules surrounding revenue sharing and NIL in regard to player compensation while resisting the temptation to have the remnants of shuttered collectives slipping wads of cash into McDonald's bags.

While it's not surprising to see coaches like Arkansas' Sam Pittman want order restored by following new guidelines, even Ole Miss's Lane Kiffin, who may have benefitted more than any coach from a well-organized collective, is encouraging his fellow coaches to stick to salary cap created through revenue sharing.

“Again, we’ve tried to follow the guidelines because that’s what we were told we needed to do," Kiffin said. "I’m not saying they’re wrong for doing it – I’m not calling anybody out. If the system isn’t solid enough to prevent that, then we really don’t have a system. So you’re not operating on a salary cap.”

It's the position of seemingly every SEC coach who has been asked. They offer disgust at how out of hand things got and can become if people don't get on board, and then opine about the need to give the new system a chance to fix it.

Just not Steve Sarkisian of Texas. His answer initially to the question about whether there's an obligation to adhere the new guidelines, and when it was reworded and essentially asked again later on, was it's his job to coach and for others outside his office to figure out whether they will follow the rules put in place while stocking the Longhorns' roster for him.

"Honestly, I have no idea, I don't know," Sarkisian said. "We're in such the beginning stages of this thing. I think that everybody is operating differently. Everybody is trying to navigate this differently, and what are exactly the rules and are they going to be enforced? Nobody really knows."

The whole point of this was to get everyone operating the same to even the playing field once again. However, as Arkansas, Texas A&M and Missouri know well, the Longhorns work by their own rules which is typically a set of beliefs that rules are for everyone else and Texas should be able to do whatever Texas wants to do. The big thing for Sarkisian is to set himself up for plausibe deniability should someone every say the Longhorns aren't doing things legally.

"One thing about me, I tend not to get into the hypotheticals of what might be," Sarkisian said, even though the new rules are real, not hypothetical. "I tend not to worry about what might happen down the road. I try to keep my focus on what we're doing, and my focus is on our team, and that's — the more time I spend on those things outside of our team, then I'm doing a disservice to our players and to our team. I'm going to let the powers that be figure that out. My job is to be the best head coach I can be for the University of Texas."

For Sarkisian, it's important the best players show up on his doorstep ready and willing to play in the fall. How they got there is of no concern of his.

"... I don't have time or energy to worry about what everybody else is doing," Sarkisian said in regard to the idea other teams want everyone following the rules. "We're trying to build a roster that is one that can withstand the test of time. We never wanted to come here and be a one year wonder team and then the next year be not very good. So we're trying to be sustainable for a long period of time. I think that that's what good programs do."

Sarkisian did mention he is at least aware there is a cap to which he is supposed to stick.

"... You only have so much money to go around, you've got to be mindful of that," Sarkisian said. "You just don't want to be reckless with what you do. Now more than ever with the cap in place, you really have to be effective and efficient, and you have to make sure that you're filling your needs on your roster with high level people when you know another high level person is leaving and/or is this a depth move?"

While Sarkisian was open and honest about his unwillingness to flatly commit Texas to following the rules in regard to salary cap, NIL and not paying players off the books to get around whatever restrictions may be in place, he let out a doozy of a statement in regard to the Longhorns not being heavily about NIL when it comes to recruiting players.

"I think sometimes, quite frankly, it hurts us a little bit in recruiting in the fact that, when kids come on our campus, one of the first things we do, we don't talk about NIL," Sarikisian said. "We don't talk about NIL or revenue sharing or publicity rights until the very end, and that may hurt us on some kids, but if a kid is coming to Texas for that reason, we don't want him anyway. We want kids that want to be at the University of Texas because of the school, the coaches, the team, the culture, all those things that go into it, and, oh, by the way, you can get publicity rights or revenue share and so on and so forth."

Yes, it was definitely the approach to make it about football, coaching and culture instead of NIL when recruits were forced to walk through rows of Lamborghinis before being greeted by Sarkisian on their visits. Texas definitely downplayed that NIL opportunity, opting to hide it and bury it under hours of film work and drawing up plays on the board (sarcasm for those who are a little slow on the take).