Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian doesn’t seem all that positive about the state of college football as he looks at the current environment.
Sure, we can keep “whistling past the graveyard,” and there’s probably a temptation to do just that for Sarkisian. He’s heading into this season with one of the best teams in the country, and the Longhorns very well could win the College Football Playoff national championship in 2026.
The flipside of the coin is that the state of college football is in shambles when you pull back the curtain.
The NIL and transfer portal era has ushered in a tumultuous time. Sure, player mobility is a good thing, and players getting paid is something that many had been calling for over the years.
There’s very little order or structure to any of it, though. There are seemingly very few ways the NCAA can enforce anything. In his own state, Sarkisian saw Texas Tech try to play a quarterback who had bet on his own team and had an admitted gambling problem. It almost worked for the Red Raiders, too, and just because the NCAA got a “win” in the case of Brendan Sorsby, that doesn’t mean everything is suddenly functional in college sports.
Heck, the Cal Berkeley Golden Bears are a part of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It’s just topsy-turvy, and Sarkisian lamented the state of things in a recent appearance on “The Stampede.”
“I don’t want to be worried about my fourth wide receiver getting talked to by another school’s coach in pregame warmups,” Sarkisian said (h/t On3). “‘Hey, come transfer here at the end of the season. You’re not playing there anyway.’ Those are the things, like, if you do those things, there’s got to be consequences for breaking rules. And right now, we can’t govern our own rules, and that’s the most frustrating part of where we’re at in college football society right now. We can’t enforce our own laws. We can’t enforce our own rules. There’s no consequences right now.”