The Texas football team didn’t let a rumor cloud the win. After the overtime escape against Mississippi State, Steve Sarkisian blasted pregame chatter linking him to NFL openings, calling the report absolutely ridiculous and saying he spoke up to protect his locker room. His agents issued a denial, and the coach doubled down that his focus remains squarely on Austin as Texas eyes November showdowns.
Asked days later about Lane Kiffin’s broader claim that dynasties are dead in the sport, Sarkisian needed only four words. The exchange, relayed by On3, came after Kiffin told ESPN that the era of week-in, week-out dominance is over in a realigned, deeper SEC where schedules stack nine league games and long road slats.
Kiffin argued records distort evaluation across conferences and pushed for analytics and computer models to steer postseason selection, with margin of victory and venue baked into the math. Sarkisian’s curt reply read as a polite pass on that worldview, the kind of sidestep a coach makes when his team still wants to hunt trophies.
The Texas football team has reasons to believe in a longer arc. The roster is built to play complementary football; the offense has found late-game answers with Arch Manning distributing, and the defense stiffens in the fourth quarter. If dynasties truly are impossible, the Longhorns still intend to behave like a team trying to start one, not declare them extinct.
Kiffin’s provocation also lands at a time when the sport is wrestling with what the expanded Playoff should reward. The Ole Miss coach says the committee leans too hard on record and reputation.
Sarkisian’s program prefers to settle that argument by stacking ranked wins and letting the resume speak. That tension, philosophy versus proof, is why their back-and-forth resonates beyond a single quip.
Kirk Herbstreit, meanwhile, poured cold water on separate carousel noise. He said Kiffin is staying in college and Nick Saban is not jumping back to a sideline, framing this year’s intrigue as more about fit than celebrity. That reads like good news for stability in the SEC and a reminder that Texas’s storyline is on the field, not on the rumor mill.
