
The Texas Longhorns walked away with a win on the scoreboard, but few fans left the weekend feeling like their team had truly triumphed.
Despite improving to 5-2, Saturday night’s performance against Kentucky left Longhorn Nation venting its frustration online and on the airwaves.
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The defense struggled to keep up, but it was Steve Sarkisian‘s offense and his puzzling playcalling that became the main target of criticism.
The numbers alone told part of the story. Pete Kwiatkowski‘s defensive unit surrendered 395 yards of total offense, allowed 26 first downs, and saw Wildcats quarterback Cutter Boley complete 80 percent of his passes. After the game, Sarkisian tried to explain what went wrong.
“When you play in 3rd and long, then you lose the flow of the game and the rhythm of the game. I think we missed some opportunities in the run game to be better,” he said.
To frustrated supporters, that sounded like an understatement. Sarkisian‘s creative but risky playcalling seemed to backfire throughout the night. Rather than settling into a steady offensive tempo, the Longhorns found themselves stuck behind the chains, facing one difficult third down after another.
Misfires and mismanagement on key downs
The breaking point for many fans came early in the game when Texas faced a 3rd-and-3, a manageable situation that should have called for a simple, high-percentage play.
Instead, Sarkisian dialed up a long-developing trick play that quickly unraveled. It was the kind of decision that has haunted him before: complex, unnecessary, and perfectly timed to kill a drive.
As the night wore on, the same issues kept surfacing. Missed throws by Arch Manning, conservative early-down calls, and low-percentage passing attempts on short-yardage situations turned every possession into a battle for field position.
The penalties didn’t help either, but Sarkisian‘s postgame comments about them struck some as deflective.
“We’ve got to quit the self-inflicted wounds. You guys see it when there’s penalties… there’s little things that we’re not doing offensively,” he noted.
For Arch Manning, the game was another learning experience in a season that has tested both his poise and his accuracy. The freshman quarterback showed flashes of brilliance but missed open targets and struggled to sustain drives when pressure mounted.
Some of his errors were his own, but many stemmed from an offensive approach that rarely allowed him to find comfort.
This news was originally published on this post .
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