Steve Sarkisian addresses NCAA transfer portal retentions

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AUSTIN, Texas — For Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian, a consistent aspect of his tenure is that he and his staff haven’t recruited players back out of the NCAA transfer portal once they enter.

During this year’s winter window, that appeared to change after multiple players were reportedly set to enter the portal or did enter the portal before altering course and returning to the Forty Acres.

But the specific verbiage of those entrances and the “unforeseen circumstances” of Blake Gideon leaving his role as the Georgia Tech defensive coordinator to come back to his alma mater as the defensive passing game coordinator and secondary coach played a larger role in those decisions than a change in philosophy by Sarkisian.

“We had a coach come back, Coach Gideon, that I think shifted some of that,” Sarkisian said last week.

Of the four players to return to Texas, all defenders, three of them were defensive backs, including rising redshirt junior Derek Williams.

A consensus five-star prospect throughout much of the 2023 recruiting cycle, Williams finished as the No. 4 safety, according to the 247Sports Composite rankings, but struggled to build on a promising freshman season and find playing time in 2025 after Gideon left, impacted by the rises of Jelani McDonald and Xavier Filsaime and a season-ending knee injury sustained in the 2024 Red River Rivalry.

Despite positive buzz in preseason camp, Williams was on the margins of the safety rotation, playing just six snaps in the first non-conference home game against San Jose State and three snaps in the conference-opening road loss to Florida. Then the 6’2, 201-pounder only played on special teams in the win over Texas A&M to close the regular season.

In mid-December, the news broke that Williams planned on entering the NCAA transfer portal in January, causing him to miss the Citrus Bowl and the practices leading up to it.

Days later, Sarkisian made the unexpected decision to hire defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski and defensive passing game coordinator Duane Akina, bringing Will Muschamp back to Austin and setting the stage for Gideon’s return.

In turn, Gideon coming back to Austin precipitated the decision by Williams in January to withdraw his name from the portal and return to Texas, a choice influenced by the relationship that Gideon built with the Louisiana product as his secondary recruiter out of New Iberia Westgate.

The timing of Gideon’s return also coincided with the planned departure and return of rising redshirt junior Warren Roberson. News broke that the Red Oak product was entering the portal on January 12 prior to his decision to come back to Texas four days later, the same day that the school officially announced Gideon as the defensive passing game coordinator.

But that timing may matter less than the actual semantics of Roberson’s situation. On3’s initial report cited a source who indicated that Roberson was entering the portal, likely his agent, and it was another source, likely his agent again, who revealed that Roberson was coming back to the Forty Acres for his junior season.

And it’s those semantics that Sarkisian made clear to address last week.

“I think some of that is, when did they really enter the portal? You guys think, because it says on the internet, he entered the portal. I view when a guy enters the portal as when his name is actually in the portal. That’s what we live by,” Sarkisian said.

It’s possible that Roberson never officially notified Texas compliance to enter his name into the portal, at which point the Longhorns have 48 business hours to release the player so that other programs can initiate contact with that player.

“I don’t get to call a kid because you guys tweet so and so’s in the portal. So when a young man goes to compliance to say he’s in the portal, I technically have 48 hours to release him, and 48 hours of business days. So if a young man decided to go in the portal on Friday, I really don’t have to put him in the portal until the following Tuesday, Wednesday, depending on when he went in. And so it may be reported that he’s in the portal, but technically he’s not in the portal,” Sarkisian said.

The margins in between the announcement of intentions, the notification of compliance, and the player’s name going live in the portal are when a significant number of retention conversations happen between programs and agents before that player can engage in conversations with other coaches, but there are also the margins in which a phrase like “plans to enter the portal” merely means that an agent is using that leverage to negotiate a better compensation package from the school the player might leave while the agent also holds preliminary discussions with personnel staffs elsewhere.

There’s another level, as well — when head coaches complain about tampering, they might be addressing contact between another school and a player not yet officially in the portal, which is officially prohibited even though the sport’s toothless governing body can’t actually enforce it, and an allowable conversation between an agent and another school to assess a player’s market value before that player actually goes into the portal.

Discussions of the latter nature happen all the time and, in fact, are necessary because of the compressed schedule of the portal window and the need to gain a competitive advantage — it’s how a transfer like former Wake Forest standout Melin Siani can go from entering the portal with a “do not contact” tag to officially committing to Texas within a matter of hours. That deal was probably done when compliance for the Demon Deacons was told to enter Sian into the portal or maybe even before it because Siani could agree to a deal presented by the Longhorns to his agent without ever having prohibited contact with the coaching staff.

Beyond the specific mechanics of it all, Texas was also able to retain former consensus five-star cornerback Kobe Black and promising rising redshirt sophomore edge Zina Umeozulu in addition to convincing rising redshirt sophomore cornerback Wardell Mack to return to the Forty Acres.

Collectively, those retentions allowed the Horns to keep talented players on campus who fit the culture and are on a developmental trajectory to play larger roles in 2026, even if none of them become starters. In a cycle in which Texas failed for the first time to retain the starters Sarkisian and his staff wanted to keep in the program, a reality imposed by the revenue-sharing era and a desire to upgrade several positions, the ability of the Longhorns to avoid doing that developmental work for other programs with highly-talented players is an area that could prove crucial to the 2026 team’s success in a high-pressure season in which Sarkisian needs to compete for a national championship.

“I really didn’t necessarily change our philosophy. When guys went in, they were in, but there were a couple unforeseen situations that did came up that allowed us to alter that,” Sarkisian said.

In the rapidly-changing landscape of college football, player retention is arguably more important than high school or portal recruiting, so even if the Texas head coach doesn’t want to admit to a philosophical change along semantic lines, the results tell the most important story.

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