Texas coach Steve Sarkisian's biggest gripe with college football

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Never has a sport changed so quickly as college football. Players are now paid. Players can now transfer almost freely. Boosters have grown in power. And the sport has a playoff. Every big change has also brought with it big problems. But what is the biggest problem? Texas coach Steve Sarkisian thinks is the college football playoff committee.

Sarkisian thinks a lot is broken in the sport. Big programs, Texas included, now pay millions for their rosters. In a lot of cases, the boosters providing the millions have become de facto owners. Athletes, who now can command “real money,” are setting up bidding wars because they can transfer almost freely. And some are even judge shopping to avoid consequences for gambling. 

“I try my best to not get consumed with how bad it is,” Sarkisian said. ‘It just wears you out.”

But it is the college football playoffs that Sark is most upset with.

“Everyone talks about NIL. But my biggest gripe is the selection committee,” Sarkisian said. “There’s no transparency on what exactly the committee is doing. We have to figure that out.”

In 2025, Texas missed the CFP thanks in part to a loss at defending national champion Ohio State in week 1 of the season. The Longhorns would lost two more games and miss the postseason. The thought that the CFP committee would weigh losses to got teams differently seemed to go out the window.

The CFP committee seems to waffle on strength of schedule. An SEC schedule is very different than a Big 12 schedule.

“But by the end of the season, we’ll play, of our 12 regular season opponents, five of those teams will be Top 10 teams when we played them,” Steve Sarkisian said. “So nearly half our schedule.”

Texas Football’s scheduling philosophy for years has been to schedule at least one elite program a year. But that cost them. But that might be changing.

For years, UT has been considered a model for college football scheduling. The Texas Athletic Department cooks up a good mix of smaller to medium size FBS teams with at least one huge marquee matchup with another college football power. Texas doesn’t play FCS (formerly I-AA) teams.

In the past, the Longhorns have played USC, Notre Dame, Ohio State and Alabama. Texas had scheduled Florida and Georgia in the future, but those were canceled after the Longhorns joined the SEC.

The Longhorns will face the Buckeyes again next year and Michigan in 2027. Beyond that?

“I think anything beyond that is up for discussion,” Sark said in December.

Then UT is currently scheduled to start a home-and-home Notre Dame in 2028. That could be in jeopardy.

It is the inconsistency exhibited by the CFP committee that Sark says is his biggest issue in college football. Sark believes the problem will get worse if the playoff expands.

“The committee doesn’t have the bandwidth to watch that many games,” Sarkisian said. “They see the media and coaches polls, and they copy them. You’ve got a 12-team playoff, and that means there are at least 30 teams that impact it. Now all of a sudden, you want to go to 24? Now the polls become an even greater factor, because now you’re asking (the committee) to watch 40 teams a week — if not 50.”

For now, Sark will keep trying to navigate the obstacles and make the CFP in 2026. But the UT coach has hinted there’s talk in the league about leaving the NCAA and the CFP all together.

This article originally appeared on Longhorns Wire: Texas’ Steve Sarkisian says the CFP committee is sport’s big problem

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