Steve Sarkisian reflects on experience opening season against postseason foe from previous year, dominant result

Steve Sarkisian isn’t new to playing the same team in back-to-back games. In fact, ahead of the Saturday’s highly-anticipated Week 1 season-opening rematch between No. 1 Texas and No. 3 Ohio State in Columbus, Sarkisian reminisced about a similar experience he had more than a decade ago.

Saturday’s season-opener between the host Buckeyes and Longhorns is the first game of a home-and-home series that has been on both teams’ schedule for years. But after Ohio State ended Texas’ run in the 2024 College Football Playoffs with a 28-14 win in the Cotton Bowl national semifinal on Jan. 10, this weekend’s matchup presents a somewhat unique challenge.

Albeit maybe not all that unique for Sarkisian.

“Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this,” Sarkisian said in Wednesday’s SEC coaches teleconference. “So not completely foreign to it. We had a kind of a similar situation with Nebraska about the same time.”

In what would be his fourth and second-to-last season as Washington‘s head coach, Sarkisian’s Huskies ended their 2012 season with a 28-26 loss to Boise State in the Las Vegas Bowl on Dec. 22, 2012. Roughly eight months later, on Aug. 31, 2013, Sarkisian and Washington returned the favor and demolished the Broncos 38-6 in the 2013 season opener from Seattle. Two years prior, in 2010, the Huskies played Nebraska twice in the same season, getting some sweet revenge for an earlier loss to the ‘Huskers in mid-September with a 19-7 win in the Holiday Bowl roughly three months later.

What that means for Saturday’s game in Columbus is anyone’s guess. But for Sarkisian, playing Ohio State twice within an eight month window is more about properly anticipating and handling any potential changes from game to game.

“I think part of it is schematically, how much are people really going to change? But names and faces, some of them can remain the same, some of them are new. And then how to do people evolve and grow in their roles that are some of the returning faces? So there’s challenges to it all,” Sarkisian continued. “I think at the end of the day there are some commonalities, I’m sure, that they do. There will be some new things and maybe they move some pieces around, some people in different spots. … A lot of similar names from last year, it’s just how much do they evolve.

“And then how much have we evolved with some of the people in our organization and some of the schemes. So that’s part of the processes of a Game 1. And that’s always one of the challenges of Game 1 is the unknowns and then trying to put your players in the best position to have success.”