Steve Sarkisian, essentially, did the thing. He broke the meme.Texas is back to being one of the best programs in college football, a legit national championship contender.After 13 years of mostly mediocre football, including just one 10-win season, the Longhorns are 36-8 over the last three seasons and one game, ranked No. 4 in the country heading into Saturday’s top-five showdown against No. 1 Ohio State.Sarkisian did that. It took the 52-year-old Californian a couple of years to ramp up, just in time for Texas to enter the SEC as a real threat to win the conference.But still, something about Sark brings out the doubters.“I feel like he has this program primed for a national title run, but we’ll see,” The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman wrote in his offseason top 25 coaches ranking, in which he slotted Sarkisian 13th. “I had him in the top five last year because he was coming off two terrific seasons, but in full view, that was the bulk of his resume in over a decade as a college head coach.”Some critiques are less nuanced.“What has Steve Sarkisian won?” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said during a “First Take” debate with Paul Finebaum this week. Smith is no one’s go-to college football expert, but his sentiment is common when conversations and commentary turn to Sarkisian.Which is better: the Big Ten or SEC?Chris VanniniBut here’s the thing: The Sark discourse and the make-or-break feel of this Texas season, likely quarterback Arch Manning’s last in college, is met with incredulity by many of the most important Longhorns.To them, you’re asking whether Sark can get it done as he is literally getting it done.“I’m just here to tell you that Sark has done a masterful job,” University of Texas board of regents chairman Kevin Eltife said.Longhorns athletic director Chris Del Conte says it’s just a Texas thing.“I understand the gravitas of being a Longhorn,” Del Conte recently told The Athletic. “The expectations are going to be completely different.”Texas is without question a college football blue blood, but baked into its identity are long stretches in which the Longhorns failed to live up to their own lofty standards.A program that seemingly has everything necessary to rack up championships — backed by one of the wealthiest athletic departments in the country and located in America’s ultimate football-crazed state — hasn’t.Last season, Texas celebrated the 20th anniversary of its most recent national title, with Mack Brown as coach and Vince Young at quarterback. The one before that came in 1969 under coach Darrell K. Royal, whose name is on the stadium at Texas. Over the last 45 seasons, Texas has won eight conference championships. Over that same span, rival Oklahoma has won 19.To a lot of college football fans, Texas football is more sizzle than steak, and Sark, a supposed offensive mastermind whose team consistently struggles to score touchdowns in the red zone, is just another part of an overhyped outfit.But why? In part, as Feldman points out, it is the total body of work. In six-plus seasons as head coach at Washington and USC, Sarkisian was 46-35. When he got the USC job, replacing his friend Lane Kiffin, he was 39 years old and coming off an 8-4 season that was his best in five years at Washington. Three straight 7-6 records earned him the nickname “Seven-Win Sark.”Sarkisian did pull Washington up from the program’s rock bottom. The Huskies were coming off five consecutive losing seasons when he arrived, including a stunning 0-12 in 2008.He unequivocally did a good job in Seattle, but his hiring at USC felt a lot like the Trojans trying desperately to rekindle Pete Carroll-era magic by tapping yet another one of his former hot-shot assistants.It turned out to be too much, too soon. Sarkisian was fired by USC halfway through the 2015 season for issues related to alcohol abuse. Putting the off-field matters aside, it’s easy to look at Sark’s career arc and conclude that he’s received some enormous opportunities that exceeded his qualifications.Before joining Carroll at USC, he spent one season as a high school coach in California. Here is a list of Sarkisian’s employers since then: USC (multiple times), Washington, Alabama (twice), the Atlanta Falcons and Texas.As with so many coaches in the 2010s, Sarkisian’s comeback started at Alabama under Nick Saban. That led to a two-year stint as offensive coordinator with the Falcons and then a return to Tuscaloosa for two more seasons as OC, helping Saban win the last of his six national titles with the Crimson Tide in 2020.About a week before that pandemic-altered season’s championship game, Del Conte, in one fell swoop, fired Tom Herman and hired Sarkisian to be the next Texas coach.It was a surprising move. Why this guy to fill one of the most coveted jobs in college football?“Steve had an incredible plan and a blueprint of what it looked like and what it could look like, and how he wanted to build his program,” Del Conte said.So far, it’s looking pretty good.Sarkisian has pushed Texas football closer to being its idealized self than any coach since Brown. From 2001 to ’09, Brown’s Longhorns won at least 10 games every season, won a national championship, played for another (and maybe should have played for a third) and never finished a season ranked worse than No. 13 in the AP poll.“If you can keep in the mix every year, you’re going to get there,” Eltife said. “And you know, after Mack left, we were wandering in the wilderness for 10, 15 years. I mean, we were lost.”Texas is right where it wants to be now.Sarkisian’s Longhorns were in the CFP semifinals in 2024 and ’25. Last season was disappointing, as they opened the season at No. 1 for the first time in program history and then didn’t even reach the CFP. Still, Texas finished 10-3 and beat both its rivals, Oklahoma and Texas A&M, each of which made the Playoff.“Last season alone we beat three top-10 ranked teams — in a down year,” Sarkisian said at SEC media days in July.He then rattled off a few more resume bullet points.