With Texas Longhorns star quarterback Quinn Ewers out with a shoulder injury this week, the Longhorns will turn to redshirt freshman Maalik Murphy or true freshman Arch Manning. And it sounds like Steve Sarkisian is preparing them both to play.
During his press conference this week, Steve Sarkisian made it clear that he wants to identify things and plays that Arch Manning and Maalik Murphy are comfortable with ahead of Saturday’s game against BYU.
“I think in the we gotta take our time as a coaching staff, which we started on yesterday,” Sarkisian said. “What are the things that Maalik does well? What are the things that Arch does well? It’s not always about the idea of the play and putting it on a whiteboard, because there’s a lot of plays that look good. But what do they do well and how do we ensure okay, here’s the concepts that we think they run really well, they don’t have to run the whole playbook.”
Sarkisian made it clear that even though this week’s game will be a test for Manning and Murphy, it “doesn’t need to be a final exam,” and he wants to make sure they are comfortable and prepared to perform their best on Saturday.
“But I do wanna make sure that I’m giving them the opportunity to do the things that they’ve shown us that they’re good at and they like because Saturday is going to be a test enough,” Sarkisian said. “It doesn’t need to be a final exam as far as let’s test them on things they might know or might not know. I want to test them on the stuff that I know they know really well, I hope they get 100%, this is an open book test. I hope they play great.”
Sarkisian said that both Manning and Murphy will get first-team reps at practice this week, but Murphy would be the starter “if the game was played today.” Either way, it’s clear that Sarkisian is going to prepare both of them to play.
