The interview was where so many take place during the college football hiring season: a nondescript hotel near the Dallas Fort Worth airport, which serves as a convenient middle ground for covert meetings. The Texas contingent consisted of athletic director Chris Del Conte, president Jay Hartzell and board of regents chairman Kevin Eltife. They were there to see Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian.
Counter to popular interview trends in the sport, Sark did not arrive armed with a binder full of detailed plans. This meeting was less about showing off his football acumen or organizational skills and more about presenting himself as a human being. “I want it to come from me and how I feel and not some book that a (graduate assistant) put together the night before the interview,” he says. “I didn’t have to flip to page 48. It was coming right out of me.”
What came out of Steve Sarkisian during that meeting was an unflinching honesty—about who he is and where he’s been and how hard he landed at rock bottom. Sark owned all of it—his firing from a dream job in 2015 at USC due to alcohol abuse, his time in rehab getting sober, a stretch where he said he couldn’t get a foot in the door for jobs—and laid it on the table for Texas to consider.
