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11 hours ago, speed817 said:

 

https://www.texasfootball.com/article/2025/06/04/how-culture-wednesdays-changed-fortunes-for-texas-longhorns

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AUSTIN – Steve Sarkisian spent his first year as the head coach of the Texas Longhorns as an observer. He wanted to get under the hood and figure out why one of the most powerful and resource-rich football programs in America was struggling to win.
 
After blowing multiple second-half leads and finishing the 2021 season 5-7, he surmised that the issue was culture.
 
Sure, his Horns needed to recruit better, develop more and improve schematically, but the root cause was a lack of togetherness. Texas wasn’t a tight-knit team. There was no brotherhood, and that was causing them to fold under pressure. Sarkisian needed to change something so he began looking for outside opinions on how he could transform the Longhorns from a talented group of individuals into a formidable unit. 
 
That led him to San Jose State head coach Brent Brennan. The two weren’t exactly best friends in the spring of 2022 when Sarkisian reached out for help with his culture problem in Austin, but the two coaches were close enough for Brennan to visit and spend a day with Sarkisian in his office talking about everything except for Xs and Os. 
 
The two started brainstorming exercises that improve culture. They discussed different things that Nick Saban and Pete Carroll did as head coaches before Brennan mentioned some of the things he did the night before games like sharing life stories and working on mindfulness with guest speakers. 
 
“I just didn’t think we could wait until the Friday before the first game,” Sarkisian explained. “I decided to implement it in June when the whole team gathered for the first time together in the summer.” 
 
Sarkisian approached Torre Becton, Texas' Director of Football Performance who oversaw the Longhorns' strength and conditioning program, with a radical idea. He only wanted his herd of Longhorns to work out four days a week and to reserve Wednesday for mind, body, and soul. Becton looked at Sarkisian like he was crazy. After all, what strength and conditioning coach wants to sacrifice power cleans and wind sprints for sharing sessions?
 
Sarkisian decided to call it “Culture Wednesdays” and the first one was June 1, 2022. 
 
“I didn’t want it to be about football,” Sarkisian said about his idea. “I really wanted them to get to know each other so that they could have a little bit of empathy for one another so that they could start to forge a connection to each other and inevitably start to love their teammates and coaches.” 
 
But Sarkisian knew there was a major hurdle to overcome if this plan would work. He was about to ask a room full of 18- to 22-year-old alpha males to be vulnerable with each other. To share personal tragedies and triumphs. To let others in and to reveal their “Four Hs” as Sarkisian calls them – their home life, a hero in their life, a hardship in their life, and an honor that they’ve received. 
 
Sarkisian planned the first Culture Wednesday for months during the 2022 offseason and landed on a realization – he needed to set the example. 
 
Sarkisian said that the initial Culture Wednesday on June 1 was the most nervous he’d ever been for a team meeting. He knew he had to tell his story. And not the PG version, either. He needed to be real. To be open. To walk a room full of young men through his very public fall from grace as the head coach at USC and how he walked through fire to earn another opportunity to lead a program. He spoke to the team for over an hour. 
 
“If I wanted to create an avenue where they feel like they could open up and share with me, I surely better pave the road for them to do that,” Sarkisian said. “When I walked through my whole story, I think they were like, ‘holy shit, coach literally opened up to us about everything. And not on the night before a big game, on a random Wednesday in June at 7 a.m. in the morning.’” 
 
After Sarkisian finished talking, he divided his team up into 10 groups of 12 and sent them to different corners of the football building with assistant coaches to begin doing the same. The assistant coaches began first and then the players spoke in those smaller groups. Sarkisian estimates about 10 of the 12 in each group jumped in right away. Over 75% of his team was on board from the jump and Sarkisian says that on that day he stumbled into the “secret sauce” of team building and knew it was a matter of when, not if, his program would turn the corner. The leadership within the team agreed. 
 
“We started learning about each other and where we came from and what we’d been through outside of football,” former wide receiver and current Los Angeles Ram Jordan Whittington said about the first Culture Wednesday. “We gained a better appreciation for each other as people and that directly impacted how we played as a team on the field.” 
 
Not every Culture Wednesday is a therapy session. Some include mindfulness experts and others were recovery circuits. The team does simple things like gratitude trees. The Longhorns were 3-10 in one-score games during the first two seasons of Sarkisian’s tenure. That means 13 of his first 25 games as head coach on The Forty Acres came down to one possession. Since the start of the 2023 season, Texas is 5-3 in those games. They no longer let teams hang around and have only played in one-score games eight times in the last 30 contests. 
 
The first Culture Wednesday of the 2025 campaign takes place on June 4 as Sarkisian breaks in a new crop of players. He no longer has to win over the whole team on that first Wednesday in June, however, because the returning players know the drill. The Horns are no longer splintered and playing for themselves. They’re a team that’s been to back-to-back College Football semifinals and are on the verge of playing in a national championship game.
 
Outsiders think it is all about talent, which Texas always had. But the truth is that the vulnerability shared on those Wednesdays has helped more than any training session could. 
 
“Our team knows the drill. They know what (Culture Wednesdays) mean and why they’re important,” Sarkisian said. “The younger guys are still very reserved at first and that is completely understandable, but we’ve got buy-in from the team and that’s what is important.” 

 

Something our 3 previous coaches would never do.

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Posted
On 6/4/2025 at 5:15 PM, Park Gothic said:

Tex Coulter. 

 

Edit: The list isn't really up for debate. You have to put following teams in some order - 

1899 Sewanee

1945 Army

1995 Nebraska

2001 Miami

2019 LSU

If we want to throw 2005 Texas into the mix, I won't push back. But that's not the consensus. The 5 teams listed above are the ones that everyone agrees on. 

LSU team I would argue.. Offense was great. The skill players were insane. The OL was pretty mediocre. The defense wasn’t a powerhouse. We saw that in DKR.. I don’t think they are legit comp to a team like Miami 01. Think there is some recency bias and skill position bias to that one 

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Posted
16 hours ago, Bevo said:

I’ve had about the same. I was riding my bike uphill in Red Lodge (kind of NE Yellowstone) and there was a small Moose (maybe a yearling) eating on the side of the road. I sat there for about 10minutes waiting for him to go away. Then he started to trot in my direction. I had already turned my bike sideways so I finished the turn and headed downhill. He was not scared of me in the least.

You might have missed out on a good time!!

 

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