Steve Sarkisian just told four of his own guys, by name, on national radio, that they were the price of better ones. Not with a private meeting. Not with a carefully worded release. He sat with Paul Finebaum and turned the roster into a salary-cap spreadsheet, and I felt that old Casino knot form under my ribs the second the clip hit. Ace Rothstein watching the whole operation flip while the guys who built it get walked out the door.
Sarkisian explained that to bring in new talent like Cam Coleman, Hollywood Smothers, Raleek Brown, and Mike Masunas, they had to part ways with players such as DeAndre Moore, Parker Livingstone, Tre Wisner, and CJ Baxter, framing these departures as necessary to create ‘cap space’ for the new additions.
That is not coach-speak. That is a general manager clearing space before free agency. And the internet lost its mind exactly the way you expect when someone says the quiet part with the microphone still hot.
Loyalty Died the Second the Cap Got Real
I keep hearing the same screech from rival accounts and the usual moralizers: Sark dumped his high school soldiers for mercenaries. Come to Texas and get purged the minute someone shinier walks through the portal. Great recruiting pitch, Coach. Except those four were not martyrs. They were replacement-level pieces on a 10-3 team that missed the playoff after everyone penciled them in.
Moore put up 77 catches, 988 yards, and 11 scores over two seasons as a starter and is now at Colorado. Livingstone gave them 29 grabs for 516 yards and six touchdowns as a redshirt freshman and bolted for Oklahoma with a “Doubt me now” post. Wisner ran for 1,661 yards and eight scores as a two-year starter and landed at Florida State. Baxter, the former Day 1 bell-cow, managed 196 yards and zero touchdowns last year after the injury merry-go-round and is at Kentucky. Texas lost more than 1,500 yards and 17 touchdowns of receiver production alone. They replaced it with the top of the portal board and 22 total additions, the most of the Sarkisian era.
Sources close to the program say at least a couple of those exits were valuation fights, not pure cuts. Player wants X. Texas has them at Y. Handshake, best of luck. That is not a betrayal. That is the market. Moore answered with three yawning emojis. Fair. Feelings got hurt. The scoreboard does not care.
Sark did not hide from it. “There were some tough decisions to make but we made them… and I think we can all agree we’re better around Arch Manning today than we were a year ago at this time.” He is not wrong. The duty is to the program and the quarterback who is supposed to deliver the first real Texas title in a generation, not to the emotional comfort of every high school signee who under-delivered relative to the new money on the table.
The Godfather Never Kept Fredo on the Payroll for Old Times
People want it both ways. They want national championships and they want the 1990s loyalty theater where you ride with the guys who got you there even when the tape says they are getting cooked. College football does not work like that anymore. Revenue sharing sits around twenty million and climbing. NIL is real. The portal is the draft and free agency smashed together. Sark is just the first blue-blood coach willing to narrate the transaction out loud instead of hiding behind “mutual decision” language.
I have watched enough of these cycles to know the pattern. The same accounts screaming about no loyalty will be the first ones demanding Sark’s head if Arch is throwing to the old group and Texas is sitting home in December again. Loyalty to the individuals on the roster cannot outweigh loyalty to the roster itself. That is the job. You field the best team the cap allows. Everything else is nostalgia cosplay.
The system is broken and everyone in it is just trying to win the next Saturday. Sark looked at the board, saw better options at the positions that matter around Manning, and made the cold call. That is not callous. That is competent.
The stomach punch is not that he said it. The stomach punch is that he is right, and half the sport is still pretending the old code still applies. It does not. The Longhorns are better today than they were a year ago because he treated the roster like a pro team instead of a family reunion. If that scares the next four-star into choosing somewhere softer, so be it. Titles do not care about your feelings. Neither does the cap.
