We’ve watched Texas blow a lead before. We hadn’t watched one blow up into an open letter from a former team captain asking the head coach to stop calling plays, not until Saturday, when No. 7 Texas let a 17-3 second-quarter lead turn into a 27-24 home loss to an unranked Florida team playing a quarterback making his first career start. And the loudest verdict on the way out of Austin wasn’t aimed at the sophomore who fumbled the game away in the final minutes. It was aimed at the man holding the play sheet.
Texas led 17-3 in the second quarter, per ESPN’s box score, before Steve Sarkisian called a fourth-and-1 run from midfield that got stuffed for a one-yard loss. Florida scored 24 unanswered points after that, took the lead early in the fourth quarter, and closed it out when Arch Manning was sacked and fumbled on Texas’s last possession. Final: 27-24, Florida, over a team playing a first-time starter.
Manning’s own stat line reads better than the result. He finished 14 of 20 for 173 yards and a touchdown, and down 27-17 he nearly saved it himself: a 62-yard completion to Emmett Mosley V on fourth-and-6, then a 9-yard touchdown pass to Cam Coleman that cut it to 27-24 with 4:21 left, a sequence Bleacher Report walked through in detail as his best stretch of the afternoon. Then, on the drive that would have tied or won it, he was sacked, the ball came loose, and Florida ran out the clock.
Sarkisian didn’t dodge the fourth-and-1 call afterward. “Not very good design. Not very good execution,” he said postgame, before widening the self-scout considerably: “We’re going to evaluate everything. We’re going to evaluate everything from an offensive perspective. Part of that is play-calling.” That’s a notable shift from a coach who, per the official Texas Longhorns recap, was asked after last week’s Oklahoma loss whether he’d consider handing off play-calling and answered with two words: “Not a chance.”
That swing from confident denial to institutional self-audit would have been a strange enough story by itself. Then came Tillman Holloway.
Holloway, a former Texas team captain and All-American by his own description in the letter, posted an open letter to Sarkisian early Sunday morning that did more to define the loss than the actual press conference had. “Fourth-and-1 at midfield today. Fourth-and-2 in the fourth quarter. We got stopped both times, and Florida scored a touchdown after each one,” he wrote, laying out the box score before he got personal. “Coach Sark, I played for Texas. I was a team captain and an All-American on the Forty Acres. I love this program, so writing this hurts.” Then the ask: “Please hand the play sheet to someone else.”
(He also made a point of saying, twice, that he wasn’t calling for Sarkisian’s job: “I’m not calling for your job. Not even close.” That’s a harder letter to wave off than the usual anonymous message-board thread.)
Holloway says he went back through the official play-by-play himself and found that Texas has converted just 4 of 11 third-and-short or fourth-and-short tries across its two losses this year. That’s his count, not an independently verified stat, but it’s the type of detail an outsider doesn’t normally bother compiling. A fan yelling about play-calling on social media usually hasn’t pulled the box score first. A former captain apparently has.
The historical case in the letter holds up, too. Holloway noted that the last head coach to call his own offense and still win a national title did it in the 2013 season, and that no champion in the College Football Playoff era has repeated the trick since. Ryan Day handed the play sheet to Chip Kelly in 2024 and won it all. Sarkisian himself won a ring at Alabama calling plays for Nick Saban, not as the man making every call himself. “You already have Kyle Flood with the coordinator title,” Holloway wrote. “Let him call it, or bring in someone you trust.”
(Two coaches have now won titles after giving the calls to someone else in the last three cycles. The argument for doing it all yourself gets harder to make with a straight face every year that pattern holds.)
Holloway posted the full letter on X, and it was closing in on two thousand likes before most of Austin had finished its coffee.
https://x.com/TEXASOL61/status/2111617572130992385
A few lines later, he dropped something that had nothing to do with play-calling and everything to do with why people believed the rest of it: “Earl Campbell ran for 1,744 yards in ‘77. Ricky Williams left with 6,279.” That’s not an argument so much as a résumé, and it’s the type of thing you only reach for if you actually bled for the program once.
None of this excuses Manning. The fumble was his, and Manning’s Heisman odds have already taken a hit in a season that opened with him as the presumptive favorite. But a sophomore making a mistake with 4:21 left in a one-score home game is a different category of problem than a staff that keeps calling the same high-risk fourth-and-short in the same type of spot. One is a player learning in real time. The other is a pattern.
Sarkisian has had an awkward relationship with the broadcast spotlight before, and on Saturday it turned on his quarterback instead. CBS analyst Damien Harris, a former Alabama running back, spent the postgame show deciding Manning didn’t deserve his own last name anymore. “Until further notice, I’m just gonna call him Arch,” Harris said. “Because if you take away the last name, you have a below-average quarterback. That’s what he is, and that’s how we need to evaluate him moving forward.” He kept going from there: “He does not see the football field well. He does not deliver a pretty football… Mechanics don’t look good. Game management doesn’t look good. Nothing about Arch Manning’s game looks good.”
That’s two separate voices, a former captain and the coach himself, landing on the same diagnosis. The third showed up uninvited on national television and landed somewhere else entirely.
Harris’s read will dominate sports radio this week because it’s the simplest and the angriest one available. (My dad still won’t forgive any coach who punts, or runs it up the gut, on fourth-and-1 from midfield; Packers blood runs that deep in our family, and he’d have hated this specific call too.) Stack Harris’s take next to Sarkisian’s own postgame self-scout and Holloway’s letter, though, and the simplest read doesn’t hold up. I think the pile-on on Manning is diagnosing the wrong patient. A below-average quarterback doesn’t complete 14 of 20 passes and engineer a near game-tying drive against a defense that had already stuffed two fourth downs that same day. A play-caller who won’t trust fourth-and-short in a one-score game, twice, against a defense playing with nothing to lose, is a specific and repeatable problem. Sarkisian admitted to that one Saturday night. Holloway spent his Sunday morning writing about that same one. It was sitting in the box score before anybody added an opinion to it.
None of that guarantees Sarkisian actually changes anything. He said “not a chance” once already, and the instinct to protect your own program from outside pressure, even well-meaning pressure from someone who wore the jersey, is a real one. But the pressure now has a name and a face attached to it instead of just a hashtag, and that tends to travel further than the usual noise does. The next time Texas faces a short-yardage fourth down in a one-score game, we’ll find out whether Sarkisian was actually listening to his own quote, or just saying what the moment required.
