Steve Sarkisian addresses 'basket weaving' comments at Houston Touchdown Club

Last Tuesday, USA Today published a detailed interview with Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian, heavily emphasizing what Sarkisian believes are the biggest challenges to being a head coach in the current college football era.

[Sign up for Inside Texas for $1 and get THREE MONTHS of Premium Access!]

Among the criticisms of the College Football Playoff committee, the lack of enforcement of rules from the NCAA and the unbalanced standards from school to school, Sarkisian made a point to bring up the inequities in academic expectations from program to program.

“At Texas, we will only take 50% of a player’s academic credit hours,” Sarkisian told USA Today’s Matt Hayes. “You may be a semester from graduating, but you’re going all the way back to 50% if you play here and want a degree. But at Ole Miss, they can take you. All you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.”

At the University of Texas, student-athletes must take two-thirds of their classes in person, and transfers and recruits alike are expected to complete at least 60 semester hours of coursework in residence to receive a bachelor’s degree.

But those aren’t the same expectations as at other institutions, like Ole Miss, which Sarkisian noted in that statement.

Of course, Sarkisian’s comments, especially around ‘basket weaving’, made traction around the country, sparking debate and criticism of the head coach.

Sarkisian had a chance to address the comments for the first time in front of the press at the Touchdown Club, the Houston chapter of the National Football Foundation.

“We were talking about the inequalities in college football… the only reason the Ole Miss thing came up is because two of my best friends were there, Lane Kiffin and Pete Golding,” Sarkisian said.

Sarkisian coached with Kiffin at USC in the early 2000s, and with Golding at Alabama in 2019-20, both of whom were on the Ole Miss staff in 2025. Kiffin has since moved on to LSU, but Golding is now the head coach of the Rebels.

“We know when we would compete with them that they were able to take players and then they were able to graduate. I probably shouldn’t have used basket weaving as my example for the class. Macro economics, I don’t give a damn,” Sarkisian joked. “Yoga, we have yoga at UT. Like the class part of it was irrelevant. The point I was trying to make is at UT, you have to complete half of your degree at the University of Texas, 60 hours, you have to do those 60 hours in UT to get a degree from the University of Texas. At a school like Ole Miss, referencing that way, they can take one class and get a degree, maybe that one class is basket weaving, maybe that one class is macroeconomics. I don’t know, statistics, irrelevant. My point is that this was one of the inequalities and discrepancies that we deal with in college athletics. We are not the NFL, where everything is standardized and everything is the same. We all operate under different contracts.”

Sarkisan made it clear that the class itself was not important, though he did find humor in the basket weaving reference throughout his presser and luncheon.

What he most wanted to point out was the fact that there are certain players Sarkisian is unable take in the portal, given the academic requirements at Texas, standards that aren’t in play at Ole Miss or other schools around the nation.

This was only emphasized this offseason, when Clemson coach Dabo Swinney claimed Ole Miss staff recruited linebacker Luke Ferrelli while he was in class, despite having just transferred from Cal.

Ferrelli would not have been eligible to make that kind of move to Texas, at least not as easily, given their stricter standards regarding academics.

Sarkisian was preaching equal standards in the college football world, from strength of schedule to academics. The weavers just so happened to catch a stray.