AUSTIN – Texas Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian has never been one to shy away from defending his quarterbacks.

And after his team’s 30-15 loss to Georgia on Saturday night, he continued to do just that, quickly defending starting QB Quinn Ewers for his maligned performance vs. the Bulldogs.

“I think Quinn definitely can play better,” Sarkisian said. “But I also think we need to play better around him.”

To be fair, Ewers was far from at his best on Saturday night. He turned the ball over multiple times, had some issues with hesitancy, and missed on a few key passes that could have made the difference in the game.

Sarkisian even pulled Ewers in the second quarter, hoping to refocus the third-year QB after his rough start.

However, Sarkisian was also adamant that Ewers was far from the only problem for the Longhorns on Saturday night, and that the team needs to play better around him – particularly up front and protection-wise – if they are going to be successful.

He also went as far as to call out the ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ for their misevaluations of Ewers’ performance.

“There was kind of a few different things that happened,” Sarkisian said. “The first sack… the sack fumble on the corner blitz was a communication error at the line of scrimmage. Quinn thought he was protected on the backside. Clearly, he wasn’t. So for all the Monday morning quarterbacks who say Quinn was late with the ball, That was incorrect. All right, he thought he was protected, and he wasn’t.”

“We have another one where we don’t block a mike linebacker coming off the edge. That was a running back issue. We have another one where a running back gets run over through the A gap, and we all want Quinn to step up, but the running backs on his back, he can’t step up, and then Kelvin (Banks) ends up giving up some pressure. We have another one where Cam (Williams) loses his fundamental technique, and gets wiped, and we give up a sack there. So it was kind of a variety of things.”

All fair points from Sarkisian, of course.

If your quarterback is not protected, he cannot execute the game plan to the level that fans have become accustomed to seeing from him over the last season and a half.

But if there is one positive to the way that Saturday night played out, it is that the Longhorns can now use this as a learning experience, and really learn where they need to improve going forward.

“I didn’t go into the team meeting this morning pointing the finger at one person or one thing,” Sarkisian said. “I made it a point today in our good, bad, and ugly and touched on just about every position group of where they can improve. That’s the mindset that we have to have. Everybody’s got to go out and improve this week. Everybody’s got to get back to playing our brand, our standard of football. I think that’s the message, right? It’s not about, ‘Hey, just this one thing needs to get fixed and we’re going to be okay. We’ve all got to improve, coaches included.”

Fortunately for the Longhorns, despite the loss, they still have everything they want to accomplish in front of them.

If they can build upon this loss in the same way they built off the loss to Oklahoma, they are more than likely to find themselves facing off against this same Georgia team in the SEC Championship Game.

Even if they fell there, the College Football Playoff would likely be in their future as well.

In other words, the sky is not falling. And if the Longhorns play to their expectation for the rest of the season, they will be in good shape.

“We expect to play better. We expect to play to the standard, and we will,” Sarkisian said. “As I told the team, I’d much rather get knocked down in the 6th round than get knocked out in the 12th round.”

That said, it does all boil down to quarterback play.

Yes, the players around that quarterback also need to be at their best. But if they are going to accomplish those goals, they will need Ewers to be the QB that he has been since August of 2023, and not the one they saw against Georgia on Saturday night.

And Steve Sarkisian is confident that his quarterback can answer that call.

“We’ve got a ton of respect for Quinn and a ton of confidence in Quinn,” Sarkisian said. “I think he’s gonna come out and play really good football for us the second half of the season.”