Texas is 2-0, ranked No. 1 in the country, and dealing with a problem that has nothing to do with UTSA.
Steve Sarkisian confirmed at his Thursday press conference that co-defensive coordinator and inside linebackers coach Johnny Nansen has been charged with misdemeanor driving while intoxicated.
“We are obviously disappointed, but that’s all I have on that at the time,” Sarkisian told reporters.
What we know about the arrest
Nansen, 52, was arrested Wednesday night after Austin police responded to a three-vehicle wreck around 9 p.m. He was one of the drivers involved. Officers reported observing multiple clues of impairment during standard field sobriety testing.
It has not been made public whether Nansen submitted to a breath test, and the account of the arrest does not indicate which driver was at fault in the crash.
Nansen was not at practice Thursday. Sarkisian said his status for Saturday night’s home game against UTSA has not been determined, and the school has not announced any discipline.
A relationship going back two decades
Nansen is not a peripheral hire on this staff. He and Sarkisian have been working together, on and off, for nearly 20 years.
Nansen was at Washington from 2009 through 2013, overlapping with Sarkisian’s run as head coach there, then followed him to USC in 2014 as associate head coach and special teams coordinator. He stayed in Los Angeles through 2019, spent two seasons at UCLA, then ran Arizona’s defense in 2022 and 2023. Sarkisian brought him to Austin on January 6, 2024, and this is his third season with the Longhorns.
That history matters here. This is a coach the head coach personally recruited three separate times, which makes whatever comes next considerably harder than a routine staff decision.
The worst possible week for it
Texas moved to the top spot in both the AP and Coaches polls this week after a 24-23 comeback win at home over then-No. 1 Ohio State on September 12. It is the earliest the Longhorns have held the No. 1 regular-season ranking since 1965.
Being No. 1 means every story about your building gets amplified, and this is the second one in seven days. Sarkisian also spent Thursday walking back the viral moment where he cut short a postgame interview with ESPN’s Holly Rowe, saying he wished he had shown more patience.
Those two things are not remotely the same. One is a bad look that fuels a week of memes. The other is a criminal charge stemming from a multi-car crash on a public road.
Sarkisian was careful not to get ahead of the legal process, which is the correct posture from a compliance standpoint and also the standard posture of every program buying itself time to gauge public reaction. Nobody at Texas is going to say anything definitive until the facts are locked down.
The on-field impact is probably smaller than people assume. UTSA arrives in Austin at 2-0, but Texas has enough defensive staff depth to cover one non-conference game without its co-coordinator on the headset.
The real question is what happens in week four and beyond, and whether a head coach who just climbed to No. 1 for the first time wants this attached to a championship run. “That’s all I have” is a one-time answer. He will be asked again Saturday night.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.