Texas coach Steve Sarkisian apologized to fans and alumni on Monday for not staying on the field during the playing of UT’s school song, “The Eyes of Texas,” following the Longhorns’Oklahoma State lost to Oklahoma State Saturday.
After Texas’ 41-34 defeat, a game in which the Longhorns squandered a 10-point third-quarter lead, only a small portion of the team stayed on the field at Boone Pickens Stadium for the playing of the song. Orangebloods.com published a photo of the group following the game.
“I owe an apology to Longhorn Nation,” Sarkisian said as he opened his weekly news conference. “I made a mistake at the end of the game in not singing ‘The Eyes of Texas’ when the game was done. It was not intentional. It was nothing to do with our players. My players just followed me down the ramp into the locker area.
“Obviously upset by the way the game ended and literally walked off the field. So I apologize to everybody for that, that’ll never happen again.”
During former coach Tom Herman’s final season as Longhorns coach in 2020, some Texas fans expressed outrage after only a few team members remained on the field for the song following a four-overtime loss to rival OklahomaIn October 2020. After the game, a tightly cropped photo of Sam Ehlinger (Texas) as the sole player for the song went viral on social networks. A Texas Monthly report for May 2021Later it was discovered that there were other players at the game.
Sarkisian was hired by Herman to replace him in January 2021. He promised that he and his team would continue to perform the song on the field.
“’The Eyes of Texas is our school song,’” Sarkisian said at his introductory news conference. “And we support that song, we’re gonna sing that song, we’re gonna sing it proudly.”
During the 2020 season the song was the topic of heated debate. Texas players witnessed intense debate following the murder of George Floyd by police. A list of demands has been released that included renaming buildings on campus, donating money to Black organizations and dropping “The Eyes of Texas,” the school song since 1902, and replacing it “with a new song without racist undertones.”
Later, Jay Hartzell, the Texas president was commissioned to create a comprehensive study into the song’s origins, published in March 2021, which concluded that it “most probably” debuted at a minstrel show in 1903 and “likely by student singers wearing blackface,” acknowledging discomfort with that aspect of its history. But the study also concluded that there was a “very low likelihood” that the song’s title originated from Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s adage “the eyes of the South are upon you.”
Hartzell said in July 2020 that the song would remain the university’s anthem but that students would no longer be forced to sing it at school events. Texas Tribune published email newsletters in 2021, obtained via an open records request, where many UT donors threatened to pull donations if players weren’t made to sing the song. Hartzell said he rejected the “extremist views” expressed in “a very small number” of “abhorrent and hateful” emails and that they bore no influence on the university’s decision making.
The song is usually played after athletic events, and the team of football players typically remains on the field until the conclusion of games.
(Photo: Tim Warner/Getty Images)
