Steve Sarkisian commended the defense - headlined by star edge rusher Colin Simmons - on their competitiveness at fall camp this week.
Junior defensive end Colin Simmons was named to the 2026 "Freaks List" by The Athletic writer Bruce Feldman, who ranks the best athletic specimens each college football preseason.
For Texas Longhorns observers, Simmons' place - ranking No. 10 overall in this year's group - shouldn't come as a surprise.
"The 2025 First-Team All-SEC pick, the conference’s sack leader (12) in 2025, has 21 sacks in his first two seasons at UT — the most ever by a Longhorn in his first two years on campus," Feldman notes.
"At 6-3, 246, with just nine percent body fat, Simmons is pound-for-pound the most explosive player on the Longhorns’ roster, according to Texas’ Director of Player Performance Torre Becton."
Simmons, Feldman notes, completed a 335-pound power clean exercise with a bar velocity of 1.4 meters per second, which Becton judges as an "incredibly rare" feat of force. Feldman also points to Simmons' leap as "world-class explosiveness and reactive strength."
On the field, that power translates to speed, as well. Simmons clocked a greater-than-20-mile-per-hour sprint in full pads during the Oklahoma rivalry games last season.
With NFL aspirations, Simmons enters the 2026 training camp as the unquestioned leader of Steve Sarkisian and Will Muschamp's defense in Austin.
Sarkisian began his media availability on Monday preaching about the core physical components of what he's seen at camp thus far.
"It's been very physical," the head coach said. "Give our players a lot of credit on both sides of the ball for playing with a level of physicality that is needed for us to be the type of team that we want to become."
Sarkisian says his team takes pride in being fast across all phases of the team, both physically and cognitively. Practicing in the Texas heat, Sark says, allows for those factors to callous a team facing as tough a schedule as the Longhorns are.
"I want to commend our team - I think they're working extremely hard," Sarkisian added. "As I said, this has been a very physical camp. ... The balance of our roster, the competitive nature of our practices is showing up, and that's a good thing for us."
And it's a good thing when one of the "freaks" of college football is at the center of it all.
