The roster management braintrust of head coach Steve Sarkisian and general manager Brandon Harris retained key players and addressed key areas of need.
“We’re not the only team in the NCAA that is going through this portal situation right now. You can’t name a team right now that doesn’t have a player that they wish didn’t go in. We understand all it and we all understand fan favorites. There will be other favorites,” new California Golden Bears general manager Ron Riviera said on Monday as Cal was decimated by spring transfer portal entries.
But it is possible to name a team with non-impactful entries in the NCAA transfer portal during the window that closes on Friday — the Texas Longhorns.
Barring any surprise last-minute entries, the four departures from the Forty Acres this spring were not particularly significant, a group that includes Freddie Dubose, a redshirt freshman wide receiver on the program’s roster fringe who was already recruited over, Malik Agbo, a reserve redshirt junior offensive lineman who wasn’t going to impact the two-deep depth chart, Bert Auburn, a redshirt senior kicker whose late-season collapse effectively ended his career at Texas, and Michael Kern, a sophomore punter who was going to back up a much more experienced player this season.
Considering the landscape of college football, roster retention has never been more important — nor more difficult — than in an era with two unrestricted free agency windows every year, as noted by former Texas wide receivers coach Brennan Marion, now in his first season as the head coach at Sacramento State.
Retaining your best guys needs to be celebrated by media just as much as changing schools does. The ability to keep starters & stars is just as big for a university as acquiring new talent. Many schools struggling bc they let great coaches & players go everyone is not disposable!
— Coach Marion (@BrennanMarion4) April 21, 2025
The ugly departure of quarterback Nico Iamaleava from Tennessee was a high-profile illustration of current roster retention difficulties and stands in stark contrast to the utter lack of drama surrounding Arch Manning, perhaps the single most valuable player in the country from an NIL standpoint.
So while the ability to retain players currently on the roster has flown under the radar for Texas, that’s in part because head coach Steve Sarkisian and general manager Brandon Harris did such a flawless job of devising a plan to address remaining roster needs and executed it perfectly.
The only minor blemish was hosting Stanford transfer EDGE David Bailey to add high-level depth, but Bailey predictably chose more money and more available playing time at Texas Tech.
Otherwise, Texas was able to land Stanford transfer wide receiver Emmett Mosley, Cal transfer tight end Jack Endries, Syracuse transfer defensive tackle Maraad Watson, Maryland transfer defensive tackle Lavon Johnson, and Texas State transfer kicker Mason Shipley.
In Mosley’s one season at Stanford, he recorded 48 receptions for 525 receiving yards and six touchdowns in nine games, which ranked second on the team in receptions and yards and tied for the team lead in touchdowns. The 525 receiving yards notched by Mosley were the most by a true freshman for the Cardinal since Richard Sherman had 581 receiving yards in 2006.
Mosley’s best game came in a win over a ranked Louisville team when he caught 13 passes for 168 yards and three touchdowns.
“Emmett Mosley is a guy that we were recruiting hard going into his senior season. He was high on our board. We had high hopes for him. We had a great relationship with he and his family. He ended up injuring his knee before his senior season and we kind of backed off of it, to his credit, man, he worked his tail off, got himself healthy and had a really, really solid freshman year there at Stanford,” Sarkisian said.
So when Mosley went into the portal after the Cardinal terminated head coach Troy Taylor, Sarkisian and wide receivers coach Chris Jackson thought he was a “natural fit.”
“He’s got experience, but yet he’s a younger player to fill the void in that room. He’s got a really good head on his shoulders, great character, great work ethic, so we’re excited about him,” Sarkisian said.
With the departures of Gunnar Helm and Juan Davis, Texas has little returning experience in the Jeff Banks’ tight end room, leaving a glaring roster need for a proven player.
“Jack is a guy we were really looking for, a tight end that could be an every-down player, a guy that could be an in-line blocker, could be a guy that was utilized split out, that ran a multitude of routes, that had the speed to separate to create explosive plays,” Sarkisian said.
As a redshirt sophomore, the 6’4, 240-pounder recorded 56 receptions for 623 yards and two touchdowns with a 57-yard touchdown catch against Miami and an impressive performance against Pitt with eight receptions for 116 yards and a touchdown. Endries set his career high with nine receptions against North Carolina State while going over 100 yards for the second time as a collegian.
“When you watch his tape at Cal, he played for three different coordinators in three years there, so he was used in a lot of different ways. So when you really put the tape together over three years, he kind of fits all the things we ask of a tight end to do here, and I felt like we needed a veteran presence in that room,” Sarkisian said.
Watson fills a need that is difficult to address in the portal — he’s a premium player with three years of eligibility remaining at a super-premium position. Just as impressive as securing Watson is that Texas was able to do so without Watson taking any other visits despite pursuit from high-profile programs like Georgia, Ohio State, and Tennessee.
Landing Watson with so little drama almost surely came with a high price tag attached, likely in the seven figures.
“We had a kid just leave us, d-tackle, I love him,” Syracuse head coach Fran Brown said in an appearance on the Audible podcast. “He is legit. He was a good football player for us. He did a good job. When they said the amount of money they offered him, I said, ‘Why the fuck you talking to me? Call them if they’re giving you that. Hit them up, man.’ Everybody, they all doing that cheating. The number he told me, for me to keep him here, that’s cheating him and his family with what they can have.”
Johnson’s recruitment certainly had more drama. After Johnson visited the Forty Acres last week, reports emerged on Friday morning that he’d signed with North Carolina. By Friday evening, however, Johnson sided with Texas after all in a surprising reversal.
Following the entrance of Auburn into the portal, the Longhorns needed to find a proven kicker and accomplished that task a day after Auburn announced his intentions to enter the portal. Texas State transfer Mason Shipley had visited Oklahoma, but sided with home-state Texas last Friday, bringing an 88.6-percent career field-goal percentage with him to Austin, including 15-of-15 in 2023 and a career long of 60 yards.
By retaining a high-level focus on high school recruiting, the Longhorns reserve portal recruitments for important roster needs, which narrows the focus during the winter and spring windows, allowing Texas to identify and target the right fits from cultural and talent perspective.
Sarkisian remains invested in that process as the final decision maker, something he says he doesn’t want to give up, but his responsibilities as head coach and play caller do require him to delegate to his personnel staff, led by general manager Brandon Harris.
“Ultimately, I’ve either got to make the decision or I’ve got okay these decisions, because I’m the one that’s ultimately responsible for them, and so I try to look at it from that frame of mind,” Sarkisian said.
A quarterback at LSU and North Carolina, Harris was retained by Sarkisian when he arrived in early 2021 after two years as a quality control assistant. The rapport between Sarkisian and Harris was good enough for the new Texas head coach to immediately elevate Harris to Director of Recruiting, a role vacated by Bryan Carrington, who left for USC to become an assistant running backs coach in his ultimately-successful efforts to land an on-field role.
“Brandon’s a guy that when we came on here four and a half years ago, was really in kind of a grunt role. His name wasn’t in the news, he wasn’t making a whole lot of money,” Sarkisian said this week.
In that role, Harris helped Texas land the No. 5 recruiting class in 2022, the No. 3 class in 2023, and the No. 6 class in 2024 before the changes in NIL and the portal necessitated a more NFL-style approach to personnel and roster management. In response, Sarkisian created the general manager role and promoted Harris into it.
“Over time, like most people in our organization, you earn trust, right? And you earn trust by doing your job really well. In his time here, he’s kind of grown in the organization with more and more responsibilities. I’ve got a lot of faith in Brandon that he’s going to execute his job really well,” Sarkisian said.
After years of working with Harris in recruiting, the two have a high level of alignment in roster building.
“I love to recruit. I love building our roster. This is something that I take a lot of pride in is that I think Brandon and I are aligned really well on the vision for what we want our roster to look like, and numbers at certain positions, and body types and character, and all those things,” Sarkisian said.
Harris is supported by Director of Player Personnel John Michael Jones, a longtime Texas staffer who joined the program in late 2013 and was responsible for leading the walk-on program that produced eventual scholarship contributors like Luke Brockermeyer, Jett Bush, and Michael Taaffe. Last year, Jones took over the role formerly held by Billy Glasscock, an early hire by Sarkisian who left to become the general manager at Ole Miss.
“I trust those guys to assemble things to put in front of me so that we can make really good decisions on on the people we bring into our program, whether they’re high school, whether they’re college transfer portal guys, whether it’s how we execute our publicity rights and sharing that with our players, and balancing our roster and balancing our books, because that’s all part of what we do now. Brandon is very bright — the young guy’s got a bright future, but he does really good job for us,” Sarkisian said.
The proof is not just in the results, but also in how smoothly they come about.