Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns pulled off their ugliest win of the season against the Kentucky Wildcats on the road. Mark Stoops’ Wildcats went toe-to-toe with the Longhorns all the way to overtime until the No. 21 Longhorns barely escaped with a 45-yard field goal at Kruger Field. Despite the win, Steve Sarkisian isn’t happy about it—and for good reason.

The game was downright ugly for Texas. On October 18th, Steve Sarkisian hopped onto a podium right after the game and started calling out everything that went wrong with today’s game against Kentucky. Steve Sarkisian expressed frustration about his team’s inability to recover fumbles: “The ball was on the ground 4 different times tonight, and I’m still trying to figure out how we didn’t recover a single one.” Apart from that, the defense was on par.

Even though they gave up 395 yards on defense, they only let Kentucky score one touchdown and stepped up when it counted. Their biggest moment came in overtime, when they stopped Kentucky right at the goal line and kept them from winning — which set up Shipley’s big play to seal the game.

Steve Sarkisian addressed the offensive mistakes: “We have to get out of our own way offensively. The self inflicted wounds. I am proud of the team tonight for winning, but we have a lot of specific areas we need to get to work on come Monday.” Even though they won, Coach Sarkisian knew the offense made a lot of mistakes, or “self-inflicted wounds” — things like penalties, dropped passes, or missed assignments that hurt their own drives. The Longhorns offense put up one of the worst performance under Steve Sarkisian era. The Longhorns only managed a total of 179 yards. That should be enough to give you an idea of how ugly the game was.

And also doubled down their offense. “When you play in 3rd and long, then you lose the flow of the game and the rhythm of the game. I think we missed some opportunities in the run game to be better.” Texas only rushed for 47 yards. Despite Arch Manning‘s rough outing, Steve Sarkisian gave props to his gunslinger’s mindset: “The competitor in him, he’s grinding it out. Everything’s going on…He’s running the ball. He’s fighting. He’ll play better, but as I said, we need to play better around him.” Arch Manning added another poor performance to his career compilation, going 12-of-27 for 132 yards and zero touchdowns. The Longhorns have a long way to go from here.

The real culprit on the Texas offense

We all know that Longhorns’ offense has been struggling, and contrary to popular belief; Arch Manning is not the problem, at-least to some extent. It’s the offensive line. Against Kentucky, the Longhorns barely won 16-13. The line gave up three sacks and seven quarterback hurries, making it really hard for Manning to throw. That’s like almost half of Kentucky’s total sacks for the whole season. Makes sense right? With so little time in the pocket, Manning couldn’t run the offense properly.

Look, their running game isn’t any better, but the offensive line is holding them back from tapping into their unknown potential. The Longhorns averaged only 1.7 yards per carry on 28 attempts, much less than Kentucky’s season average of 3.9 yards per rush. Without strong blocking, the team couldn’t find gaps on the play, even though Coach Steve Sarkisian wanted them to run the ball more to help open up other plays. When Manning did get time, he could make plays, averaging 11 yards per completion, but the offensive line didn’t give him enough chances.

This game shows how important the offensive line is for Texas. Last week, they played well against Oklahoma, but against Kentucky, they struggled badly. If they don’t improve their blocking and communication, the Longhorns could have more close games that are hard to win.