Steve Sarkisian Regrets 'Poor Choice of Words' After Viral 'Basket Weaving' Dig at Ole Miss

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian took a shot at Ole Miss' academic standards earlier this month, saying "all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree."

On Tuesday he walked back those remarks, saying he was trying to speak to the differing standards in the sport when it comes to transfers.

"We have a rule at the University of Texas, we can only take 50 percent towards your degree, no matter how many hours you've completed," he told reporters. "Other schools can take all of your hours that you take. To me, that's an inequity in our sport. Those are some of the things that we have to work through. I could have used macroeconomics. I could have used engineering. It wouldn't have mattered. The class was irrelevant, and that was a poor choice of words on my part."

Ole Miss has taken some heat of late, with former head coach and new LSU leader Lane Kiffin saying earlier in May that some grandparents and parents of recruits have expressed concerns about the racial dynamics in Oxford.

As Chris Smith of Vanity Fair wrote on May 11:

Kiffin also seems willing to indirectly invoke Ole Miss's struggle to distance itself from symbols like the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and the nickname 'Ole Miss' itself. When he was coaching there, Kiffin says, top recruits would tell him, "'Hey, coach, we really like you. But my grandparents aren't letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi.' That doesn't come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus's diversity feels so great: 'It feels like there's no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that's the real world.'" (The next day Kiffin added, "I just hope [my comment] comes across respectful to Ole Miss... There are some things that I'm saying that are factual, they're not shots." The population of Baton Rouge is about 51 percent Black and 36 percent white; Oxford is about 66 percent white, 26 percent Black.)

Kiffin said on Monday he was simply relaying the opinions of some people and wasn't expressing an opinion of his own.

In the wake of that Vanity Fair article, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter posted on social media, "Kind of amazing how uncomfortable our success is making some people."