Texas pays for Steve Sarkisian to fly private. Here's how much that costs.

In 2023, Steve Sarkisian took the Texas Longhorns to within 12 yards of the national title game, a swatted fourth-down end zone pass away from playing Michigan. 

Despite the loss, it was still a wildly impressive 12-2 season, with wins over four top-25 teams. 

Less than two weeks later, the university rewarded Sark with a new contract extension, doubling his salary and catapulting him into the upper echelon of coaching compensation, earning over $10 million a year. 

The upgrade sparked a mini-content cycle, with even the Daily Mail covering its fine print. 

“The details of Steve Sarkisian's contract extension with Texas are sick,” wrote Bussin’ With the Boys, highlighting a clause that offered Sark up to 20 hours of private jet travel paid for by the university. 

The news cycle was, as often, overhyped a tad. All those perks were in Sarkisian’s original, $5 million-a-year contract he signed with Texas in 2021. 

And the university also offered those same luxuries to Sark’s predecessors, Tom Herman and Charlie Strong. (We will not be dusting off the microfiche at PCL and exhuming Mack Brown’s original deal). 

Both Herman’s and Strong’s contracts offered the two coaches' use of private jet hours that had been donated to the university. But Sark’s contract stipulates the school will outright pay for it. 

Here’s the relevant clause, from the 2021 contract, obtained by Extra Points. 

“Use of Private Airplane: For the period that the Head Coach is Head Football Coach, the University will provide to Head Coach twenty (20) hours per year of private aircraft flight time for Head Coach’s discretionary personal use … Such flight use shall be arranged, documented and accounted for as compensation in accordance with University and Athletics department policies and procedures.“

Which means the school tracks all its spending on Sarkisian’s private jet travel. How much did that additional perk cost Texas? 

In the past two years, over a quarter-million dollars went to Gulfstreams, LearJets, and Cessnas.  

Invoices released to FOIAball show that in 2024, Sarkisian used 17 hours and 23 minutes of his allotted flight time, which cost the school almost $141,000. 

In 2025, so far, Sark is through 13 of his contractually offered 20 hours, with a tab of almost $118,000.

Not only are the invoices public records, so too are the flight details, showing just how and where Sarkisian jetted off to.

In May 2024, Sark and another passenger took a LearJet 75 to New York City for a couple days, flying into Teterboro. It was perhaps to attend his daughter’s college graduation, which occurred in the city around those dates. 

That round-trip flight cost $45,676, one of the more expensive trips in the documents. 

In July 2024, Sark took two more flights, flying one way on a Citation Latitude to Los Angeles at a price of $22,900.

And on July 4th, he left Los Angeles in the cushy leather seats of a Citation X, making a two-night stop to Tallahassee, then popping over to Boca Raton for another few days before returning to Austin. 

That cross-country crisscross put the school back $72,268. 

In 2025, Sark took an interesting January flight from Austin to Los Angeles, flying with two other passengers. In L.A., one got off, and the jet, on the ground for only an hour and fifteen minutes, flew back to Austin, a $52,000 spend for what amounted to an extremely quick pit stop. 

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It was probably Sark who got off the plane, the flight coming a couple weeks after Texas lost to Ohio State in the college football semifinals. Two weeks after that flight landed in Los Angeles, Sarkisian took another flight from Los Angeles, this time on a Gulfstream G-IV,  back to Austin.

That two-and-a-half-hour flight wound up costing $36,000. A few days later, the Texas Longhorns’ Instagram welcomed Sarkisian back to Austin, posting “good to see ya @steve.sarkisian,” with a photo of him sitting courtside at a men’s basketball game. 

The last came at the end of February, when the school dropped $29,429 for a two-day, round-trip flight to Atlanta on a Citation CJ4.

All the flights were sourced through a third-party travel firm, Anthony Travel, frequently used by numerous college football programs. They were booked on Principal Aviation, which describes itself as “your global network of meticulously vetted private jet aircraft.”

Sark flew on Principal Aviation’s Super Mid class—which provides eight-seat jets with reclining leather seats—when he took his two most expensive trips.

Only on one leg did he fly a bougie Gulfstream IV, a plane that comes with its own shower. 

Private airline travel as a coaching perk has exploded in recent years, with numerous Division I coaches having that language inserted into their contracts. In some, the hours are even going up. When Matt Rhule signed with Nebraska in 2023, his contract stipulated 50 hours of private flight time, more than double Sark’s deal. 

Those records, requested of Nebraska, should be coming soon.

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Steve Sarkisian image via Texas Longhorns/YouTube; Gulfstream image via Kentaro IEMOTO/Flickr