Texas Longhorns’ David Gbenda details postgame speech following loss to Georgia

Throughout the season, Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian has preached about how many leaders he has seen on his team and has been able to confidently say that several players are taking responsibility in the locker room.

After Saturday’s tough home loss to Georgia, a voice of reason was needed more than ever, and senior linebacker David Gbenda knew what he had to do.

“I just felt like it needed to be said and a positive message needed to be conveyed. You know, that wouldn’t shape our season,” Gbenda said during Monday’s media release. “We left out a lot. I just want the team to know that we still have everything ahead of us.” [and] I have to keep working day after day.”

Gbenda is now in his sixth year at Texas and came into the game as a freshman in 2019. He has experienced firsthand the harsh ups and downs of college football. He was there when the Longhorns went from an 8-5 record in his first year to a 7-3 season that was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a disappointing 5th-place debut in the Steve Sarkisian era :7 results came in 2021.

Gbenda said the fact that he has faced this adversity throughout his career has helped him better understand what it takes to recover and re-evaluate the rest of the season, especially with such a fresh squad. who really wants to improve.

“It helps a lot because in these difficult situations you learn a lot about people and your team. And I firmly believe that this team is different,” said Gbenda. “We are talented and the sky is the limit for us. So when I look back from the past to the present, I just understand that this wouldn’t define our season. It helped us sort of formulate a plan for how to really bounce back and adapt, and areas where you can clean up and just help others and pick them up in other places, in contrast to before when we were just experiencing this and trying to get out of this rut. “

For the younger players on the field, the game against Georgia was a relatively new experience, as it was the third loss for Texas in the last two seasons. Gbenda mentioned that while the underclassmen were hurting over the loss, he took it as a sign of how determined they were to maximize the team’s full potential and saw an opportunity to use this as a teaching experience.

“Our job as a team is to just let them know what it’s about and guide them. And they’ve made it really hard and are just now being introduced to this culture and understanding what’s important. So they take it hard.” “That’s a great sign too because it just shows how great we want to be as a team, from top to bottom,” Gbenda said. “We just have to show them the way to do everything on and off the field, and that means dealing with a situation like this and showing them how to deal with it and how to kind of recover and adapt.”

Gbenda hopes to help his teammates pull off a big comeback against Vanderbilt this weekend as the Longhorns continue to excel in the SEC and remain in the top five of the latest AP Poll.

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