AUSTIN — The Texas offense struggled for the entirety of its matchup against Kentucky on Saturday night, and it was nothing new, as quarterback Arch Manning played poorly and play-calling from head coach Steve Sarkisian was questionable.

This has been an ongoing issue for the Longhorns all season, even in their wins. Much of the blame has been thrown at Manning, but the issue is rooted far deeper, in almost every facet of the offense.

The offensive line has not played well, the tight ends have not been utilized, receivers have dealt with drops and poor scheming, the running backs have also not played well and have gone underutilized, and Manning has just not been great.

Sarkisian spoke about what the offense needs to do to get going in future games.

“We’ve got to quit the self-inflicted wounds,” Sarkisian said. “You guys see it when there’s penalties. Granted, we do some things that are obviously very frustrating. We get a hold the first play of overtime. We get a false start in the fourth quarter when we’re trying to put the game away. We catch a pass with a minute to go, and we go out of bounds without getting the first down, where we could have stayed in bounds and made them use the other timeout. There’s little things we’re not doing offensively. We miss open throws. Clearly, I’m not calling enough stuff for our guys to feel good about what we’re doing.”

Play-calling has been concerning at times, but the self-inflicted wounds have also hurt plenty. Overall, the offense needs to go back and take a look in the mirror and figure out what the problem is before the season truly goes downhill.

“At the end of the day, we can have high scoring games, and I could air it out and lose,” Sarkisian said. “If our style of game and our style of play is we’re going to play hard-nosed football, we’re going to play great on defense and great on special teams, we need to be more efficient on offense with the opportunities that we get. That’s what we need to do offensively. We need to minimize the self-inflicted wounds and become more efficient. We weren’t efficient enough.”

The Longhorns will now have to hit the road again to face a decent Mississippi State team on Saturday in an environment that can get rowdy, so they’ll need to be sure that they root out the issues and clean up before they head to Starkville.