Steve Sarkisian isn't spending Texas football's bye week concocting a special plan to ensure Quinn Ewers is fresh when he returns from his abdominal strain.

That's because he put that plan into action right after Ewers went down.

"Every player, but most notably the quarterback, when he gets injured, we want to pull him in even tighter, we want to pull him in even closer," Sarkisian said at his weekly press conference Monday. "When we're at practice, Quinn is engaged. He's in every meeting talking about the game plan. Friday night before we go through the call sheet with the quarterbacks, he's talking through different things. On Saturday, he's wearing the earpiece. So we keep him engaged on that front."

This isn't the first time Sarkisian has been through this with Ewers, who missed three games in 2022 and two games last season.

As Ewers is recovering, Sarkisian said he'll spend the week evaluating the situations where Ewers looks comfortable and where he doesn't. If he plays, Sarkisian has listed 10-to-20 areas where he thinks Ewers can succeed.

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"We'll probably go in that direction if he were to play, that he's running stuff that he's had some success with throughout the week," Sarkisian said. "As opposed to saying, 'This looks like a great play design, it should work,' but either he didn't rep it because of limited reps during the week, or when he did get that rep, it didn't look so good.

"The stubborn me would still call that play. The guy that tries to step back and tries to put his players in the best position to be successful goes to his bucket of the stuff that I thought (Ewers) did well throughout the week."

That approach has worked.

When Ewers returned from injury in 2022, he threw for 289 yards and four touchdowns in a win over Oklahoma. In 2023, he rebounded by passing for 317 yards and a TD to lead Texas to a win over TCU.

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Why Steve Sarkisian ripped into Texas football QB Arch Manning

Texas fans who tuned into Sarkisian's in-game interview with the SEC Network on Saturday might have heard him use some colorful language to describe a conversation he had with backup quarterback Arch Manning, who started in Ewers' place.

"He had his own issues that I was — as I was quoted on TV — ripping his ass for," Sarkisian said.

As it turned out, a relatively small detail in the grand scheme of the game had Sarkisian worked up.

On a failed quarterback sneak in the third quarter, Sarkisian believed Manning had scored, but he got up off the ground before the officials arrived on the scene to determine whether or not he was in the end zone.

"By the time they got there, they couldn't tell whether he was in the scrum or not where he was on the field," Sarkisian said. "So I tried to explain it to him on the headset, the beauty of the headset. He almost did the same thing again, and oddly enough when the play was done, the official came to me and said 'Hey, remind Arch to stay on the ground so we can see where he's at.' So there's little things like that."

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This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Quinn Ewers injury: Inside Texas' plan to ensure QB isn't rusty upon return