FRISCO — Texas opened January with a wrenching setback to Washington in the College Football Playoff semifinals, but there haven’t been many losses since then.

Head coach Steve Sarkisian and his staff cherry-picked six players in the transfer portal during the month, including the top available tight end in Alabama's Amari Niblack and the second-ranked receiver in Alabama's Isaiah Bond. That’s in addition to the December addition of Clemson safety Andrew Mukuba and UTSA edge rusher Trey Moore, two other highly-ranked portal players.

More: Which former Texas football players will play in the Shrine Bowl and Senior Bowl?

Overall, Texas ranks ninth in On3’s team listing of portal additions even though it's the only program in the top 10 that brought in less than 10 players.

But as Sarkisian said after his induction into the Shrine Bowl Hall of Fame on Wednesday, the portal remains a complement to recruiting.

“For us, it's pretty simple,” Sarkisian said. “We want to recruit high schools. That's what we want to do. We want to exhaust ourselves in high school, and we want to get players into our program that get in our culture, get developed by our coaches and our staff, who work their way up, and then when needed, they perform.”

Sarkisian explained his program’s portal philosophy as a targeted approach. For example, the Longhorns lost their top four receivers from 2023 — Xavier Worthy, Adonai Mitchell, Jordan Whittington and tight end Ja’Tavion Sanders — but replaced them with Niblack, Bond and two other receivers in Houston’s Matthew Golden and Oregon State’s Silas Bolden.

More: What Texas football's 2024 roster will look like after all the recent comings and goings

“What the portal provides us is an opportunity to fill immediate needs when immediate needs arise,” Sarkisian said. “We lost three really good receivers this year and a few other guys went into the portal, so we ended the season with only three scholarship receivers. So we had to sign four out of high school, then we had to go get another three in the portal just to kind of get our numbers back. So we use the portal to address needs. But again, I think everybody looks at the portal differently from team to team. That's just kind of our approach to it as we move forward.”

Those fans worried about old-fashioned high school recruiting don’t need to fret, either. Texas is ranked sixth in 247 Sports’ composite team rankings for the class of 2024, and Sarkisian and running backs coach Tashard Choice left Wednesday’s Shrine Bowl Hall of Fame festivities to immediately resume recruiting in the fertile grounds of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas' Steve Sarkisian: Portal helps but recruiting high schools still key