Texas fell two wins short of its first national championship since the 2005 college football season, reaching the Playoff for the first time but dropping its Sugar Bowl matchup against Washington. Head coach Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns went all-in ahead of the 2023 campaign, acquiring hordes of talent from the transfer portal and pairing it with the stars already on campus to build a title-caliber roster. Then they did it again early in the 2024 offseason, landing the country’s No. 7-ranked transfer class. That could be a winning formula for Texas for the foreseeable future.
Even with numerous key starters departing for the NFL, Texas opened the offseason with the fourth-best odds to win next year’s national championship. Its ability to reload and place enough high-end talent around star quarterback Quinn Ewers puts coach Sarkisian within striking distance of his first title.
“Texas doesn’t have to [rebuild],” Late Kick host Josh Pate said. “Texas has entered that rarified air in our sport where they can take their best shot, and if they win a title, fine. If they lose to Washington in the semifinals, fine. They’ll have an excellent chance to do it again the next year.”
The path to college football supremacy in one way becomes easier for Texas next season and in another becomes more difficult. Playoff expansion makes access to the title game far more widespread, but the Longhorns’ move to the SEC raises the level of competition around them and creates a difficult road to the conference crown.
As one of the sport’s biggest brands, though, and with an accomplished coaching staff leading the way, Texas has everything it needs to compete at the highest level on a perennial basis.
“This could be an evergreen prediction,” said Pate. “Keep saying it. Like predicting Saban’s retirement — keep predicting it every year, because eventually you’ll get it right. Keep predicting this, because Texas is going to have a shot every year.”
There is a major difference between “has not” and “cannot,” Pate explained, and Texas falls under the former category with regards to winning a national championship under Sarkisian’s leadership.
“They had such a shot this past year,” Pate said. “Think about how perfectly it lined up for Texas. You got the semifinal in New Orleans against a team that’s halfway to Alaska, and then you got the final in Houston. It didn’t happen. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
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Playoff success in 2024 hinges, in part, on Ewers leading another potent offense. The future NFL-bound quarterback returned for a third year atop the unit, and while many of his top skill position playmakers are gone, incoming transfers and a few returnees make for another potentially explosive unit. Defensively, plenty of talent is back from a group that allowed just less than 19 points per game last season — good for 15th nationally.
