ESPN’s College GameDay comes to Austin Saturday, and once Lee Corso, Pat McAfee, and guest prognosticator Scottie Scheffler finish their morning of sports infotainment, the evening contest between the top-ranked Texas Longhorns and number five Georgia will be called on ABC and ESPN+ by Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Holly Rowe, and Katie George. That’s the network’s usual big-game broadcast team, but it sure would have been fitting to have Joe Tessitore at the play-by-play mic.
It was Tessitore who called the Texas–Notre Dame game for ABC on September 4, 2016, in which the unranked Longhorns, coming off a second losing season under Charlie Strong, knocked off the tenth-ranked Fighting Irish in a 50–47 double-overtime thriller.
“Texas is back, folks!” Tessitore boomed after UT quarterback Tyrone Swoopes dived into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown. It was an appropriately exuberant, in-the-moment call that also felt a bit like wishful thinking—to both UT fans and UT haters.
And so it was. Texas lost three of its next four games as well as three straight that November, with a loss to Kansas just about dooming Strong’s job security. “Texas is back” became a running joke about a perpetually disappointing football program, even—especially—after UT started to show signs of life under Tom Herman.
“Longhorn Nation, we’re baaaaacccck,” quarterback Sam Ehlinger said after his 10–4 team upset Georgia in the 2019 Sugar Bowl—another appropriately exuberant, in-the-moment promise. Problem was, he and Herman couldn’t keep it. Over the next two seasons UT had a winning record but nary another major bowl appearance, and the program never came close to a championship (conference or national). By the time Texas hired Steve Sarkisian as head coach, in early 2021, “Texas is back” had passed from an ironic meme to an exhausted sports cliché—the “Houston, we have a problem” of its time.
But in 2024, the joke’s on everyone who doesn’t bleed burnt orange. Texas isn’t back. Texas is inevitable. The number one team in the country.
Yes, there’s a lot of a season left, but going into Saturday’s game against Georgia, the Longhorns are once again the national power that the program was during the best periods of the Darrell Royal and Mack Brown years. Quarterback Quinn Ewers remains in the Heisman Trophy race even after missing two games with an abdominal injury and even though his backup, Arch Manning, is a bigger household name. The Texas offense is averaging nearly 500 yards and more than forty points per game, both of which are close to the best marks in program history. And the defense is as stingy as the offense is prolific, leading the nation in both total defense (229.7 yards per game) and points allowed (a mere 38 all season, or 6.3 per game).
It doesn’t seem real, right? Sure, Sarkisian’s success has already been both demonstrable and more than incremental. The Horns had a 5–7 record in 2021 as he took over the program, and a winning record in his second season with the team. Then the Longhorns made a huge statement early last season with a road win over Alabama before stumbling against Oklahoma at the Cotton Bowl. Under Herman, Strong—or let’s face it, Brown, more years than not—that would have meant more disappointment. But the 2023 Longhorns didn’t lose another conference game and went on to claim UT’s first Big 12 title since 2009. They also returned to the national postseason for the first time since then, entering the College Football Playoff with a 12–1 record before falling to Washington in the semifinals.
But while that raised expectations for this season, several players from last year’s squad are in the NFL now. And then there was the small matter of Texas and Oklahoma joining a new conference. This was supposed to be the year to find out if Texas was ready for the SEC. Instead, it has become a year in which the other SEC teams have to get past Texas.
This Longhorns season was different from day one. In years past, even the home opener against a nonpower team like Colorado State might have gone differently: a slow start, maybe an early underwhelming lead or deficit, and finally a win that didn’t satisfy fans. But the 2024 team won that game 52–0. Meanwhile, defending national champion Michigan is far from the powerhouse they were last year, after losing head coach Jim Harbaugh and quarterback J. J. McCarthy to the NFL. The Longhorns handled them easily in Ann Arbor, winning 31–12 to take over the top spot in the Associated Press poll.
And then there was the Red River Rivalry, a game in which at least a few bumps are always expected. Instead, after falling behind 3–0 in the first quarter, UT scored 34 unanswered points, leaving Oklahoma safety Billy Bowman to passive-aggressively lament that the Sooners “gift-wrapped” the game. “We gave it to them,” he said. “They didn’t earn what they got . . .” Sure, whatever.
Before the season, Georgia was the game circled on UT fans’ calendars. It’s the biggest Longhorns game in SEC history, such as it is. The Dawgs own two of the past three national championships, have played in the SEC championship game seven of the last eight years, and have won 47 out of 50 games since 2021, with all three of those losses coming to Alabama. Even so, Georgia coach Kirby Smart maneuvered the Bulldogs past the Crimson Tide, which hasn’t won a national championship since 2020, to claim the unofficial title of college football’s perennial favorites. But now Georgia fans also have Texas circled. The Longhorns are a five-point favorite, turning the Dawgs into underdawgs for the first time since their 2021 season opener.
What’s gone right for UT is so obvious that it makes one wonder how things went wrong in Austin for so long. Above all, Sarkisian simply turned out to be the right coach—as a recruiter, as a tactician, and as a tone-setter. Of course, Sarkisian also has a quarterback (or two). In some ways it’s always that simple. When Mack Brown had Vince Young and Colt McCoy, he was a genius and the Longhorns were playing for championships. When Brown had Case McCoy and David Ash, not so much. But the bigger change Sarkisian wrought was in the trenches, where UT is back to pushing teams around on both sides of the line. Sarkisian came to Texas from the SEC, and when he arrived, he knew what it would take to win in their future conference. He has recruited with that in mind. The best players want to play in the conference that wins the most championships and gives them the best chance of playing in the NFL.
It’s already a new day for the University of Texas on the latter front. Between 2016 and 2022 the Longhorns were not producing NFL players in quality or quantity. Defensive tackle Malcom Brown, a Mack recruit, was the last Longhorns player taken in the first round of the NFL draft, in 2015, while just sixteen UT players were drafted over the ensuing seven years. Since then, the Horns have had three first-round picks and sixteen players overall selected in the last two pro drafts, with eleven of those coming in 2024.
“Now, the Longhorns look and feel like the Alabamas and Georgias of the world,” The Athletic’s Seth Emerson and Sam Khan Jr. wrote last week. That was always the goal. And yet, ironically, there’s little to no chance that Texas can replace either of those schools as college football’s next dynastic power, because college football might never see another dynasty quite like Saban’s in Tuscaloosa. The current age of name, image, and likeness (NIL) payments, super conferences, and the expanded College Football Playoff has changed the sport. Dominance will still mean winning conference championships and earning a spot in the playoff year after year, but the postseason itself will be more random, like March Madness or the early rounds of the Major League Baseball playoffs. Over the next several years, expect the College Football Playoff to generate more upsets than repeat title winners.
At the same time, the regular season—while still wildly entertaining—is less consequential. One, two, or even three losses won’t necessarily mean a top team’s season is over. If Texas loses to Georgia on Saturday it will feel like a failed test, but the Longhorns would still be favored to get through the rest of their season and snag a high seed in the playoff.
Whether or not the team gets past the Dawgs, Texas still has big games on its schedule against hyped-up historic rival Arkansas and the SEC’s surprise team, Vanderbilt—and that’s without having to face Alabama, LSU, or Tennessee in the regular season. And then there’s the matter of that school in College Station. After losing its season opener to Notre Dame, Texas A&M has made its way back into the playoff picture. That means the new college football reality of great regular season games with slightly lower stakes might produce two Longhorns versus Aggies rivalry games in consecutive weeks this year, when we’ve had no UT-A&M games since 2011. That’s what The Athletic’s Manny Navarro is predicting, with the Aggies winning on November 30 and Texas winning in the conference title game. At that point, we’d just have say it: Texas and Texas A&M are back.
