Following his team’s win over previously unbeaten Texas A&M on Nov. 28, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian lobbied as hard as he could for the Longhorns to get in the College Football Playoff, touting their wins and overall resume.
But when the Playoff field was revealed on Sunday during the selection show, Texas was hardly mentioned, not even making the bracket graphic as one of the first two teams out (the Longhorns were the third team out, behind Notre Dame and BYU).
After two consecutive trips to the CFP, the Longhorns entered the 2025 season with national championship expectations as the No. 1 team in both major polls and a quarterback, Arch Manning, who was the preseason Heisman Trophy favorite. But a 9-3 record kept them out of the tournament, and instead, they’re now headed to the Citrus Bowl to play Michigan.
Why did the preseason No. 1 team fall short of the CFP? Here are some of the pitfalls that plagued Texas in 2025.
A bumpy first two months
One point Sarkisian hammered in his case for making the 12-team field was a claim that Texas’ 14-7 season-opening loss at Ohio State was holding it back from the CFP. Had the Longhorns played an easier game and not challenged themselves by going on the road to play the defending champs, he said, they could be 10-2 and a shoe-in for the bracket.
That’s probably true if the rest of the results remained the same, though Vanderbilt being left out at 10-2 shows that record is not quite an automatic for an SEC team. But the reality is, the Longhorns’ play for chunks of September and October, beyond simply Ohio State, hurt their case.
Two weeks after the Ohio State loss, the Longhorns labored to score points in a 27-10 win over UTEP, an overmatched team that finished 2-10.
Texas’ 29-21 loss on Oct. 4 at Florida, a team that finished 4-8, hurt its resume the most. The Longhorns trailed the Gators by 15 for most of the fourth quarter, before scoring a touchdown with 3:20 left and taking possession with a chance to tie with 55 seconds to go. After that defeat, the Longhorns had played five games but went 0-for-2 against Power 4 opponents, and it sent them tumbling out of the Associated Press top 25.
A 23-6 win the following week over rival Oklahoma — ranked No. 6 at the time — got Texas back into the poll, but having to go to overtime in the next two weeks to beat Kentucky (which finished 5-7) and Mississippi State (also 5-7) weren’t exactly resume boosters, either. Although the Longhorns were 6-2 at that point, they didn’t feel at all like a Playoff team based on how they played for most of the first two months. Of their first six wins, only one was over a team that finished the season with a winning record.
An inconsistent offense
Addressing the various issues on the Texas offense in the 2025 season was a bit like playing Whac-A-Mole.
Offensive line play was one of the biggest culprits of the Longhorns’ offensive struggles. After losing four of five starters, including three NFL Draft picks, that young unit took a while to find its footing.
In October alone — which included the Florida, Kentucky and Mississippi State games — Texas allowed a 46.2 percent pressure rate, which was fifth worst in the entire FBS that month, according to Pro Football Focus. The O-line performed better in November, but its 38 percent pressure rate allowed kept it ranked 121st in the 136-team FBS.
Some wondered if Texas should have taken an offensive line transfer or two. Sarkisian has yet to do so in his five seasons at Texas, in part because it recruited at a high level. The Longhorns at least kicked the idea around — one Power 4 personnel director said the Longhorns tried to woo one of his starting linemen to Austin in the offseason — but Texas ultimately stood pat, trusting the development of the young linemen it had.
Line play issues also led to struggles in the running game. Sarkisian’s offenses have had a 1,000-yard rusher every season with him as the play caller since 2009. That streak ended this season, as leading rusher Quintrevion Wisner finished with just 597 yards. Wisner missed three games because of injury, CJ Baxter also missed time with injury and sophomore Jerrick Gibson left the team at midseason. Texas could never quite replicate the backfield prowess it had early in the Sarkisian era, when Bijan Robinson, Roschon Johnson and Jonathon Brooks punished defenses.
Manning also had his own growing pains in his first year as the full-time starter. Accuracy issues plagued him early on, and his mechanics and footwork were inconsistent, too. Whenever Manning got sped up in the pocket, things tended to go haywire with how he saw the field or his ball placement.
But as the season wore on, Manning got better. After the Kentucky game, he threw for at least 300 yards and three touchdowns in three of his next four games. His accuracy improved. He wasn’t immune to mistakes, as stretches against Georgia and Texas A&M showed. The win over A&M in the season finale was, in many ways, a microcosm of his season: a slow start with a mostly strong finish.
Lastly, Texas’ receiving corps, while solid, was not to the level of recent years. Drops were an issue — Texas had 21 this season and a 5.7 percent drop rate, according to PFF, both of which were more than the average Power 4 team. Stanford transfer Emmett Mosley missed the first four games with an injury. Cal transfer tight end Jack Endries wasn’t quite as impactful as his predecessors, Gunnar Helm and Ja’Tavion Sanders. Ryan Wingo, DeAndre Moore and Parker Livingstone are all talented, but they have not reached the level that recent Texas receiver alumni did, like Xavier Worthy, Adonai Mitchell or Matthew Golden.
A disjointed Playoff selection process
Sarkisian admitted Sunday, after the Longhorns accepted a bid to the Citrus Bowl, that Texas must simply control what it can by winning more games.
But the erratic and inconsistent logic used by the CFP selection committee to justify where it slots certain teams leaves most outsiders confused and frustrated. Was Texas a slam-dunk Playoff team? No. But did the Longhorns’ resume compare well to at-large teams that made the field? Absolutely.
Alabama, which was one of the last at-large teams in, has a pretty similar resume to Texas. The Crimson Tide have a bad loss (Florida State) and two losses to top-10 teams (Georgia and Oklahoma). Texas had losses to Florida, Ohio State and Georgia. The Tide’s best wins were at Georgia and home vs. Vanderbilt. Texas’ best wins were over Oklahoma — a common opponent with the Tide — and a home win over Texas A&M.
Texas’ strength-of-record and schedule metrics compared favorably to teams just above them, like Alabama, Miami and Notre Dame. Nobody not wearing burnt orange is shedding a tear for the Longhorns getting left out of the field, but it’s not hard to understand where Texas is coming from.
“The one thing we’ve learned under the current format, we’ve got to win more games and we’ve got to win the games that are right in front of us,” Sarkisian said Sunday. “And it doesn’t matter how hard your schedule is. That doesn’t matter. It matters what your record is. And so, to complain about your schedule or how many good teams you play or how many teams you play on the road is really irrelevant.
“What we have to do is control what we can control, and that’s win the games that are right in front of us, as long as this is the format that we’re gonna use.”
And though missing the Playoff is a disappointment considering the preseason expectations — Sarkisian himself at SEC media days said he had a championship roster — Texas has a chance for a third-straight 10-win season, something the Longhorns haven’t achieved since the Mack Brown era in the late 2000s.
“That’s a pretty big accomplishment for this group,” Sarkisian said. ” … beating our rivals for back-to-back years and beating OU by double digits two years in a row, beating Arkansas by double digits two years in a row, beating A&M by double digits two years in a row, those are some really cool things that this team gets to hold on to. And so I want to make sure we go get that 10th win for them. … next year, the goal is to be in the playoffs.”