Texas Longhorns athletics hasn’t been a sleeping giant for a while.
Athletic director Chris Del Conte picked up where the legendary DeLoss Dodds left off and the Forty Acres has become the unquestioned most successful sports winner in America.
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We’re still waiting on football to break through. Only then will the national reckoning that Del Conte has mentioned on many occasions becomes complete.
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Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian celebrates a interception late in the 4th quarter against Texas A&M Aggies offense in an NCAA college football game in the Lone Star Showdown in Austin, Texas, Friday, Nov. 28, 2025.
Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman
Texas just won its third straight Learfield Directors Cup — its fifth in six years — after the university grabbed four national championships: men’s swimming and diving, softball, rowing and men’s tennis. Mad props go out to those teams, but Texas football, the program that cuts the biggest checks, has yet to fully cash in at the hardware store under current management.
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When SEC media days kick off July 20 in Tampa, the Texas contingent will include head coach Steve Sarkisian and quarterback Arch Manning — the two most important figures in the program — and the conversation will eventually take on a familiar tone with a question we’ve been hearing for more than two decades:
Is this the year the Longhorns return to the winner’s circle?
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Football hasn’t won a national championship since Vince Young danced into the end zone at the 2006 Rose Bowl to end USC’s dynasty that had won 33 straight games and a pair of crystal balls. That was the greatest college football game ever played. But Texas’ juggernaut program of the 2000’s has appeared in just one more title game since then — a loss to Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide at the end of the 2009 season — before Mack Brown’s run that produced nine straight 10-win seasons began to take on water.
Steve Sarkisian enters his sixth season
Under Sarkisian, the ship has steadied and the expectations remain bigger than the Pacific in these parts. The Horns have been knocking on the door for awhile with playoff appearances under quarterbacks Quinn Ewers and Manning, but a championship game appearance has proven elusive. There’s a big difference between knocking and kicking the son of a gun in.
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Sooner or later, Sarkisian has to separate himself from the others who haven’t put boot to wood — Kyle Whittingham, Lincoln Riley, Kalen DeBoer, James Franklin, Lane Kiffin, Marcus Freeman and Dan Lanning are a few names that come to mind — for his fan base to fully embrace the feeling of being numero uno. It’s the top program in the state, but that hasn’t equated to the obvious goal on a national level.
Texas Longhorns quarterback Arch Manning (16) looks for a pass in the second quarter of the Citrus Bowl against the Wolverines at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Florida, Dec. 31, 2025.
Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
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The business model has changed in today’s game and while the Horns have one of the biggest war chests in the country, they still have to figure out how to play — and win — within the parameters of the NCAA’s portal era, something that isn’t easy despite the big stacks of greenbacks.
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“We have a responsibility to go recruit the best players in the country,” Sarkisian told reporters at the SEC spring meetings earlier this year. “We have a responsibility to retain our roster, and in the end we have the responsibility to field the best team possible every weekend, every year that we go take the field as the Texas Longhorns, representing the university. So that’s where the portal’s got to come into play. And how do we do all those things and do it with the right balance, and at the end make our team feel like a team and not a bunch of hired hitmen, right?”
Breaking through will mean having to figure out the sphinx that is Georgia football and coach Kirby Smart, who literally has Sarkisian’s number at present, so much that Smart texted his fellow Saban disciple on the morning of Texas’ overtime win at Mississippi State in late October. They’re friends, but you can’t convince me Smart wasn’t playing a bit of college football chess since Smart’s team was to host the Longhorns two weeks later, a game the Bulldogs won convincingly.
The Horns and Dawgs won’t play in the regular season this year, but methinks the SEC championship will run through Athens, Ga., though the Horns can still make the 12-team College Football Playoff without winning the deepest league in the country.
Texas Longhorns athletic director Chris Del Conte, left, and head women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer, right, attend game one of the NCAA Women’s College World Series against Texas Tech at Devon Park on Wednesday, June 3, 2026 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
Others waiting to break through
Of Texas’ four major sports, women’s basketball is the most intriguing because Vic Schaefer’s 2026 crew lost four huge pieces from a second straight Final Four team: point guard Rori Harmon to the WNBA and wings Jordan Lee, Aliyah Crump and Justice Carlton to the transfer portal. All-America forward Madison Booker is a top-flight player, but she’ll largely be surrounded by unprovens in 2027 except for her head coach who coached in two national championship games at Mississippi State.
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Men’s basketball boss Sean Miller will enter his second year after an unexpected three wins in the NCAAs. Miller lost his three best perimeter players — NBA first-round draft pick Dailyn Swain plus Jordan Pope and Tramon Mark — but has brought in some nice portal pieces to join returning big man Matas Vokietaitis.
Jim Schlossnagle’s baseball team made it to Omaha this year, but a 1-2 showing at the College World Series doesn’t cut it, especially on a team with five players who made various All-America squads.
While the championships stack up in other Texas sports, football isn’t exactly a sleeping giant because of its recent playoff experience, but there has to come a time when Sark and Co. must figure it out and put it all together. A quick peek at the 2026 schedule reveals that Sarkisian will face only one head coach — Ohio State’s Ryan Day — who has captured a natty.
Texas history tells us that both Darrell Royal and Brown won championships in their eighth seasons in Austin, but that came at times when fans were more patient with coaches when it came to program building.
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Those were the good old days.
They don’t exist anymore.