No. 1 Ohio State in the season opener and losing 14-7<\/a>? What if, instead of going on the road to one of the toughest places to play in all of college football with a first-year starting quarterback and a new offensive line, they had scheduled Kent State and eased into the season?<\/p>\n\u201cIf we\u2019re a 10-2 team right now, this isn\u2019t a discussion,\u201d Sarkisian said. \u201cBut we were willing to go up there and play that game.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a compelling point because it\u2019s largely true, and you\u2019ll undoubtedly hear SEC commissioner Greg Sankey make it every time a microphone comes into his vicinity over the next week. It\u2019s undeniable that a 10-2 Texas with their three high-quality wins would probably get a playoff spot.<\/p>\n
But Texas isn\u2019t 10-2.<\/p>\n
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And those what-ifs don\u2019t account for the cruel, sometimes unfair reality of college football: In a sport with only 12 data points, you are defined by neither your best nor worst moment. Instead, it\u2019s the totality of a complicated picture, and the 12-team playoff system is supposed to account for all of it.<\/p>\n
If Texas misses out on the CFP, can they honestly say that playing Ohio State cost them a bid? Or by losing that game, did they merely fail to earn the extra margin for error that would have allowed them to lose to a team like Florida without much punishment?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went on the road to Ohio State and lost in a one-score game where we outgained them by 200 yards and no one else has been close against them,\u201d Sarkisian said. \u201cBut I think more importantly it\u2019s the message we want to send to the head coaches and athletic directors around the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you play five top-10 ranked teams and go 3-2 and schedule Ohio State out of conference, I don\u2019t think we want to punish us to do that because what will we do? We\u2019ll get out of those games like a lot of teams have done. They have nice, pretty records but they\u2019re not willing to play those games.\u201d<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s the exact same argument Alabama made, unsuccessfully, when it was left out of the playoff a year ago at 9-3, kickstarting an entire offseason of discourse around CFP expansion and how the committee uses strength of schedule.<\/p>\n
And Sarkisian will come armed in every media appearance with all the stats about how difficult a road it was for Texas this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re gonna have a good shot to get in there because of Coach Sark,\u201d receiver Ryan Wingo said. \u201cHe\u2019s got a way with words.\u201d<\/p>\n
But are his words enough to convince selection committee members that Texas, particularly with Manning\u2019s development over the course of the season, is a different team than it was in August? Or, more to the point, can he convince them Texas\u2019 trajectory should matter more than what it put on paper?<\/p>\n
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It’s an attractive proposition, particularly for a television network that would love the ratings juice Manning brings. And it just might be enough to make the Longhorns the first three-loss playoff team in history.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we\u2019ve come a long way,\u201d Manning said. \u201cWe\u2019ve played a lot of good teams. I hope this thing works out because we\u2019re trending in the right direction. We\u2019re a good team. We\u2019re only getting better. And if you let us in, we can beat anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUSTIN \u2014 Every few minutes in this thunderdome of a college football stadium at the University of Texas,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2895,3230,261,3118,2470,3129,2926,17308,20718,3231,27,29,28,35644],"class_list":["post-70631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-alabama","tag-arch-manning","tag-college-football","tag-florida","tag-longhorns","tag-ohio-state","tag-oklahoma","tag-playoff-team","tag-ryan-wingo","tag-steve-sarkisian","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-the-university-of-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}