Back in January, on the morning of college football’s national championship, I came across something surprising. I was looking to contextualize Georgia’s recent on-field performance with regard to their recruiting success, and to do that, I was looking at the five-year average for recruiting rankings—a quick, simple, reasonably accurate reflection of the overall talent on a college football team. As I expected, Georgia graded out well in this metric. What I didn’t expect was the fifth team in the top five:
| Team | Five-Year Average |
| Alabama | 2 |
| Georgia | 2.6 |
| Ohio State | 5.4 |
| LSU | 6.6 |
| Texas | 9.2 |
Under Tom Herman, Texas recruited well. Texas recruited alongside the best in the country. No, they weren’t at the level of Alabama or Ohio State (or Georgia or LSU), but they were within range—closer than Clemson, at least, which is noteworthy for that era. Even with a coaching transition season in the midst of those five years, Texas brought in more talent than every school in the Big 12, every school in the Pac-12, every school in the ACC, and 24 of the 28 schools in the Big Ten and SEC.
On the field, though, of course, Texas was not within range of those schools.
Yes, they beat Georgia in that Sugar Bowl. But over Herman’s four seasons, Texas won ten games just once, lost an average of about five games per full season, and only managed even a two-loss Big 12 season once.
The talent was there.
But even more glaringly than in Athens, the wins were not.
The task, then, for Steve Sarkisian, is not to get talented players to come to Texas. Is that going to be challenging? Always, for any coach anywhere. But it’s going to be less challenging at Texas than at the vast majority of even Power Five programs, sitting atop a big brand in the midst of a talent-loaded area, even with possible headwinds from the recent prominence of racist donors at the school (and the ongoing fight over “The Eyes of Texas,” the school song with racist roots that provoked the emails).
The task, for Steve Sarkisian, is going to be winning with those talented players, something both his predecessors have failed to do.
Texas currently occupies a place in the Big 12 ecosystem somewhere amidst TCU, Baylor, Iowa State, and Oklahoma State—schools that have risen to challenge Oklahoma in recent memory but haven’t successfully pushed the Sooners off the throne. It has the football players to beat each of those four, as well as the four that haven’t recently challenged OU. But will Sarkisian do it?
There isn’t an easy way to know. It wouldn’t be surprising if Texas knocked off Oklahoma or Iowa State and made the Big 12 a three-horse race. It wouldn’t be surprising if Texas came out of the gate with back-to-back losses to Louisiana-Lafayette and Arkansas. The expectation, for the first year at least, is that Texas will land somewhere between those two worlds—in other words, right where they’ve been. If they do less, there will likely be a grace period for Sarkisian, but the mountain may become a little steeper. If they do more, you may hear that Texas is “back.” If they do a lot more, Texas might actually be back.
