In four years, Steve Sarkisian has turned Texas around, and now the Longhorns are No. 1 in the preseason US LBM Coaches Poll. How did they get here?
This is uncharted territory for the Texas Longhorns.
Twenty years after the program’s last national championship, the Longhorns will begin the 2025 college football season ranked No. 1 in the US LBM Coaches Poll, earning 28 of 67 first-place votes thanks in large part to a potentially unmatched collection of talent paced by third-year sophomore quarterback Arch Manning.
This is a first: Texas had never been ranked No. 1 in the preseason in the history of the Coaches Poll, which debuted in the 1950 season.
“This is a new year, new faces, new team, and obviously expectations are high for our program,” coach Steve Sarkisian said at SEC media days. “I'm not naive to that. I don't put my head in the sand, and expectations are very high.”
The preseason ranking can be seen as the latest source of validation for the program constructed by Sarkisian, now entering his fifth season. Helped by an NIL-driven landscape of personnel management that has been a boon for many deep-pocketed programs, Texas looks on paper to be nearly flawless.
Given their ability even in the deep SEC to simply out-talent most teams on the upcoming schedule, the Longhorns’ quest to go wire-to-wire atop the Coaches Poll could come down to how they manage intense hype that has coalesced around one all-or-nothing goal: to deliver a national championship.
“I do think we have a very hungry football team, one that is talented,” Sarkisian said. “I think this is a championship roster. Now we've got to play like a championship team, but I do think it's a championship roster.”
How Texas got to No. 1
Before climbing to the top of the preseason poll, Texas had to experience the lowest point in modern program history.
The team Sarkisian inherited for the 2021 season was fresh off four bowl wins in as many years, a program first since winning five in a row from 2004-08. But the Longhorns had struggled in former coach Tom Herman’s final two years, failing to build on a 10-win 2018 season capped by a Sugar Bowl defeat of Georgia.
Texas opened the Sarkisian era with a non-conference win against Louisiana-Lafayette and then won two in a row to start Big 12 play, rising to No. 23 nationally heading into the Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma. That 55-48 loss was the first of six in a row, the program’s longest such streak since 1956, and included a miserable 57-56 overtime defeat to Kansas – the Jayhawks’ lone conference win and one of just two wins overall on the season.
Steady progress ensued beginning in 2022, an eight-win finish highlighted by a 49-0 rout of the Sooners and five losses by a combined 25 points. The 2023 Longhorns won the Big 12 in the program’s final year of membership before losing 37-31 to Washington in the College Football Playoff national semifinals at the Sugar Bowl.
Last year’s team nearly took the SEC by storm, losing only twice to Georgia – the second in overtime of the conference championship game – and then beating Clemson and Arizona State in the expanded 12-team playoff before losing a close game to eventual national champion Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl.
“I mean, it was a tough loss, but that was the last season,” said junior linebacker Anthony Hill. “We have a whole new team. We want to go out there and be 1-0 next year. That's all we'll focus on is just being 1-0, and we'll handle everything else when the time comes.”
The program has undergone a clear shift in mentality, embracing the “all gas, no brakes” mindset instilled by Sarkisian and his staff. But the primary factor behind this recent resurgence is simpler: Texas has procured an eye-popping talent level through traditional recruiting and the transfer portal, buoyed by a willingness to spend millions to compile the best roster money can buy.
Arch Manning leads loaded Texas roster
Though it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact total spent on talent acquisition, the 2025 Texas roster is expected to cost between $35 and $40 million, the Houston Chronicle reported in the spring.
The crown jewel of this roster is Manning, who enters his first year as the starter after throwing for 939 yards and accounting for a combined 13 touchdowns in the backup role to Quinn Ewers as a redshirt freshman.
Manning is part of four consecutive signing classes ranked among the top five nationally by the major recruiting services. The No. 1-ranked class inked in this winter included four five-star and 14 four-star recruits, with eight signees ranked among 247Sports' top 85 prospects overall. Another 11 players joined the program through the transfer portal, with as many as five projected to start.
“We have a bunch of good players and follow his lead,” Manning said of Sarkisian. “This is a big-time conference. It's tough each week. But I think we've done a pretty good job. I'm hoping to carry that forward.”
To some degree, every program in the Power Four is trying to lean on NIL and the portal to build a deeper roster that layers traditional recruiting and player development with more established players acquired as transfers. The Longhorns’ NIL offerings have joined the program’s inherent advantages - members of an elite conference, one of the nation’s strongest brands, competitive in the championship race - to turn Texas back into a trendy destination for the top prospects out of high school or the portal.
“We're trying to build a roster that is one that can withstand the test of time,” said Sarkisian. “We never wanted to come here and be a one-year-wonder team and then the next year be not very good. So we're trying to be sustainable for a long period of time. I think that that's what good programs do.”
No player embodies the program’s enviable collection of NFL-ready talent more than Manning, who chose Texas because of his close relationship with Sarkisian and the chance to carve out his own reputation away from the shadows cast by his family’s quarterback legacy.
Like few before him - maybe his uncle, Peyton, and former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks such as Tim Tebow - Manning will be watched, monitored and scrutinized at a level unmatched by any other active player in the Bowl Subdivision, his every performance held against the obscenely high standard set by his name, location and obvious physical gifts.
“I take football pretty seriously,” Manning said. “Other than that, just a regular guy.”
Handling hype and expectations
A steady stream of factors have combined to make this the most highly anticipated season of Texas football in decades - a statement in itself given the annual hype around the program - and raised the boom-or-bust stakes to the point where anything less than an SEC crown and multiple playoff wins could be seen as a disappointment.
One is the Longhorns’ back-to-back playoff berths, with both years ending with the offense having opportunities in the red zone and in range of delivering an appearance in the championship game. (Fixing ongoing red-zone issues is a “huge emphasis of ours” this offseason, Sarkisian said.)
The second is the wealth of depth and experience on the roster. While not necessarily represented in previous starting experience at Texas, which brings back only nine starters from last season, the run of top-ranked signing and portal classes in a row have created a conveyer-belt type of depth-chart substitution where rising stars such as sophomore edge rusher Colin Simmons (nine sacks in 2024) are poised to transition from key reserve roles into the starting lineup.
And the third is Manning. If he plays well and the Longhorns win the SEC, Manning will be fodder for talk-show debate centered on the possibility that he enters the NFL draft after one season as the starter; if Texas struggles, the redshirt sophomore could easily become the scapegoat.
There’s no question the Longhorns are deserving of the hype. But what will decide this season is how Texas manages these intense expectations against a schedule that opens with a rematch at No. 2 Ohio State, features road trips to Florida and Georgia, includes the annual neutral-site matchup with Oklahoma and ends with the first matchup against Texas A&M at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium since 2010.
“But I also say we're the University of Texas, and the standard is the standard here, and that's competing for championships year in and year out,” said Sarkisian. “It didn't matter when we were in the previous conference. It didn't matter now that we're in the SEC. It is what it is.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Texas, Arch Manning are No. 1. How Steve Sarkisian rebuild Longhorns
Category: General Sports
