For more than a decade, as Texas flirted with returning to its former status as one of college football’s elite programs, it was one of the most popular questions in the sport.
Are the Longhorns finally back? For just as long, the answer stayed the same: No.
That changed in 2023, when Texas went 12-2 in coach Steve Sarkisian’s third season and appeared in the College Football Playoff for the first time. Few, this season, are still questioning the top-ranked Longhorns (6-0).
Even when starting quarterback Quinn Ewers was injured and missed two games, Texas was able to insert backup quarterback Arch Manning, the former top recruit in the country in 2023 whose uncles, Peyton and Eli Manning, combined to win four Super Bowl titles.
Yet, the Longhorns will face their toughest challenge thus far Saturday when they host No. 5 Georgia (5-1). And it’s appropriate that Texas’ “Welcome to the SEC” moment should come against the Bulldogs, the program whose path to the top the Longhorns are trying to mimic.
Like Texas, Georgia spent much of the last 30 years boasting a past national championship and a campus in a recruiting-rich part of the country, with little modern success to show for it. Under coach Kirby Smart, a former defensive coordinator who learned under Nick Saban at Alabama, the Bulldogs supercharged their recruiting; in the nine years since Smart’s hire, they have finished with the top-ranked class three times and been ranked lower than fourth just once.
In 2022, the same season in which Georgia won a second consecutive national championship, the university spent $4.5 million on football recruiting, most in the country, according to USA Today. The quarterback of the Bulldogs’ back-to-back championship teams was not a former high-star recruit but he did grow up in Georgia.
When Texas sought a head-coaching change in 2020, it also turned to a former Saban coordinator, Sarkisian, and showered the program with money to find the best players possible, spending $2.4 million on its 2022 recruiting budget. In the decade before Sarkisian’s hiring, Texas recruiting classes finished with an average rank of 10.8 in the country; in three recruiting classes under Sarkisian, Texas has averaged a ranking of 4.6. And the offense full of misdirection and motions is now run by a homegrown Texan — Ewers.
In the eyes of Texas fans, the Longhorns won’t qualify as fully back until they win the program’s first football national championship since 2006. Though Texas officially played its first Southeastern Conference game Sept. 28, beating lowly Mississippi State, its first measuring-stick game as a member of the SEC arrives Saturday in the form of Georgia, the program whose turnaround from a historic great to a present power it aspires to model.
By one metric, the Longhorns may be a step ahead. For the first time since 2021, bettors view Georgia as an underdog.
