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We’ve been building toward a game like this. It didn’t happen hastily or without warning. In fact, Texas’ great football rebirth has been in the works for some time. You just had to look for the proper signs.
On Saturday, the next chapter in this Longhorns’ era took on new life against the defending national champions. Sure, Michigan lost its coach, its quarterback, its starting running back and a slew of other players.
If you want to argue against the team Texas dismantled, there are reasonable ways to do just that. Those losses are very real. But Texas traveled into Ann Arbor and proceeded to methodically dissect a top 10 with relative ease.
Outside of a brief scuffle between the Texas offensive line and the Michigan defense after a cheap shot on starting QB Quinn Ewers, this game was drama free. Just a slow, methodical destruction in front of more than 100,000 opposing fans.
By the middle of the fourth quarter, many of those fans had left.
Sometimes football scores lie. This one, a 31-12 drubbing told us everything we needed to know. Texas was better than Michigan in every facet, and the lack of juice surrounding this outcome says a lot about how far this team has come in a relatively short period of time.
Texas isn’t back; Texas has arrived. At a time when resources matter more than ever before, no program seems more equipped to capitalize on these needs than this one.
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Steve Sarkisian has built a football program the way football programs should be built in the year 2024. He has recruited, developed, taken full advantage of the transfer portal and used NIL money wisely along the way.
Along that path, a lot has happened. For a while, Texas lost football games it shouldn’t. Each time it did, many celebrated just how far this once proud program had fallen.
As the elite recruiting classes mounted and incremental progress was made, the roster quietly transformed. Bijan Robinson and Xavier Worthy came and went, impacting the program one highlight at a time.
All the while, the program was building and evolving. That evolution resulted in a College Football Playoff berth one season ago. That was a moment. This year, the Longhorns entered with immense expectations and a top-five ranking.
On Saturday, that evolution came full circle once again. And it came full circle against a team, Michigan, that evolved over the last 10 years—through failure after a failure—to win a national championship.
If that blueprint sounds familiar, it should. This exact blueprint is the one Texas hopes to follow this season.
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All the necessary pieces are in place. In Ewers, Texas has a talented quarterback who has played well, especially in important games. Ewers’ game appears to be evolving as time goes on. Working alongside the offensive-minded Sarkisian will do that.
He spread the ball around to a wide receiver room that has been put together through recruiting and the transfer portal, playing behind the best offensive line in football—a group that took its lumps a few years ago.
Defensively, Texas has taken enormous steps over the last 15 months. While it will likely never be the main attraction of a Sark-coached program, the progress this side of the ball has and will continue to make has a chance to be the final piece of a national championship puzzle.
First, Texas will have to make its way through a new conference. While we wondered what the transition to the SEC would look like, Saturday eased many of those concerns. If anything, power mainstays within the conference will likely take note of what just unfolded.
Certainly, there is still a long way to go. Oklahoma and Georgia will serve as another quality measuring stick in October. Other opponents down the line, Florida, Arkansas or Texas A&M, could certainly challenge as well.
In many ways, however, Saturday symbolized more than just one game. It showcased yet again how far Texas has come in a relatively short period of time. It showed us the power of the many devices college football programs have at their disposal—if you have the people and the resources to activate them in the right way.
Saturday was more than just a huge win in a young football season. It was the first major step toward another national championship run, which suddenly feels very real.
It was also the latest piece of evidence that Texas football has been rebuilt into something more.
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