Steve Sarkisian has built the Texas Longhorns into a perennial contender.
For college football fans who paid attention to Mack Brown’s heyday in the late ’90s and early 2000s, this is nothing new. For Texas fans who suffered through the “purgatory” of the later Brown years and the Charlie Strong and Tom Herman eras, though, Sarkisian has been a breath of fresh air.
He’s built a program that can compete for the College Football Playoff every year, especially now that it has expanded to 12 teams. Even when it was only four teams, though, the Longhorns made it back in 2023-24.
How does a college team remain consistently successful in today’s NIL and transfer portal era? Nick Saban did it for years at Alabama with recruiting alone. That’s still a constant in 2025 and beyond, but coaches now need to build via the recruiting trail and then quickly rebuild on the fly via the transfer portal. It’s a whole new game, but Sarkisian and the Longhorns have figured it out.
That’s why talking head Paul Finebaum believes Texas should be the favorite to win it all this season. This, even though the Longhorns lost 12 players to the NFL Draft.
I’m sticking with Texas,” Finebaum said on
ESPN’s “Get Up” on Thursday morning
when asked his opinion on the best team in college football heading into the fall (h/t On3). “They just have it all across the board. Now, some of these people reading the magazines at the grocery store are going, ‘How can you say that, because they’ve had to replace so many skill-position players?’ That’s all true. Just watch the NFL Draft. But Steve Sarkisian has recruited, and he has mined the portal better than anyone in the land, so his roster is superb.”
To Finebaum’s point, the Longhorns lost an elite college quarterback in Quinn Ewers and replaced him with potentially an even better quarterback in Arch Manning. That change at quarterback, alone, is something only elite contending programs can do. Throw in the fact that Sarkisian’s 2025 recruiting class was ranked No. 1 in the nation, and you start to see why people like Finebaum are so confident in the Longhorns.
Sarkisian has built his program to compete for titles both now and in the future. The Longhorns are going to be a tough out for a long time.
