In the second year of the Tom Herman era, the Longhorns saw heights they hadn’t achieved since the 2009 season under Mack Brown.
Texas won double-digit games, appeared in the Big 12 Championship game, and found their way to a New Years Six bowl game for the first time in nine years. Herman received an extension and everyone seemingly thought that the Longhorns were on their way back to climbing to the pinnacle of college football.
It all came crashing down quickly. Texas watched other teams challenge the Oklahoma Sooners in the title game for back-to-back seasons. On top of that, the Longhorns played a Pac-12 opponent in the Alamo Bowl for two consecutive years. Despite the fact that they won both by a combined 60 points, that is a disappointment for Texas. Their expectations are much higher.
Now that Herman is out of the picture, it’s a whole new ballgame under Steve Sarkisian. Can he get them over the hump? ESPN broke down what they need to do in order to get back to a New Years Six bowl game in 2021.
Tom Herman went 1-4 against Oklahoma, which is one of the reasons Steve Sarkisian is the new boss in Austin. So let’s start there: Any breakthrough at Texas will begin with getting over the hump against Lincoln Riley. Since Mack Brown’s exit in 2013, the past eight Red River Showdown games have been decided by a total of 52 points, an average of 6.5 points per game, but the Longhorns are just 2-6 in those.
The road schedule is a little salty: at old rival Arkansas, at Baylor, at Iowa State, at West Virginia and a trip to TCU, which is 6-1 against Texas since 2014. Sarkisian will have to find out if Casey Thompson is for real after a near-perfect Alamo Bowl performance, but RB Bijan Robinson gives him an offensive centerpiece to build around. If the Longhorns can finally knock off the Sooners, they’ll start to believe. — Dave Wilson, ESPN