After a terrible first season under Steve Sarkisian, the Longhorns will have an uphill battle to improve for 2022.
Texas finished the season at a modest 5-7 record, which included multiple blown double digit leads, along with a school record losing streak of six consecutive games.
The disaster of a season happened for a multitude of reasons, whether it be poor offensive line play, a horrible defensive showing, or the lack of adjustments made by the coaching staff. A lot of the struggles the team faced was due to the large amounts of turnover from previous classes put together by Tom Herman, or simply players not panning out like many thought they would.
This led to Sarkisian’s offseason goal of adding over 30 new scholarship players, which he surpassed with flying colors thanks to hauling in the No. 5 2022 recruiting class in the country, along with the No. 8 transfer class.
However, the Longhorns also experienced a decent amount of turnover in terms of players entering the transfer portal and or leaving for life after Texas football whether it be graduation or the NFL.
ESPN (exclusive content) released a ranking of college football teams that are returning the most production, and the Longhorns came in at No. 53.
The lack of returning starters on offense are likely the cause, as the article has Texas returning just 62% of their production from 2021, which ranks as No. 77 in the offensive category. On the bright side, Texas does return two stars in running back Bijan Robinson and recover Xavier Worthy.
The Longhorns defense on the other hand is returning 74% of their production from 2021, which ranks much higher than the offense at No. 37.
This means there will be a ton of new faces on offense, and while there will be some new contributors on defense, there will be the same core players.
Whether either of these numbers are a good thing is something we will have to wait and find out, as the defense its returning a large chunk of players that were apart of the group that gave up over 200-yards rushing a game.
Texas will need major improvements from the returning players, and to hit immediately on the new weapons on offense.