Texas Football: 2005 Horns lose to 2001 Miami in all-time team tourney

The 2001 Miami Hurricanes and the 2005 Texas football team are two of the best since 2000, and it showed in a recent Yahoo Sports bracket challenge.

Yahoo Sports is hosting one of the many bracket challenges going on right now while the sports world is essentially being placed on pause. And the Texas football program had an all-time classic team involved in this individual bracket challenge from Yahoo Sports. This particular bracket that they built is a 16 team tournament of the best college football teams, at least since 1970. Yahoo only went back to the 1970 season to make this bracket.

A 2005 national title winning team for the Texas Longhorns football program is the one in particular that is taking part in the Yahoo challenge. The 2005 Longhorns recently had their 2006 Rose Bowl win over the USC Trojans to claim the BCS National Championship shown on national television in primetime, which aired on April 2.

This 2005 Texas team was the 10-seed in the bracket. Their first game in the tourney had them pitted against the 1988 Notre Dame Fighting Irish team. That Notre Dame team was the seven seed. But 68 percent of the vote went the Longhorns way to beat the 1988 Fighting Irish team that featured stars like Heisman contending quarterback Tony Rice.

In the second round of this all-time great college football teams tournament, the 2005 Longhorns were pitted against a team with even more star power than 1988 Notre Dame. The 10-seed Texas had to take on the insanely dominant 2001 Miami Hurricanes, who was the two-seed in this bracket.

Miami wound up flipping the script on Texas in the second round, getting 68 percent of the vote to triumph and move on to the Final Four of the voting. An absolutely stacked roster for Miami that featured Frank Gore, Najeh Davenport, Willis McGahee, and Clinton Portis, all in the same running back room in one season got the best of Texas.

The Miami receiving corps at that time featured the likes of Andre Johnson, Jeremy Shockey, and Kellen Winslow Jr. And the Canes defense was highlighted by Ed Reed, Jonathan Vilma, Antrel Rolle, and Vince Wilfork. It truly is amazing how much talent was on that team.

But if this were a game that was to be more realistically simulated, then the Longhorns would have one big advantage over Miami. Texas had a much better quarterback than the Canes did. The 2005 Heisman runner-up Vince Young led former Texas head coach Mack Brown to reach this team’s ultimate goal by winning the national title.

VY is one of the most elusive and polarizing quarterbacks to play for any college team since the turn of the century. His performance in the 2006 Rose Bowl against USC produced an instant classic game, where he rushed for more than 200 yards.

Nonetheless, this result from the Yahoo Sports college football all-time teams tournament is hard to argue with. That 2001 Miami team blew up pretty much every team they played. They would dominate the No. 2 Nebraska Cornhuskers in the Rose Bowl/2001 BCS National Championship Game by the final score of 37-14 to claim their only title since the turn of the century.

Other notable teams that are included in this bracket includes the 2019 LSU Tigers, who barely upended the Longhorns in Austin in Week 2 of this past season, and the 2009 Alabama Crimson Tide who beat an injured Colt McCoy and his squad in the national title game. The four teams left in this Yahoo college football bracket includes 1995 Nebraska, 2001 Miami, 2019 LSU, and 2004 USC.