Texas Football: 12 biggest villains in Longhorns history

1. Unruly expectations

There are a few blue blood college football programs that seem to have too much weight of expectations placed on their top players’ and coaches’ shoulders year in and year out. That list of programs usually includes the likes of the USC Trojans, Tennessee Volunteers, Notre Dame, and the Longhorns.

It’s rare to go any preseason without seeing at least two or three of those four aforementioned programs ranked outside of the top 20 in the major polls.

Let’s just take a look back at some of the preseason rankings for Texas in the major polls in the modern era. Since the turn of the century, there were 11 occasions in which Texas finished lower than their preseason ranking were they were slotted inside the top 25 of the preseason AP Poll. There were only four occasions in which Texas finished with a higher ranking in the final AP Poll than they had in the preseason.

When there’s that much weight of expectations placed on the shoulders, that can wear on teams like the Longhorns. There’s a lot of movement of coaching staffs of late, and a lot of that has to do with a partial lack of patience and coming up short of preseason expectations.

There was no better example of how preseason expectations could weigh down on a coaching staff and players than the 2010 Texas team. Texas entered the 2010 season with a preseason AP Poll ranking at No. 5. It turned out that Texas would finish up the season with as many wins as the number of their preseason ranking.