Where Texas football ranked amid top 25 programs of the last decade

Most would not expect the Texas football program to find their way into the top 25 best teams of the last decade among the entire FBS.

The 2010’s were not the best of times for the Texas football program in its 118-year history. Texas had its best season within the last decade during the 2018 campaign, when star quarterback Sam Ehlinger and head coach Tom Herman led them to the Big 12 Championship Game and a Sugar Bowl win over the Georgia Bulldogs. But that still meant that the best season for the Longhorns in the last decade resulted in just 10 wins.

Entering the 2010 season, if Texas fans were told that they would only have one 10-win season in the entire decade, most would laugh you out of the building. Throughout the 2000’s there was only one season in which the Longhorns finished shy of double digit wins. And that’s when they won nine games during the 2000 season, still in the early years of the tenure of former head coach Mack Brown.

However, most Texas fans would also not expect this team to be in a very favorable spot in terms of the top 25 programs of the last decade. Yet, a list that was compiled by Bill Bender of Sporting News and released late last week still had the Longhorns amid the top 25 college football programs over the course of the last decade.

Bender of Sporting News had the Longhorns just inside the top 25, in the final spot on the list. Here’s what he had to say about placing Texas in the final spot in this ranking.

"The Longhorns have six winning seasons in the past 10 years, and the path from the end of the Mack Brown era through Charlie Strong to the past three seasons under Tom Herman has not been easy. That said, Texas is contending for Big 12 championships again — and it is on Herman to bring the Longhorns back once and for all."

Other significant spots on this list included the in-state rival Texas A&M Aggies at No. 20, Big 12 foe Oklahoma State Cowboys at No. 16, Baylor Bears at No. 22, and the Oklahoma Sooners at No. 4. The top five, in order from top to bottom, included the Alabama Crimson Tide, Clemson Tigers, Ohio State Buckeyes, Oklahoma, and the defending National Champion LSU Tigers.

Texas had a number of different starting quarterbacks, with Ehlinger being the very best, and three different head coaches of the 2010’s. Hopefully Herman and Ehlinger can get the Longhorns off to a better start in the 2020’s than Mack gave them heading into the 2010’s.