Texas Football: BR ranks 2005 Longhorns among 10 best teams ever

Moving into the point of the college football offseason commonly known as “list season” there’s a lot of time to ponder past teams on the Forty Acres to see what went right and what went wrong of late. For the Texas football program, the 2000s is more the decade the new head coach Steve Sarkisian would like to replicate the success from, at least compared to the past 10 years.

Texas was a national contender essentially year in and year out in the 2000s under the direction of former head coach Mack Brown. But when the calendar turned from 2009 to 2010, the success wasn’t quite so frequent for the Longhorns.

Under three different head coaches over the span of 10 years (Brown, Charlie Strong, and Tom Herman), Texas only made one BCS/New Year’s Six Bowl game appearance. And they had four losing seasons, which is usually unheard of for this program over the span of a decade.

Sark and the Longhorns will try and right the ship, and follow the model that the program had during its more successful and consistent days throughout the 2000s.

Revisiting Mack Brown, Vince Young and the legendary 2005 Texas football team

Texas fans got to revisit some of those better teams of the 2000s of late thanks to a Bleacher Report piece published on May 16 detailing the top college football teams of all-time. A usual team of note on lists like that is the 2005 Texas squad, led by legendary quarterback Vince Young and Brown as head coach.

Mack, Vince, and the 2005 Longhorns helped make an instant classic of BCS National Championship Game in the 2006 Rose Bowl. Texas knocked off the juggernaut USC Trojans in the 2006 Rose Bowl thanks to that memorable 4th-and-5 scramble by VY for the game-winning touchdown.

Here’s more on what that BR piece had to say about the 2005 Texas team.

"If the 2006 Rose Bowl isn’t the greatest game ever played, it’s certainly no lower than the highest tier in history.Vince Young’s legendary fourth-down scramble gave Texas a dramatic win over USC—then considered a potential all-time team. Given that context, how could the unblemished Longhorns not then be catapulted into that discussion?Texas allowed just 16.4 points per game, but Young and Co. demanded the headlines with a top-ranked 50.2 points scored per game."

BR ranked the 2005 Texas team at No. 8 on the list of the 10 greatest college football teams of all time. A few teams of note ahead of them were the 2019 LSU Tigers (No. 6), 2004 USC (No. 5), and the 2001 Miami Hurricanes (No. 1).

The 2001 Miami team often holds the top spot among the best college football teams in history. That spot is deserved too given all of the NFL talent that graced that Miami roster throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The 2005 season was the last time that the Longhorns won a National Championship. They came close during the 2009 season, when Brown led the Longhorns to the BCS National Championship Game, before eventually falling short to head coach Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide.