Is Texas the most overrated team in the latest ESPN FPI?

The latest edition of ESPN’s College Football Power Index was released late this week and it was followed by some really polarizing reactions, largely due to where Texas football was ranked. Second-year head coach Steve Sarkisian saw his squad ring in at No. 6 in the latest update to the FPI from ESPN this spring.

This edition of ESPN’s FPI projects Sark and the Longhorns to finish up with a record of around 9-3. It also gives Texas a whopping 41 percent chance to win the Big 12 Championship, a 21 percent chance to make the College Football Playoff, and a seven percent chance to win the National Championship.

Those are some pretty lofty projections and expectations for Sark and the Longhorns to live up to following a season where this team went 5-7 (3-6 Big 12), resulting in an absence from bowl season.

While it’s not out of the question for the Longhorns to come away with eight or nine wins this fall, giving this team better than a one in five chance to make the College Football Playoff seems out of touch. And the fact that this update to the FPI gives Texas nearly a coin flip’s chance to win the Big 12 seems even more out of the question.

But this isn’t really anything new for the Longhorns to have pretty lofty rankings in the FPI. The final FPI from last season and the first FPI for 2022 both had Texas hovering around the top 25. At the time, that seemed pretty hard to believe. Yet, ESPN managed to find a way to one-up that this spring.

Are Steve Sarkisian and Texas football overrated in the latest update to the ESPN FPI?

There are two questions that surface in my mind when considering how outlandish this is for Texas to rank at No. 6 in the latest FPI.

First and foremost, is Texas the most overrated team in this edition of the FPI?

At first glance, it looks like Texas could be considered in a group of three teams that managed to crack the top 10 that are pretty overrated it seems. The Pitt Panthers and Auburn Tigers also seem like some pretty overrated teams included in the top 10 in the latest FPI.

But Pitt won the ACC last season before losing to the Michigan State Spartans in the Peach Bowl. The very fact that Pitt made it to a New Years’ Six Bowl and won a power conference last season makes them at least a semi-reasonable team to include in the top 10.

That would leave Auburn and Texas, in my opinion, as the most overrated teams in the FPI. Auburn also finished up last season with seven losses, but they did at least make it to a bowl game.

The argument in favor of Texas being the less overrated team compared to Auburn lies in the fact that the Longhorns seemingly had a better offseason thus far compared to head coach Bryan Harsin and the Tigers.

But it’s easy to make the argument that Texas is the most overrated since they’re ranked four spots above the Tigers.

Moreover, the second question that comes to my mind in this discussion of Texas being overrated in this edition of the FPI is how they’ve performed vs. preseason expectations in the FPI in past years.

We went back to the 2017 offseason to find the preseason FPI rankings compared to the postseason for the Longhorns. And what we found was that Texas was often hyped up a good bit considering the fact that the lowest preseason spot for the program in the FPI was No. 24.

But there were fewer occasions of the Longhorns falling short of preseason expectations, purely in terms of past FPI comparisons, than you might think. In fact, last season was the widest gap between the preseason and postseason FPI ranking for Texas since 2017.

It does look like there is a valid argument to be made that the Longhorns are always at least a little bit overrated in the FPI. Texas has only one double-digit win season since 2017, but they finished in the top 20 of the FPI in three of the last five years. It’s also worth noting that the Longhorns finished higher in the postseason FPI than in the final AP Poll in each of the last five seasons.

All in all, if the last five seasons are any indication of what’s to come this fall for the Longhorns, this could actually be a rather promising 2022 campaign for Sark and his squad. The last time that Texas was ranked in the top 10 of the preseason FPI was in 2018 when this team made it to the Big 12 Championship Game and beat the Georgia Bulldogs in the Sugar Bowl.

Texas is set to take part in the annual Orange-White spring football game at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium on April 23. And then, Sark and the Longhorns are set to open up the 2022 regular season at home on Sep. 3 against Louisiana-Monroe.