It's no secret that Texas HC Steve Sarkisian has been consistently campaigning for the Longhorns to make it into the College Football Playoffs, and it's incredibly understandable.
Yesterday, along with discussing the 2026 recruiting class and the NCAA's scheduling problems, he addressed the CFP again:
"In my humble opinion, we are one of the best seven teams remaining (after conference champions). We're not competing for our conference championship. We tried that last year. We didn't make it. This year, we're a 6-2 team in the Southeastern Conference."
"We've played the hardest schedule of all the remaining teams left in the CFP, and that's supposed to be the number one criteria, strength of schedule. The second criteria is supposed to be head-to-head competition. Well, there's two teams that are in there that we beat by multiple scores, so is that head to head competition or not?"
Every single thing that Sark said is 100% correct, and something is incredibly wrong with the way college football works if the Longhorns don't make it in.
Like he mentioned, the strength of schedule is "supposedly" a huge, deciding factor in the College Football Playoffs Selection Committee's criteria for eligible teams. Texas not only has the most wins over top 10 teams in 2025, but they've played more top 10 teams than anybody else this season.
Most of the programs that are ranked ahead of them in the current CFP rankings haven't even played a schedule with more than two top 10 teams, let alone beat them. Just because Texas has three losses shouldn't prevent them from making it. The entire "The loss to Florida is holding them back" excuse doesn't make any sense either. All of their top 10 wins more than make up for that loss, and Alabama has a loss just as bad on the resume' (Florida State).
It's going to be interesting to see where the committee ranks the Longhorns after the conference championship games this weekend.