Is Texas college football's new Alabama?

New York Times

2 days ago

Editor's note: This article is part of the Program Builders series, focusing on the behind-the-scenes executives and people fueling the future growth of their sports.
AUSTIN, Texas — The offseason remodeling of Texas football has mostly focused on the installation of a famous new starting quarterback for the Longhorns, but it also included a stylish makeover of their headquarters at the Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center.
Advertisement
Open-concept, modern and sleek, the updated lobby doubles as a trophy room. An assortment of impressive awards welcomes visitors: the Golden Hat that goes to the winner of the Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma; just about every bronze statue a college football player can win from Heisman to Thorpe to Ray Guy (shout out, Michael Dickson); and, of course, a couple of national championship trophies.
Notably, there is plenty of space to add more hardware. Smart planning. After two consecutive appearances in the College Football Playoff semifinals and a program-record 23 players selected over the last two NFL Drafts, head coach Steve Sarkisian and the Longhorns seem to be just getting started.
For the first time, Texas will enter a college football season as the No. 1 team in the country, as the Associated Press on Monday proclaimed the Longhorns the preseason frontrunners. The Coaches Poll did the same last week. It's yet another milestone for a program that is well past the point of being merely 'back.' Now, the Longhorns are trying to solidify the elite status that comes from churning out national title contenders on a yearly basis.
'If you talk to any of our players, or you just listen to their discussions … our players are talking about national championship,' Sarkisian told The Athletic this spring, when the lobby project was still exposed drywall and wires hanging from the ceiling. 'They're not talking about a rebuild. They're not talking about, 'Well, we'll see how this goes.' There's a standard here. There's an expectation, and they understand that they're held to the standard.'
In short, Texas is becoming the new Alabama. No, that doesn't mean the Longhorns are going to rattle off a half-dozen titles in the next decade. But this is the season Texas puts its staying power on display. There is always another draft pick. There is always another All-American. The talent conveyor belt is fully operational — and well-funded. The days of stumbling as a 12-point favorite at home appear to be over.
Advertisement
Texas stepped into its new conference last year SEC-ready. Only Georgia kept the Longhorns from immediately running the league.
The Longhorns maneuvered past Alabama and created a new pecking order in the SEC. This year will determine whether it sticks, but everything appears to be in place for Texas to take the Crimson Tide's spot alongside Georgia as the conference's biggest bullies.
There is only room for so many superpowers in one conference.
Coach Kalen DeBoer enters Year 2 in Tuscaloosa with a roster talented enough to return the Crimson Tide to the ranks of the national championship contenders, but Alabama still faces questions about what its post-Nick Saban reality will be. Especially after DeBoer's debut produced a 9-4 season, highlighted (or maybe lowlighted) by some losses that had previously been unthinkable.
Meanwhile, Texas has moved into a new phase of its development under Sarkisian. With Arch Manning ready to step in at quarterback, the Longhorns believe the arrow is still pointing up.
'I think Texas is in a phenomenal place,' said ESPN analyst and former Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy, who went to high school just outside of Austin. 'There's no denying, Sark's got access to everything he wants.'
Much like Kirby Smart did when he left Saban and Alabama to take over at Georgia, Sarkisian implemented the Bama blueprint at a school with more resources and easier access to talent than Saban's old school, building a program to rival the Tide.
At a time when how much a school can spend has never been more directly tied to how good the team can be, no school is better positioned to fund a championship roster than Texas. Reports that the Longhorns built a $40 million-plus roster this year are difficult to confirm but not hard to believe.
'They can outspend anybody if they wanted to,' McElroy said.
Advertisement
As college football tries to move away from unregulated name, image and likeness spending and into a capped revenue-sharing system, the market advantage should shift to schools — and their collectives — that can align with companies big and small to provide athletes deals on top of rev-share payments. Business is booming in Austin, which has become a hub for tech companies. The Texas One Fund has at least 20 sponsorship partners, including Texas-based Benchmark Bank.
'The area to differentiate any university is, how many outside — call it true NIL or whatever you want to call it — how many of those opportunities are out there for student-athletes?' said Patrick 'Wheels' Smith, president of Texas One Fund. 'And having the best model not only is good for your university and you can recruit better and win, but it's also good for kids to get opportunities. So our plan is to continue on that whole for-profit space, to get as many opportunities as we can for our student-athletes in the for-profit brand space.'
But the Saban way is not so much about a place or a plan as it is a culture that stifles complacency and prepares the next wave of blue-chippers to step up when it's their time.
Saban's message to players: This will be hard, but the payoff is plentiful — championships, individual accolades and the NFL Draft. Fun? The fun is in winning.
That culture has been difficult to build at Texas. Coaches who have been at Texas talk about an 'I have made it' attitude that often arrives in Austin with highly touted recruits.
Sarkisian and his staff have tried to change that.
'Doing games with Sark in his first year, he was like, 'We have got to get kids that hate to lose. They cannot after a loss be OK with playing well.' And I think that took a year or two,' McElroy said.
'Ultimately the goal is to win the last game of the season,' Longhorns guard Cole Hutson said. 'Still working on that, but they're looking for people that have the want-to and the drive to kind of make sure that when things get rough that they're going to push through, and they're going to persevere.'
Advertisement
Third-year receiver DeAndre Moore talked about watching Sarkisian dial up plays for DeVonta Smith during Alabama's last national title run in 2020, wanting a piece of that action. That's what led the top-150 recruit from California to Texas.
Moore also noted that at one point the Tide had four future first-round draft pick receivers on their depth chart, and it was Smith who went on to win the Heisman after being fourth in line behind Jerry Jeudy, Henry Ruggs and Jaylen Waddle.
Moore enters his third year with Texas looking to take a leap from complementary player to one of Manning's top targets after the Longhorns had three receivers drafted within the first two rounds over the last two years.
'Not gonna sit here and tell you that everything was just fine, you know, all rainbows and sunshine,' Moore said. 'And there were definitely some days where I was just like, man, this is tough, but I knew there was a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.'
Texas high schools consistently pump out more blue-chip recruits than any other state in the country. That's a good thing, of course, for the Longhorns, who don't have to go far to lay the foundation of a championship team. The downside, McElroy said, is the well-oiled machine that is youth football in the Lone Star State also produces a preponderance of players who are near maxed out as teenagers.
'Oftentimes they might be a five-star and they get on campus and they're the same guy for four years,' McElroy said. 'While they want to take kids from Texas, you gotta take the right kids.'
Sarkisian, who broke into big-time college coaching at USC under Pete Carroll, tries to blend Saban's process-driven discipline with Carroll's cool competitiveness.
'Those guys were both uber successful, crazy successful coaches that instilled their personality into their building, into their culture, into their teams, and rebuilt those teams year after year,' Sarkisian said. 'I think at the end of the day, anybody who's been around those two guys would probably tell you I'm probably a little bit of both of them. And so I would say our culture, our team, is probably a little bit of both of those two.'
Advertisement
When Texas players are at practice or in workouts: no jewelry, matching socks, shirts tucked in. Hats off during team meetings. That's Saban coming out of Sark.
'But also I think my ability to engage with people, and not that Coach Saban didn't, but, man, it was definitely like a fear factor with him,' Sarkisian said. 'And with Coach Carroll, it was more like, hug you. And I'm probably somewhere in the middle there. I try to engage with people. I try to relate to everybody in our building. My door is always open for our players and in recruiting, and I think that's allowed some of that connectivity.'
Sarkisian can incorporate Saban's process while not facing the pressure that comes with following the seven-time national championship coach.
As DeBoer tries to chart his own course at Alabama, the specter of Saban and the unprecedented standard he set looms over the Tide.
'In the end, we know we gotta win more games and we want those expectations, absolutely,' DeBoer told The Athletic this summer. 'That's what matters. You can come up with every excuse. It doesn't matter. No one cares, and we understand that. But as a coach myself, having been at different places, there is a process that you have to go through. And every place, it's been different challenges.'
While the first season fell short of the standard at Alabama, a top-five recruiting class coming in this year and another in the making for 2026 are a good sign.
Revenue sharing and NIL should continue to spread talent around college football more than when Saban was at his peak and it seemed only two or three teams in any given season could hope to compete against Alabama.
Just because the Longhorns are thriving doesn't mean the Tide can't keep rolling. But right now, the program in Austin is closer to the one Saban left behind than the one in Tuscaloosa.
Advertisement
'Excellence is exhausting, but it's worth it,' Sarkisian said. '(The players) see the success of their peers, and they're like, I want that, you know? The Outland trophies, the Thorpe awards, the All-Americans, the first-round picks, the draft picks, the College Football Playoffs. The on-the-cusp-of-a-national-championship. I want that. So how do I get there? It's pretty simple. The only thing I just keep looking for is, is there a complacency? Because complacency is, that'll get you. And we're fortunate. We've got no room to be complacent, because we haven't won the thing yet, you know?'
Program Builders is part of a partnership with Range Rover Sport. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
Spot the pattern. Connect the terms
Find the hidden link between sports terms
Play today's puzzle