How do you know Texas is truly back? When the Longhorns post a 10-3 season in which they defeat all three historic rivals plus Michigan by double digits and the season is generally regarded as a failure. Such is life when you're coming off back-to-back CFP semifinal trips, begin the year No. 1, and miss the Playoff entirely.
Looking back on it now, Sarkisian says he took his hands off the culture wheel and went on autopilot for most of the 2025 offseason, which is always the wrong choice but especially so considering nearly the 2024 offense graduated or went pro. Watching the team week-to-week, it was evident the coaches didn't know what they had with that group until November.
On a macro level, though, the only Sark offense to rate better than the defense was his first. Somehow, the unit quarterbacked by Casey Thompson has done heavy lifting that subsequent offenses led by Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning did or have not done. (Also consider: Sark's two Alabama offenses rated second and first in FEI.)
Texas FEI Rankings, 2021-Present
| Season | Offense FEI | Defense FEI | Team FEI |
| 2021 | 35th | 47th | 31st |
| 2022 | 17th | 8th | 6th |
| 2023 | 19th | 6th | 7th |
| 2024 | 18th | 3rd | 5th |
| 2025 | 32nd | 15th | 19th |
Combine the macro trend with the trend of Texas losing high-profile games, literally, at the goal line (Oklahoma 2023, Washington 2023, Ohio State 2024, Ohio State 2025) and the conventional wisdom was that Sarkisian would glean from the 2025 downturn that he needed to appoint or hire an offensive play-caller and step back into a CEO role.
Naturally, Sark did the opposite. He shockingly fired Pete Kwiatkowski and pulled Will Muschamp out of semi-retirement, effectively naming co-head coach of the defense. The answer wasn't to spend less time with the offense, it was to spend more. "That allows me and frees me of a little bit more time from an offensive perspective. Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, I'm let him to go do his thing on defense and really be a great leader and head coach over there, which allows me to get back to doing the things that I believe I'm really good at," Sarkisian said.
December rolled into January, where Texas acquired two expected offensive line starters, two new running backs, an expected starter at tight end and, oh yeah, the top overall player in the portal in Auburn wide receiver Cam Coleman.
In 2026, the Texas offense will start:
-- an expected No. 1 pick at quarterback, with 15 career starts -- who happens to be the crown prince of the royal family of quarterback play
-- a running back tandem with 613 combined touches, all at the Power 4 level
-- a wide receiver corps with two former 5-star recruits and 252 career catches among the top three
-- a fifth-year senior tight end transfer
-- an offensive line where the least experienced starter is a third year, former 5-star recruit with 13 career starts
It's an offense without an apparent weakness. And by Sark's own logic, any investment in the defense -- by high school recruiting ranking, the Texas defense is more star-studded than the offense -- is a bank-shot investment in the offense, too.
“I would say probably for the first time I feel like we have the top-level talent across the board position by position on both sides of the ball. But, yet, we also have the depth behind it across the board,” Sarkisian told On3 in an interview that published Monday. “I felt like we’ve had years where we’ve been elite at a couple positions and maybe we hadn’t had anything behind it, and it would have been really scary to think what would have happened if certain guys went down.”
In short, Sark has constructed a team in such a way that, if Texas falls short of its goals for a second straight season, Sark will be the only person to blame. There simply are no other stones to turn.
Texas enters 2026 in a level of all-in similar to Ohio State in 2024 and Penn State in 2025.
No one's predicting Sark will be fired midseason amid a spectacular free-fall a la James Franklin, but one thing is absolutely certain. Having the pieces fit as they do for Sark in 2026 is a once-a-career thing -- or once-in-a-lifetime thing, when you add in the Manning element. Most coaches will spend their entire lives waiting for the stars to align just so as they will at Texas this fall. And that will lead to only one conclusion, either good or bad: for the rest of the time he's at Texas, there will be a dividing line before and after the 2026 season. There are the six years building to the "all-in" 2026, and then there's however many years that come after it.
If Texas cashes in and wins its first national title, 2027 will be an exhale felt from Austin, Texas, to Augusta, Maine. If Texas falls short of its first championship in two decades, 2027 and all that follow will be tense.