If not now, when?
That’s the overarching question facing sixth-year Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian embarking on a 2026 season during which his program faces national-title expectations at odds with the odds makers who place the Horns with the fifth-highest odds of winning it all and the beliefs of voters in both major polls who have Texas ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.
Despite the national skepticism, bolstering the expectations around the Longhorns are the presence of four potential
top-15 picks in next year’s NFL Draft — quarterback Arch Manning, wide receiver Cam Coleman, left tackle Trevor Goosby, and edge Colin Simmons, shining stars on the best roster that money can buy.
Compounding the pressure on Sarkisian? Those draft projections provide hard evidence that this roster is peaking in 2026 after the Longhorns went through enough growing pains last year to miss the College Football Playoff after back-to-back semifinal appearances.
In a nod to those expectations and how this season’s outcome will help define Sarkisian’s legacy in burnt orange and white, the first question last week on the 3rd & Longhorn podcast was about his legacy.
After mentioning graduation rates, players sent to the NFL, and leaving the program better than he found it, Sarkisian delved into what will actually determine his legacy.
“I hope at some point when people look back, one of the topics of conversation will be about the championships we won, right? And that’s a journey to win championships with an S, right?” Sarkisian said.
Sarkisian doesn’t have to hope for that, it’s the reality. In that pursuit, Texas has already won a championship under Sarkisian, notching a Big 12 title in 2023 on its way out of the conference, but that isn’t a legacy-defining achievement.
The standard is higher at the fourth-winningest program in college football history.
“I will say this. At the University of Texas, the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. And I know the expectations are high outside of our building. I know everybody wants to say what percentage we are to make the playoffs or what percentage it is for us to win a conference championship or make the CFP or be a national champion,” Sarkisian said at SEC Media Days.
“But the expectations are always high within our organization. They’re higher than you would imagine. They’re higher than they are in the outside world.”
Considering the outside perceptions of a boom-or-bust, all-in season with a national championship as the standard, that’s the only expectation those inside the football facility can harbor.
History is staring down Sarkisian from multiple angles.
There’s the school history, where Sarkisian seeks to place himself in the exclusive pantheon of the greatest head football coaches at Texas, a list that only includes two names — Darrell K Royal and Mack Brown, who combined to win all four of the school’s national championships.
And then there’s the next tier in which Sarkisian hopes not to land, coaches stuck in the shadow of those two greats like Fred Akers, Royal’s replacement who wasted two opportunities to win national championships.
In 1977, Akers’ first season, he squandered Earl Campbell’s Heisman Trophy-winning campaign thanks to a decisive 38-10 blowout loss to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl that exposed the previously-undefeated Texas team.
Six years later, the Longhorns raced through the SWC slate to another undefeated regular season and a No. 2 ranking heading into another Cotton Bowl appearance, this time against the Bulldogs.
The day before, No. 1 Nebraska had opened up the path to a national championship in a dramatic 31-30 Orange Bowl loss to No. 5 Miami that saw Tom Osborne attempt a two-point conversion for the win after scoring a touchdown in the final seconds, an attempt that fell short.
Once again, Texas also came up short, losing a defensive slugfest when Georgia scored a 17-yard rushing touchdown in the fourth quarter to win 10-9.
The Akers era never recovered — by 1986, the Horns were 5-6, the program’s first losing season in 30 years, and Akers left to coach the Boilermakers, where he was forced to resign after a 2-9 season in 1990 that included significant discipline issues.
For Sarkisian to avoid a similar place in school history, that 2023 conference title isn’t enough.
The other side of the history staring down Sarkisian is more likely to factor into the short-term outcomes in Austin, especially this season — the realities of attempting to win a national championship as a head coach calling plays on offense.
Since Osborne won three national championships in four years running the Wishbone at Nebraska in the 1990s, marking the end of that seminal offensive attack dominating college football for four decades, only two head coaches have won a national title calling offensive plays.
In 1996, Spurrier split the Nebraska dynasty by using his pass-heavy Fun ‘n’ Gun offense to secure a title for Florida.
It took nearly two more decades for another similarly-constructed team to top college football before Jimbo Fisher led Florida State to an undefeated national championship season despite starting the year ranked outside the top 10 in both major polls.
Perhaps a more telling recent example of the difficulty facing Sarkisian is Ohio State head coach Ryan Day.
Heading into the 2024 season, the Buckeyes had lost three straight games to the Wolverines as Jim Harbaugh led Michigan to the 2023 national championship, forcing Day to make the difficult decision to give up his play-calling duties in what amounted to an act of survival sitting on an increasingly hot seat, convincing spread guru Chip Kelly to leave his head coaching job at UCLA to come to Columbus in what amounted to an act of survival on Kelly’s part after posting a 36-35 record over six seasons in Westwood.
It wasn’t enough to win The Game, but Ohio State did peak at the right time, avoiding the strain of playing in the Big Ten championship game and surging to four straight College Football Playoff wins, including a semifinal victory over the Longhorns in the Cotton Bowl and a 34-23 triumph over the Fighting Irish in Atlanta to secure Day’s legacy and his job security.
Sarkisian faces a Michigan-like road block in Kirby Smart and Georgia, winners of two regular-season games and the 2024 SEC championship game against Texas, leaving college football observers reticent to predict the Longhorns to even win the conference until Sarkisian can overcome his Kirby Smart problem, one unlikely to resolve itself as easily for the Texas head coach as it did for Day when Harbaugh left Ann Arbor to return to the NFL and the subsequent Sherrone Moore scandal left the program reeling.
In assessing the Longhorns program after missing the CFP for the first time since 2022, Sarkisian hoped that he could blaze another path forward — keeping offensive play-calling duties while hiring a defensive coordinator capable of serving as a head coach of the defense.
So Sarkisian fired Pete Kwiatkowski in order to bring Will Muschamp back to Austin.
“What I felt like was happening to me as the offensive play caller and an essentially offensive coordinator with [Kyle] Flood and [AJ] Milwee, I was taking more time with defensive players. I was taking more time on visiting with them on how I wanted to play certain opponents, and I was kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and in the end, the offense wasn’t up to par, nor was the defense,” Sarkisian said.
In 2025, the Texas offense ranked ninth in SP+, but tied for 51st in plays of 20 yards or more, so Sarkisian is delegating game planning and in-game decision making to Muschamp in order to focus on improving a running game that struggled to take pressure off of Manning as it averaged 4.2 yards per carry, 10th in the SEC.
It’s the type of boldness demanded by the expectations placed on this season, and a dream hire for a coach who wasn’t able to secure Muschamp’s services five and a half years ago when he arrived in Austin.
The hire, which touts Muschamp’s well-earned reputation as one of the best defensive minds in college football with the capability to handle head coach-level decision making, also ensures that if Sarkisian is unable to match the size of the moment facing him in 2026, he’ll have no one else to blame but his own abilities as a play caller, just like Day after the 2023 season.
Those are the stakes as Sarkisian stares down the nation’s toughest schedule and faces the risk of wasting Manning’s time in burnt orange and white if the Longhorns come up short this season and Manning moves on to the NFL.
It’s the highest possible standard, but it’s the standard that Sarkisian embraced when he got to the Forty Acres — now he’s rebuilt the program into a contender, and College Football Playoff semifinal appearances are no longer the measure of success as Sarkisian seeks to define his legacy at Texas.
