ATHENS, Ga. — In a nation forever gaga about its sports stars, you would think there might be some bylaw by which Texas and quarterback Arch Manning could appear in the College Football Playoff almost regardless of piddly considerations such as their record. Maybe they could reach the bracket under some sort of TV-ratings berth, sponsored by some sort of corporate brand.
In reality, the playoff selection committee operates too seriously for such frivolity, so the 2025-26 playoff probably waved goodbye to Texas on Saturday night when the No. 10 Longhorns suffered a fourth quarter their coach and players labeled a “disaster” in a 35-10 beatdown from No. 5 Georgia.
That means that as the established coach Steve Sarkisian walked off the field listening to his wife, and as Athletic Director Chris Del Conte exited in his boots and jeans with hands briefly clasped behind his back, and as dogged Georgia fans from among the original 93,033 chanted at fine Longhorns players, “Who’s your daddy,” the national season had reached a notable point. The preseason No. 1 team had subsided before Thanksgiving.
Whatever went ever so slightly wrong with Texas (7-3) and its commercial star quarterback in 2025 will go to future dissection, perhaps to emerge 20 years from now when uncomfortable truths start getting more comfortable to address, or perhaps to hit the dustbin altogether. For now, the Longhorns are left to faint hope for upheaval in the ranks involving teams such as BYU and Utah, while straining to presume themselves still playoff-possible.
“We’ve got a two-week season in front of us,” Sarkisian said to the question of any remaining viability for the 12-team playoff.
“Really just keep going, let everybody know that everything we want to do with our season is still in front of us,” junior running back Quintrevion Wisner said.
“I’ve got the utmost confidence in my team,” defensive end Colin Simmons said.
“Don’t lose hope,” safety and leader Michael Taaffe said. “We’re not dead yet. We have two games to go, and focus on Arkansas [next Saturday], and we have a game after that, and then give it up to the playoff to see who they let in.”
“We’re just going to go do our best,” Manning said, “to beat Arkansas and then control what we can control.”
Such desperation called to mind the opening of the season, when Texas began its admirable and brutal schedule with the bold venture to Ohio State, after which Manning trudged off the field quietly from the 14-7 loss and a lukewarm year got going. It would course through a hard 29-21 loss at a so-so Florida on Oct. 4, and through weird escapes from Kentucky (in overtime), Mississippi State (after trailing 38-21 in the fourth quarter) and, to some degree, Vanderbilt (when a late Vanderbilt onside kick almost brought fresh hell).
In fact, the Texas playoff bid of 2025 pretty much ended on an onside kick in Georgia, one so unexpected it came with 14:20 remaining. It came just after Georgia (9-1) and quarterback Gunner Stockton took a 14-10 game to 21-10. It made Georgia Coach Kirby Smart look so giddy on the sideline that you might start to think converted onside kicks constitute the most exuberant moments in the cheerless lives of coaches. It called to mind Alabama Coach Nick Saban’s devilish smile after Adam Griffith’s pivotal onside kick at 24-24 in the Alabama-Clemson national championship game of January 2016. And it worked because a Texan playing for Georgia with the glorious football name Cash Jones peeled between two Longhorns to snare the one-hopper from the keen foot of Peyton Woodring.
It signaled doom.
“Yeah, it’s heartbreaking when that happens,” Smart said afterward, “because you just gave up a touchdown, and the defense is over there drinking water, and they all of a sudden got to go back out.” Just before that, he noted that a “little walk-on kid from Texas, Cash Jones, I bet he’s taken 250 reps of that in his time being here, and he kept asking me, ‘When are we ever going to call it? I’d love to do it. I’d love to do it.’”
“On the onside kick, we didn’t break on the ball,” Sarkisian said. “And that’s on us as coaches,” indicating the need for more “situational” drilling, he said, before saying, “We actually practiced that kick in practice . . . and we didn’t field the ball.”
Soon, Stockton had a tricky six-yard touchdown pass to Lawson Luckie to go atop his two first-half touchdowns to Texan Noah Thomas, plus his 30-yarder to start the fourth quarter to a London Humphreys free in open prairie at the 10-yard line, all part of Stockton’s 24 for 29.
Later, the quarterback would score himself to reach 35-10 and exult, and the crowd would swoon in one of those rarefied frenzies, and the Texas season of gaudy promise had come to this. It had come to the tradition of the players bunching in front of the fans for the customary song, but in a lonely corner of the stadium at 11:08 on a mid-November Saturday, amid the famed hedges. It’s rough out there in the SEC.
Sarkisian had done such an impressive thing in 2023 and 2024. He had taken an operation long seen as having too many cooks — it went 91-72 between 2010 and 2022 — and had made it pretty damned airtight. He had reached two straight national semifinals, and he had done so while seeming to lack the drill-sergeant chromosome everyone presumed essential to solving the extravagant puzzle of Texas.
Now he has a bit of a dip from those heights, the kind one must rationalize by saying things such as, “You know, that was a really good game until the start of the fourth quarter.” It’s the kind of sports juncture when one seeks to keep the mind hopeful, as when Sarkisian observed a rushing game with 23 yards on 17 carries and said: “I thought we actually ran it pretty good. We just didn’t get enough opportunities.” In the hushed visitors’ news conference room, he said: “I don’t want the fourth quarter to be the overriding, ‘That’s all that happened in the game.’ . . . But the fourth quarter was, for lack of a better word, a disaster.”
It took the game from 14-10 to 21-10 to the onside kick to 28-10 to 35-10 and then left the rest as filler.
Long ago — in August — Texas had that No. 1 ranking, near No. 2 Penn State and No. 4 Clemson, who by now have 11 losses between them. Texas had the rational hype of the two-year understudy Manning taking over as quarterback, and it had Sarkisian’s impressive steering. Now it had a pretty good quarterback with the first-year-starter dents long familiar in football — Manning went 27 for 43 for 251 yards and a 114.8 rating next to Stockton’s 187.7 — and it had to hope for untold chaos up above it in the rankings for any playoff consideration.
Here comes the two-week season: home against Arkansas and unbeaten No. 3 Texas A&M. A win in that latter task could coax some heft from the committee, but the raft of teams ahead of Texas suggests it ended this bid on a temperate night in the great Athens, when the tailgates pulsated and the party persisted, and when a star quarterback looked like an above-average first-year starter in the understandable throes of trying to figure it out.
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