Steve Sarkisian addresses if the College Football Playoff committee values the right things

Following Texas‘ 27-17 win over rival Texas A&M on Friday night, the focus immediately shifted to the College Football Playoff conversation. Could the Longhorns work their way up enough to earn a second straight berth in the 12-team field?

Right now the program checks in at No. 16 in the rankings. But that was before the big win over the Aggies.

The real question is whether the strength of that win will help propel Texas up a few spots. Otherwise, Texas will need at least a couple teams in front of it to lose in order to get into striking distance of a berth.

“I don’t know, you know? We’re not in the room, so you don’t know what they look at or how they look at it,” coach Steve Sarkisian said of the College Football Playoff committee and how it’ll evaluate Friday’s win. “Again, all we can do is control what we can control, and that was playing the best football that we can play against some really good teams.”

Texas is certainly playing its best football of late. After a 3-2 start to the season, the program finished 6-1. The lone loss was a road loss to then-No. 5 Georgia.

Included in those wins were victories over Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, which were ranked No. 6 and No. 9 at the time of the game, respectively. That’s some quality ammo on the College Football Playoff resume.

“The fact that we beat an undefeated No. 3 team in the country tonight that a lot of pundits on television think were the best team in the country with the toughest schedule and the toughest metric, and we just beat them by two scores,” Sarkisian said. “To me that’s a pretty impressive win, a pretty dominant win for our team, that I don’t know how many other teams can say they have wins like that on their schedule.”

Overall, Sarkisian seemed to think that Texas’ overall body of work was worthy of inclusion in this year’s College Football Playoff. Will reality play out that way? We’ll see.

“Again, we’ve had some great wins,” Sarkisian said. “We beat, I don’t know, I think Oklahoma is the seventh-ranked team in the country right now. We beat them by three scores. And obviously beat Vanderbilt as well.

“And I get it, we didn’t beat Ohio State, we didn’t beat Georgia. But we played five top-10 ranked teams out of 12 regular season games. And you look at what some of the other teams’ schedules were in front of us, quite frankly it’s comical to think what would their record look like if they played those teams.”