Michael Taaffe knows how far Texas has come since last early season loss

Just 10 Texas football players remember losing to Alabama in week two of the 2022 CFB season.

[Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY and get the BEST Longhorns coverage!]

Just four of them can even remember stepping on the field against the mighty Nick Saban-led Crimson Tide, with only two playing snaps that weren’t purely special teams.

One of those four players, to no one’s surprise, was Michael Taaffe, then just a no-name walk-on safety who was lucky to be playing on special teams. And though he did eventually earn playing time on defense, that early September matchup saw Taaffe sweating out plays on kick and punt return, just trying to make a play in an otherwise low-scoring game.

Taaffe remembers that game clearly—it’s the only out-of-conference regular season game Texas has lost in the last four years.

That, of course, changed Saturday. Texas played another blue blood, a titan of the sport in Ohio State, this time on the road in Columbus. When reminiscing on what it was like after Alabama compared to now, Taaffe felt a moment of clarity in seeing how far this team had come.

“When we lost against Alabama, we sang The Eyes of Texas and the whole of DKR stayed and they clapped for us, because we ALMOST beat Alabama. That’s what the Texas culture was at the time,” Taaffe said. “Y’all almost beat Alabama. Great job. We got a standing ovation for losing.”

Taaffe’s correct. Texas had missed a bowl game a year prior in Steve Sarkisian’s first season coaching the program. They were a flawed team, littered with issues surrounding culture, effort, and personnel in the trenches. A season later, Taaffe’s defense held Bryce Young and Alabama to just 19 points on 5.5 yards per passing attempt. Even with the loss, this was a resounding success.

Now, in 2025, the stakes are a bit different.

“Two days ago, the whole world was like, ‘Texas just lost, what the heck?’” Taaffe said. “So the standard has been upped. And we’re not naive to that. We recognize that the standard is really high for us, and we have the standard high for ourselves, too. And so the locker room is a little bit different. It’s not like, ‘all right, we almost beat Alabama. You know, you’re kind of in the conversation.’ It’s like, no, you’ve lost and you’re expecting to win every single game. So how can you get better from that game?”

Taaffe’s point again rings true. In all the commotion of hyping up the first preseason No. 1 team in Texas history and crowning Arch Manning as a Heisman favorite before he’d ever played a game on the road, people had forgotten how far the Longhorns had come.

This program was a disaster four years ago. It took losses to Kansas and a viral leaked video of coaches chewing out players to really appreciate how bad it was. Now, not even half a decade later, it’s seen as a failure because Texas lost to Ohio State. In Columbus.

Taaffe has always been a level-headed leader for this program. When asked about the feeling of defeat this early in the season after Saturday’s game, he continued to share that forward thinking.

“My freshman year, we didn’t even make a bowl game, so I saw different cultures, how they took different losses, and I could tell we had a winning team, a winning football team, when I walked in that locker room 30 minutes ago, when we just lost our first game ever, when the media is making it the biggest opening-season football game in history,” Taaffe said. “So to have that competitive edge that we have, we’ll be alright.”

Taaffe, as well as Manning and other players, said business was as usual Monday. Trust Sarkisian’s process, trust your own, and make the past the past. With three non-conference games and a bye week ahead in September, Texas has every chance it needs to iron out the kinks and look forward to a tough road schedule in the SEC.