Right or Wrong: Two Decades of Texas Football Predictions and Lessons Learned

A fan goes into every season with an idea of who your team will be. Sometimes those notions are blown up in the first few weeks of the fall, your dreams with it. As if you were attending a Garth Brooks concert and Chris Gaines showed up instead.

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I’ve been wrong about some Texas teams and right about others. Let’s look back at our preconceived notions and what we’ve learned along the way.

(Keep in mind my preseason ideas about Texas only stretch back to the early 2000s. Unfortunately the single digits version of myself didn’t have any hot takes ready to sell the last season of John Mackovic. But I welcome your own thoughts.)

2004 — RIGHT

One of my formative moments as a young Texas fan was spending a week each summer doing the Mad Dog Madden Explosive Power Camp on campus. You push Nathan Vasher around on a sled at 13 and you’ll be hooked. But I remember watching the 2004 team run sprints in the sweltering heat and before each rep shouting “BCS!” They had tunnel vision on their goal.

But Mack Brown’s program missed playing for a national championship in 2001 and then fell short in 02 and 03. Going into 2004 they’d lost their trio of superhuman wide receivers and some other key pieces. Vince Young had a bumpy 2003 where he and Chance Mock yo-yo’d back and forth with one another.

Some folks in Austin, media included, were selling that a Brown team could ever really break through, against Oklahoma or on the BCS stage. Texas still lost a heartbreaker against Oklahoma that season, 12-0. But they had the epic comeback against Oklahoma State in Austin and the 4th-and-forever conversion by Young in Lawrence. We know what happened in the Rose Bowl against Michigan.

It felt like Texas had been so close, yet couldn’t punch through the wall. Until they did. Much like the last two semifinals where the Longhorns had been so close to the end zone they could smell a national championship appearance. To fans, the line separating your team from glory can feel thin. The lesson? Sometimes it takes that proximity and pain to break through.

2010 — WRONG

The Longhorns still had a litany of NFL players — Aaron Williams, Sam Acho, Kenny Vaccaro and more. They had just played for a national championship and had six years of the best quarterback play college football had ever seen. Like many, I expected the train would keep rolling and never stop. 5-7 and the collapse of Brown’s program followed.

The lesson? Watch for signs of rot and stagnation. One of the signs was in recruiting. The classes had stopped stacking talent at key positions to foster competition, which had been the hallmark of the Brown teams at their pinnacle.

2016 — WRONG

Things really can go worse than your wildest nightmares.

Even with Charlie Strong at the helm and his program’s issues with offense, strength and conditioning and organization, I kept thinking Texas would just snap its fingers and get back to winning 10 games because “we’re Texas.” Wrong. Nobody is immune from falling to the depths of hell.

Winning is hard. Even when the cake is baked.

2018 — RIGHT

I was confident about this team after seeing the Longhorns play harder and more physically in 2017 in Tom Herman’s first year. I remember writing that good quarterback play would get them to 9-3 and the Big 12 Championship. Although I briefly stuffed my head in a beehive after the second straight opening loss to Maryland, Sam Ehlinger proved me right.

Unfortunately I don’t know if there’s a broader lesson here other than to not count Bam Bam Sam out.

2021 and 2022 — WRONG

It took me some time to adjust to Steve Sarkisian’s program. I think I thought incremental improvements in offense and quarterback plus a fresh face leading familiar names on the roster would lead to immediate results. I’m not sure why I didn’t listen to Sark though. He constantly talked about wanting a bigger and faster team and pointed out cultural issues.

The lesson? Familiar names who you had high hopes for don’t always change. Sometimes, people stay who they are. It might take an overhaul to achieve success. I even think this lesson might apply to Texas’ quarterback position from the last two years. I wonder how much I was wishcasting on Quinn Ewers, wanting him to be different.

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Arch Manning is so different from Ewers he does represent a remodel of the position for Sarkisian. We’ll see if it’s enough to break through. I think it will be.

2025 — RIGHT/WRONG: TBD