A month ago Texas erased a 20-point fourth-quarter deficit and beat No. 1 Ohio State 24-23, winning it on a one-yard touchdown with 25 seconds left. Since then the Longhorns have lost to two unranked teams in a row, both by 27-24, the latest a home loss to Florida that dropped them to 4-2. When a team only shows up for the opponents with a ranking next to their name, the head coach has to own it. Steve Sarkisian is the head coach, and the contract he signed says this is his to answer for.
The argument you'll hear everywhere this week is that Arch Manning cost Texas the game, and in the narrowest sense the tape backs it up. He threw for 173 yards and one touchdown, and with 1:54 left and the Longhorns alive, he got sacked by Myles Graham and lost the ball, which Florida recovered to kill it. That's a brutal sequence and it's on him. Quarterbacks get judged on the last snap that mattered, and Manning's last snap that mattered was a fumble.
But look at what happened before that fumble. Florida came in having been blown out at Missouri and having lost at home to an unranked South Carolina team. This is a Gators team that beat No. 4 Ole Miss 52-28 and then couldn't win its own homecoming, a team you genuinely can't predict from week to week. Texas led 17-3. Then Florida scored 24 unanswered points to go up 27-17 behind a quarterback making his first career start. A top-10 team with a national brand let a coin-flip opponent rip off that kind of run at home. You don't pin a 24-0 stretch on one bad throw from your own guy.
Texas is now, per the record books, the first AP No. 1 to lose back-to-back games to unranked opponents since 1961. A week before the Florida game, the Longhorns were the No. 1 team in America. A team that hammers the heavyweights and then wilts against the field has a preparation and identity problem, and preparation and identity come from the top. Manning didn't schedule the practices or build the game plan twice against teams Texas was favored to beat.
Sarkisian stood up afterward and took most of the blame, while noting his quarterback and the rest of the team needed to be better too. He also said everything is going to be evaluated, which is coach-speak for pointing the cameras at the quarterback before anyone points them at the man with the buyout. The quarterback's seat is already warm in the national conversation. The coach's seat should be warmer.
No coach fully controls his roster at a place like Texas, where the pressure to play certain names doesn't always track with the depth chart. If that's the water Sarkisian is swimming in, fine. He took the job and he took the money, and the job is to win the games you're supposed to win regardless of who's whispering in his ear.
Texas will spend the week debating whether Arch Manning is the answer. A team built to contend should show up every week, even against the ones nobody circles on the calendar. That one's on the head coach.
