Texas finishes 9-3 with three Top-15 wins, but an ugly loss at 4-8 Florida drops the Longhorns to No. 13 and out of the first 12-team College Football Playoff.
The Texas Longhorns won't just miss the College Football Playoff; they'll have to watch three of their biggest rivals chase a trophy without them.
After opening the season ranked No. 1 with the Heisman Trophy favorite at quarterback, Texas stumbled to a 9-3 finish. The resume still looked strong with three wins over teams currently in the Top 15 of the CFP rankings and competitive losses to No. 2 Ohio State and No. 3 Georgia.
But when the final 12-team bracket was unveiled on Sunday, the Longhorns landed at No. 13 - the third team out.
Notre Dame and BYU were slotted as the first two out, with Texas right behind them. Meanwhile, Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Oklahoma all punched tickets to the playoff, twisting the knife for a program that had reached back-to-back national semifinals the previous two years.
The committee's message was blunt and, for Texas, brutal ... one bad Saturday in Gainesville outweighed everything else.
The 29-21 loss to a Florida team that finished 4-8 became the scarlet letter on the Longhorns' profile. CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek made it clear last week that this was the anchor dragging Texas down.
"The committee has a great deal of respect for Texas and they've played an incredible schedule," Yurachek said, noting the Longhorns' four games against current Top-10 opponents and marquee wins over Oklahoma and Texas A&M. "They lost to No. 1, Ohio State, and lost to No. 3, Georgia."
Then came the dagger.
Among teams in the top 15, there were 17 total losses, and 16 of them came to teams that were ranked or had been ranked in the CFP Top 25 this season. The lone outlier? Texas' loss to unranked Florida - a game the Gators dominated, holding the Longhorns to 50 rushing yards and forcing two interceptions.
In other words, it wasn't the heavyweight swings that cost Texas. It was the whiff.
Now, instead of prepping for a first-round matchup, Steve Sarkisian's program is stuck in what-ifs.
What if Texas had simply taken care of business against a 4-8 Florida team? What if the No. 1 preseason squad and its Heisman frontrunner hadn’t sleepwalked through a swampy October night?
The margins in the new 12-team playoff era are supposed to be wider. For Texas, one ugly loss proved they're still razor-thin.