It’s not news by any means to say that Texas has currently been one of, if not the most, underwhelming teams to start the season. Besides Penn State, there haven’t been any other teams that have free-fallen out of the rankings as quickly or violently.

That’s not just a figure of speech, either, as the Texas Longhorns made history earlier this week by being the fastest team to fall entirely out of the rankings after being voted as the No. 1 team entering the season. The previous record was the 2012 USC Trojans, which took 12 weeks to fall out of the rankings.

At this point, discussions about the playoffs appear to be futile as the Horns have had next to no success against Power Four teams. While they’d be almost entirely pointless if Texas were to go on to lose the Red River Rivalry, it’s still a bit early to be saying it’s truly over.

With the current format of the College Football Playoffs, it’s not absurd to say that Texas still has a chance to make the playoffs. Just last year, we saw eight teams with two or more losses make the playoffs, Texas being one of them. Even though many of those teams had showcased more on the field than Texas has at all this season, there’s still some time to turn it around.

Especially when you consider that Arch Manning arguably had one of his best performances of the season against Florida, albeit that’s not saying too much.

“I do think, though, that fans are going to have to at some point wrap their heads around this,” Steve Sarkisian said. “There’s a lot of prideful programs throughout the SEC and throughout the country that are going to have to get out of what the norm was. And the norm was an undefeated national champion or maybe a one-loss national champion. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.

Even though it’s naive to say Texas still has a chance to make the SEC championship and automatically qualify for the playoffs, don’t be surprised if they’re able to string some big wins together and sneak in at the 12-seed. Especially when considering how heavy a bias the media has in favor of the Southeastern Conference.

Often regarded as the hardest conference in college football, controversy has always shrouded rankings when it comes to SEC teams. Even though many often wonder if these teams deserve a higher ranking in spite of having worse records than their non-SEC counterparts, the truth is, when it comes to college football, the SEC tends to get more passes than others.

Times have been worse than rough lately for those who don the Burnt Orange every Saturday, but regardless of what has happened, there’s still time to decide what will happen. Although the road to the playoffs feels like one that’s currently filled with potholes and speed bumps every step of the way, a win against Oklahoma keeps the car alive. And maybe that’s all Texas needs to find a backroad route to sneak its way into the playoffs.