Texas Football Has Completely Changed the Way It Builds Championship Rosters – Sports Illustrated

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The Texas Longhorns have built many a championship-caliber roster in their 132 years of playing college football. This is largely thanks to their position as the premier institute for the sport in arguably its most talent-rich state.
That gave Texas coaches an easy formula for success: recruit local kids, develop them into difference-makers and go win with them. This worked wonders for decades of Longhorns football as the team created a feedback loop wherein their success continually increased their stranglehold on the state's best talents, leading to even more success.
However, current Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian has upset this routine ahead of the 2026 season, using different methods to construct a title contender. Here is how he changed the way Texas football builds champions.
The Texas Longhorns are as un-Texan as they have ever been.
That is not to say that Sarkisian can not hack it on the hyper-competitive Texas recruiting trail or that he has abandoned the state, but it has certainly become less emphasized over his years with the team.
Here is a chart showing the number of four- and five-star recruits the Longhorns have landed from within and outside of the state, according to On3.
The numbers bear out Sarkisian's increasing willingness to look around the country for the best players he can get. Things came to a head in the past two seasons as for the first time since at least 2004, Texas did not bring in more local blue-chip recruits than they did out-of-state ones.
As much as things have changed just in Sarkisian's time with the team, they have changed even more since Texas' last golden age. The Longhorns won at least 10 games for six years in a row and appeared in two BCS National Championships in the mid-to-late 2000s with teams that were as Texan as Whataburger under head coach Mack Brown.
While Texas' increase in transplant stars is obviously a huge shift, it arguably is not even the biggest change to roster-building philosophy that Sarkisian embraced this offseason. That title probably goes to his newfound emphasis on one-year rentals from the transfer portal.
Sarkisian was never averse to using the portal, but did use it sparingly from 2022-2025, largely focusing on patching up holes while landing one or two big fish in the process. However, his tune totally changed this offseason as Texas brought in the No. 3 class in the portal.
Texas' last national title game appearance hinged largely on the relationship between Tuscola, Texas-native quarterback Colt McCoy and Burnet, Texas-native receiver Jordan Shipley. Now, the offense will largely rely on the connection between New Orleans-native quarterback Arch Manning and transfer-portal wideout Cam Coleman
So, will his new-age philosophy pay off? Texas fans will just have to wait and see.
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Carter Long is a sophomore Journalism and Sports Media student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a general sports reporter for the Daily Texan on the baseball beat. Long is from Houston and supports everything H-town.
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