Steve Sarkisian Casts Doubt on Texas' Future Showdown With Notre Dame

A season after Texas was left out of the College Football Playoff despite beating three top-10 teams, the Longhorns are still evaluating the fate of their future schedule.

Its home-and-home series with Ohio State is set to conclude this year with the Week 2 matchup in Austin. Many already have questions about whether this will be the last marquee non-conference matchup on Texas’s schedule for the near future.

When asked about the fate of future non-conference scheduling, and specifically the 2028-29 home-and-home with Notre Dame, head coach Steve Sarkisian was non-committal.

“It's always a tough topic because I try to move on, right? We're in 2026, but I think back to 2025,” Sarkisian said. “We have to learn from history. You know, I have to go back to 2023 really. We beat Alabama at Alabama, and that might have been the game that probably got us into the playoff that year in a four-team playoff.”

Dec 31, 2025; Orlando, FL, USA; Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian and Michigan Wolverines interim head coach Biff Poggi shake hands after a game at Camping World Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Pendleton-Imagn Images | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

The year after knocking off the Crimson Tide in what is arguably the biggest regular-season win of the Sarkisian era to date, the Longhorns went to the Big House in Ann Arbor and knocked off Michigan.

Then came this past season, the opening season loss to Ohio State, a team who ended up securing a top-four seed in the playoff, got Texas off on the wrong foot.

“If we beat Ohio State last year, surely we're in a much better position when it comes to the playoffs,” Sarkisian said. “But on the other side of it is, if I don't play Ohio State and I play Jones Junior High, and we're 10 and 2, the two losses are in Georgia and Florida. We're a playoff team."

Texas’s omission is at the heart of the worries among many’s concerns about the SEC moving to a nine-game conference schedule. If teams like Texas decide to play a challenging non-conference game and accrue a loss, they will be punished for it before even playing the conference slate.

Even after Texas accumulated three top-10 wins, with two of their losses being playoff teams: Georgia and Ohio State, the loss to Florida in October doomed the Longhorns. It was their third loss and as the SEC often argues the wrong number in the wrong column.

"But like anything in this world, if you want to be really good at something, you've got to take risk. There's calculated risks involved in life that you have to take, …” Sarkisian said. “You're taking a risk. And so yes, there's risk involved in playing a high-level non-conference schedule, but there's a lot of value in that."

While the Notre Dame series is still being evaluated, the Longhorns are set to finish their series versus Ohio State and already confirmed the 2027 home game versus Michigan.

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