Last October, Arch Manning was flat on his back in Gainesville, sacked repeatedly by a Florida team that would finish the season 4-8 with the Swamp crowd howling along all the way. That was Week 5, and it explains Texas’s 2025 season better than any stat line.
The Longhorns had walked in as preseason No. 1 — the whole machine built around a quarterback who’d barely thrown a full season’s worth of passes and a last name with its own gravitational pull. Beating a losing SEC team wasn’t supposed to be a question. Instead, it became the loss that made Steve Sarkisian’s next press conference feel like damage control, his talk of trimming the nonconference schedule landing the way excuses always land after the fact.
The Georgia loss five weeks later hurt differently — that one at least came against a team that would go on to win the SEC. Losing to Florida was a program not recognizing itself, and Manning’s numbers matched the vertigo: under 60% completion in three of the first five games. Then it turned.
Manning’s Late Season Turnaround Inspires Hope for 2026
After that Gators loss, he went 7-1, capped by a 27-17 win over a previously unbeaten, No. 3 Texas A&M that ended the Aggies’ championship bid in the same building Texas couldn’t get past a month earlier. A Citrus Bowl blowout of Michigan closed the year at 10-3 — a record that would headline most offseasons and instead became the reason Texas spent its winter answering questions instead of taking compliments.
That’s this conference in a sentence: 10-3 and still on trial. But the bookmakers are predicting big things for both Manning and the Horns in 2026.
Can Texas Finally Get It Done?
The early 2026 SEC odds from the popular Lucky Rebel Sportsbook make Texas a narrow +280 favorite to win the SEC for the first time ever next season. But there’s a particular kind of pressure that comes from being picked to win it all and still not trusted.
The Ohio State opener from 12 months ago pulled millions of viewers, proving the most-watched Week 1 game in the sport’s history, and that’s the scrutiny this program operates under. But what went wrong was subtler: red-zone trips fell from second nationally in 2024 to 63rd in 2025, and on the road, an offense that scored at a top-15 clip in the first quarter a year earlier nearly vanished, dropping from better than nine points a game to under two. Sarkisian knows it — that’s why Pete Kwiatkowski and Duane Akina are gone, replaced by Will Muschamp, back in the building where he coordinated defenses under Mack Brown two decades ago.
Manning gets a receiver room that should erase last year’s excuses — Auburn transfer Cam Coleman joining returning juniors Ryan Wingo and Emmett Mosley V. The talent’s never been the question in Austin. The question is whether a team this loaded can survive one road loss without unraveling again. Ohio State in week two, then Tennessee, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, LSU and Texas A&M to finish — that’s a gauntlet built to expose the exact road fragility that cost Texas its season last year.
Georgia Continues to Lurk
Here’s the strange arithmetic of being Georgia right now: four SEC titles under Kirby Smart, back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022, and a 39-34 loss in the Sugar Bowl — to an Ole Miss team Georgia had already beaten 43-35 in October — reads in Athens like a crisis. Twelve wins and a second straight SEC title, won by handling Alabama 28-7, still gets filed under disappointment. That’s what happens when your own standard becomes the opponent nobody else in the building has to face.
Gunner Stockton is the whole equation for 2026 — his ceiling showed up against Alabama, his floor showed up against the Rebels side that ended Georgia’s year. Nate Frazier anchors a backfield that should carry the offense through Stockton’s rough patches, and a defense reloading around Raylen Wilson, KJ Bolden, and Elijah Griffin might genuinely be better than last year’s. None of it matters if Smart can’t finally clear the bar his own dynasty built — a national title, not another conference trophy that now reads like a consolation prize.
Boom-Or-Bust for LSU
Boom-bust isn’t a stat for LSU — it’s closer to a personality disorder. A $20 million roster spend was supposed to buy Brian Kelly his first Playoff berth. Instead, it bought a 49-25 home humiliation against Texas A&M, a firing the next morning, and a 7-6 finish that ended in a losing bowl game under an interim coach nobody outside Baton Rouge could’ve named in August. LSU called it a season from hell, and for once, the cliché undersold it.
Lane Kiffin is walking into a building that just burned its last coach to the ground, armed with a seven-year, roughly $91 million contract and the nation’s top-ranked transfer class — 41 additions, including edge rusher Princewill Umanmielen, who followed him from Oxford. Sam Leavitt, who led Arizona State to the 2024 Playoff before injuries cut his 2025 short, arrives behind Jordan Seaton, the portal’s best available tackle.
On paper, it’s the most talented roster Kiffin’s ever coached. Yet SEC media picked LSU only fifth — a quiet vote of no confidence from people who’ve watched enough transfer classes fail to gel in year one. The bookies consider them slightly better than that, pricing them at +700 to win the conference, but they are still very much third-favorite behind the Longhorns and the Bulldogs.
