Kirk Herbstreit used his time on The Pat McAfee Show this week to deliver a warning as much as praise: Texas may be loaded, but talent alone will not carry the season. Herbstreit said he is a fan of Sark and Texas, called the Longhorns incredibly talented and said this will probably be Sark's best team, then added a catch that hangs over the entire season. "But can they handle week in and week out?" he said.
The reason the warning lands now is simple. Texas is already being treated like a national title threat, and the schedule is doing little to soften that view. Phil Steele ranked Texas' 2026 slate as the toughest in the country, and that run includes six preseason top-25 opponents, with Ohio State in week two followed by Tennessee, Oklahoma in Dallas, Ole Miss, LSU and Texas A&M before any potential SEC Championship appearance.
Herbstreit is not coming at Texas from the outside. He has been praising Arch Manning for months, and his broader view of the program has been consistently upbeat. But this week he tied that optimism to a harder standard, one shaped by what he saw happen last year, when preseason Texas, LSU, Clemson and Penn State all carried title talk and none of them handled the pressure. That is the part Texas has to answer now: not whether it looks talented on paper, but whether it can live up to the noise once the games start coming one after another.
He drove that point home with an offhand comparison that said plenty about how much attention Texas now brings. Herbstreit even contrasted Texas' TikTok presence with Mississippi State's, a reminder that the program is operating in a louder, harsher spotlight than most. That is what makes this more than another preseason compliment. Herbstreit is bullish on Texas, but he is also drawing a line between being admired in August and surviving the grind that follows.
And that is where the season turns. Texas does not just have one defining game; it has a sequence of them, starting in week two and running through a schedule that could expose any flaw in the team's response to pressure. If Herbstreit is right, Texas has the kind of roster that can contend with anyone. The unanswered question is whether that same roster can carry the expectations that come with being treated like one of the country's favorites from the start.
