Ewers has Longhorns in college football’s top tier
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Texas Longhorns, national champions.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
It was nearly 19 years ago – 6,824 days, to be exact – that Vince Young carried Texas to a 41-38 win over USC in the 2006 Rose Bowl, throwing for 267 yards and rushing for 200 more, claiming the fourth national title in program history.
Hailed as one of the greatest matchups in college football history, the meeting between Texas and USC lived up to the hype.
The Longhorns came in undefeated, behind Young, who was a month removed from finishing second in Heisman Trophy voting to the Trojans’ Reggie Bush, who paired with quarterback Matt Leinart to lead USC to back-to-back national titles in 2003 and 2004.
In Pasadena, it was Young getting the last laugh – bringing Texas back from a 12-point deficit in the final five minutes, capping it with his third rushing touchdown of the game on a fourth-down scramble with 19 seconds left, snapping USC’s 37-game winning streak in the process.
Less than four months later, Young was off to the NFL, drafted third overall by the Tennessee Titans – one pick behind Bush, and seven ahead of Leinart. The Longhorns didn’t slow down, going 45-8 under head coach Mack Brown between 2006 and 2009, capping a run of nine straight years with double-digit wins.
Since then, things have dried up in Austin. At least until recently.
Enter Steve Sarkisian and Quinn Ewers.
Texas has its most successful head coach since Brown and its best quarterback since Young, and has vaulted itself into college football’s top tier alongside fellow SEC power Georgia, as well as Ohio State, which has asserted itself as the class of the Big Ten early this season.
And after reaching the playoff last year in its previous four-team format, the Longhorns are looking like a shoo-in this season’s new 12-team bracket.
Ewers has emerged as the Heisman favourite through two games, behind 506 passing yards and six touchdowns – 246 and three of which came last Saturday at The Big House, in a never-in-doubt 31-12 win over defending national champion Michigan.
This year, Texas has its sights set on being the last team standing. One giant test is complete, but things get harder from here on out – the famed Red River Showdown with Oklahoma at the Cotton Bowl on Oct. 12, followed by a matchup with Georgia a week later in what’s widely considered to be a preview of December’s SEC championship game.
Unlike Young’s Longhorns, Ewers’ team doesn’t have to be perfect. Texas just needs to save its best football for December and January, and take two steps forward from last year, when it lost to Washington in the CFP semifinals.
Regardless of how this season finishes, Ewers will move forward, just like Young – a near-certain first-round pick in next April’s NFL Draft. When he does, Texas will turn to its next phenom, Arch Manning – the latest gunslinger from football’s most famous quarterback dynasty, who’s standing by to take the reins.
For now, Ewers has put to rest any talk of a quarterback controversy.
But if Texas wins a national championship in 2025, there might just be one thing up for debate – whether it’s Young or Ewers that goes down as the greatest quarterback in Longhorns history.