Texas is best team in college football? You've gotta be kidding after that mess - USA Today

KNOXVILLE, TN – Texas is the No. 1 team in college football? You've got to be kidding me.

Seriously, I find it hard to believe after watching this 3½-hour sack-fest.

If that’s the best team in the nation, then every challenger from Georgia to Mississippi to Miami to Notre Dame must be licking their chops for a chance to play Texas.

Texas looks glitchy. Shaky. Beatable. Just because No. 13 Tennessee couldn’t pull it off, don’t think that means a loss (or, more than one) isn’t coming.

Will Muschamp’s defense refused to let No. 1 Texas lose to a quarterback making his first career SEC start.

Steve Sarkisian’s offense kept giving way to the punter.

Texas survived, 20-17, in a game it kept trying to give away.

The Longhorns won despite six three-and-outs, seven punts, and one 15-yard penalty after a star player pretended to urinate on the field.

Tennessee was inside Texas territory after recovering an onside kick with a chance to win the game, before the Longhorns sacked Faizon Brandon for a 10th time to prevent a white-knuckle game from becoming a shocking collapse.

"All respect to our skill guys, but games like this are won in the trenches," Texas defensive tackle Hero Kanu said.

With six ranked opponents remaining, Texas’ weekly endeavor of survive-and-advance is still in its early stages.

Texas looked like a special team for one quarter of a comeback victory against Ohio State. Because of that rally, the Longhorns are atop the polls, but this team that showed up in Neyland Stadium masqueraded as college football’s No. 1 team.

If Texas is the best college football has to offer, then that means there’s no team like 2025 Indiana in the hunt this season.

When Archie Manning played Tennessee for the final time in 1969, Vols fans taunted the Ole Miss quarterback with buttons that read “Archie Who?” He showed them exactly who he was, in a 38-0 rout of Tennessee. (The year before, Archie threw six interceptions in a loss to Tennessee.)

Wearing the number Uncle Peyton used to wear when he struck up the band here, Arch Manning channeled his pedigree early on. He completed nine of his first 10 passes. He looked like a Manning in the first quarter. He looked like a guy pretending to be a Manning for the next three quarters, while Texas looked like a team pretending to be No. 1.

What is Sarkisian doing with this offense? Nothing special, that’s for sure.

Manning kept trotting off the field, while the punter trotted on.

Don’t pin it all on No. 16. Manning’s pass protection betrayed him, and completions became scarcer than punts for a while. His 201 passing yards were fewer than Georgia Tech compiled against Tennessee just two weeks ago.

Texas followed up its sloppy win against UTSA with a penalty-filled battle of survival. Survive, Texas did, despite mucking it up with 11 penalties. The Longhorns’ offensive line allowed six sacks of Manning, and this game had some shades of Texas’ sack-filled loss in The Swamp last October.

Manning finally got a clean pocket on third-and-long in the fourth quarter and fired a critical completion to Ryan Wingo to move the chains on a touchdown-scoring drive, preventing another white-knuckle game for Texas from progressing deeper into the upset zone.

Tennessee’s offensive line raised the ante on shoddy pass protection.

Texas sacked Brandon on about one-fourth of his dropbacks. That included five sacks by Colin Simmons. In a microcosm of the Longhorns making this harder on themselves than it perhaps needed to be, Simmons celebrated one of his sacks by pretending to urinate on the field.

Yep, you read that correctly. In a round of raunchy charades, Simmons mimed unzipping and peeing on the field. Instead of fourth-and-long, Tennessee gained a first down.

As the referee explained to a sell-out crowd that striped the stadium in orange and white, Simmons was being penalized 15 yards for “simulating using the restroom.”

That’s right, the leader of the free world watched a grown man pretend to pee on the football field and get penalized for it.

Aside from that penalty, Air Force One’s pregame flyover ranked as the most surreal moment of this rock fight. President Trump attended a game in a state he won by 30 points in the 2024 presidential election. The Longhorns’ warts on offense might prevent them from beating anyone left on their schedule by anything close to 30 points.

Texas could only exhale when it swatted away a Hail Mary as time expired.

The Longhorns remained undefeated, and the rankings say it's No. 1, but if college football's top squad showed up in Neyland Stadium, it did a heck of a job disguising itself as a sloppy, vulnerable team.

Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Listen to his podcast, "College Football Unfiltered." Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.

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