At the start of the college football season, everyone expected a team from Texas to make the playoffs. A couple teams did, but not the one fans expected.
The Texas A&M Aggies and Texas Tech Red Raiders have a chance to win the national title. The Texas Longhorns, the top-ranked team in the country at the start of the season, will not.
As a consolation prize, the Longhorns will play the University of Michigan in the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl on Dec. 31 in Orlando.
A&M will host a first-round game against Miami on Dec. 20. Texas Tech, winners of the Big 12 Conference, get a first-round bye and won't play until New Year's Day as they await the winner of the Oregon/James Madison game.
The Aggies were the surprise team of the year in the Southeastern Conference. Preseason polls had the team finishing eighth. And while the Aggies only beat one team that finished the year ranked, that early-season win against Notre Dame propelled A&M up the national rankings.
Similarly, Texas Tech was not a favorite to win the Big 12 at the start of the season, but the Red Raiders spent millions of dollars compiling their roster, with reports saying it was among the most spent across all of college football.
For the Longhorns, it was a preseason of high hopes, from a No. 1 ranking to a predicted Heisman-winning quarterback in Arch Manning. But the team stumbled from the top spot to being unranked after losing to powerhouse Ohio State and a struggling Florida team in the first five games of the season.
The team did rally, with wins over playoff-bound Oklahoma and Texas A&M, but a blowout loss to Georgia in November proved to be too much to overcome in the team’s hope to slip into the playoffs.