The Texas Longhorns are set to take on The Ohio State Buckeyes tonight at 6:30 p.m. in the College Football Playoff Semifinals at the Cotton Bowl.
Both teams will enter this game with two wins in the College Football Playoffs. The Longhorns defeated Clemson and Arizona State, while the Buckeyes defeated Tennessee and Oregon to reach the semifinals.
The winner of this matchup will advance to face the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the College Football National Championship, scheduled for Monday, January 20, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Texas currently leads the all-time series between these two teams with a record of 2-1 against the Buckeyes, though two of the three matchups have been one-score games, according to Ohio State Athletics.
Although this matchup with the Buckeyes will be one of the biggest tests of the season for this Longhorns football team, Head Coach Steve Sarkisian said that the difficult path to this moment has taught the team how to fight through adversity.
Sarkisian explained that each of the remaining teams dealt with challenges throughout the season rather than facing lower-ranked teams that would help to guarantee more wins on their resumes.
“And I think that as much as everybody’s trying to stockpile wins, I think the players we recruit, they want to go against the best. They want to compete against the players that they went on multiple recruiting visits with and they got to know a little bit with or played in all-star games against,” he said, per The Austin American-Statesman.
“And so you can feel that energy, especially early in the season when you’re coming out of the grind at training camp when you’ve got a marquee game early in the season, that I think our players look forward to. But it also kind of shapes you for maybe where your deficiencies are, because they can get exposed in games like that, that you can get fixed throughout the season to get ready for a playoff run.”
One of the biggest keys to winning this game for both teams will come from the matchup between Texas cornerback Jahdae Barron and Ohio State wide receiver Jeremiah Smith.
Barron became the third Texas player in program history to win the Thorpe Award for the best defensive back in college football after finishing the season with 42 solo tackles and five interceptions.
This performance has resulted in Barron also being discussed as a potential selection in the 2025 NFL Draft, where he is expected to be drafted within the first round by a team searching for an immediate starter.
Meanwhile, Smith has put together an impressive season with 1,224 receiving yards and 14 touchdowns in his 14 appearances, including 187 receiving yards and two touchdowns in a dominant win over Oregon last week.
Both players have distinguished themselves as among the top players at their positions and will spend much of the game matched up against each other.
Similarly, a matchup of the trenches will occur between an incredible offensive line for the Longhorns and one of the best defensive lines in the country for the Buckeyes.
Texas’s offensive line has four returning players from previous seasons and features two offensive tackles, Kelvin Banks Jr. and Cameron Williams, who are expected to be selected in the first round of the NFL Draft.
However, this group will have a difficult matchup against an Ohio State defensive line that is third in the nation with 30.5 sacks this season, per Ohio State Athletics.
Betting odds for this game, according to ESPN, have the Buckeyes as six-point favorites over the Longhorns, with the over/under for this game currently set at 53.5 points.