The 25 best college football teams to not win a national championship

Best college football teams without a national championship: 2008 Texas Longhorns

The “what if” around this era of Texas Longhorns typically surrounds the 2009 version that fell short to Alabama in the BCS National Championship Game in Pasadena. Of course, Texas fans will be quick to point out that Colt McCoy’s injury in the first quarter swung that game in the Crimson Tide’s favor. If he hadn’t gotten hurt, things would have been very different.

Whether or not that is true is up for debate and will never fully be answered, but the constant chatter surrounding that 2009 team ignores how good, and how dominant, Mack Brown’s Longhorns were the previous season.

McCoy piloted this ship as well, and just three years removed from his first national championship in 2005, Brown had a team in Austin good enough to capture another title. Texas earned wins over three teams in the Top 11 during the regular season, knocking off rival Oklahoma in the Red River Shootout, and then defeating Missouri and Oklahoma State in consecutive weeks.

In their fourth consecutive game against a highly ranked opponent, Texas ultimately suffered its one defeat of the season against rival Texas Tech in Lubbock when Graham Harrell hit Michael Crabtree for the game-winning touchdown with just a couple of seconds left on the clock.

That one defeat ultimately proved costly as Texas, despite earning the head-to-head win over the Sooners, lost out on the three-way tiebreaker in the Big 12 South. The Longhorns watched Oklahoma roll past Missouri in the conference title game, earning a spot in the BCS Championship Game against Florida.

Florida defeated Oklahoma 24-14 to capture its second national championship in three years. What might have happened if Texas got a crack at the Gators instead? According to Bill Connelly’s S&P+ rankings, Texas was better than Florida in 2008, but neither the Gators nor the Longhorns were the true No. 1 team in the country…