Texas spent the transfer portal reshaping its running back room, and the overhaul was dramatic. By the time the dust settled, the Longhorns had lost their top four backs from 2025: Quintrevion Wisner to Florida State, Christian Clark to South Carolina, CJ Baxter to Kentucky and Jerrick Gibson to Purdue.
That kind of turnover usually raises alarms. In this case, it also gave Texas a chance to address the biggest issue in the backfield: a lack of burst.
Take Arch Manning out of the equation, and Texas averaged 107.1 rushing yards per game last season with just seven rushing touchdowns in 13 games. The Longhorns also went under 100 rushing yards five times, including the overtime win at Kentucky and the conference losses to Florida and Georgia.
After the offense stalled in Lexington, Steve Sarkisian was blunt about what was missing.
“Our inability to create any explosive runs tonight showed up and I thought we had some opportunities to do it,” head coach Steve Sarkisian said after the offense sputtered in Lexington. “We missed some opportunities in the run game to maybe be a little bit better… Consistency in the run game, efficiency in the run game is critical, and we weren’t efficient enough tonight in that aspect of the offense either.”
Injuries only made the situation messier. Baxter and Clark both suffered season-ending injuries in 2024, and Baxter and Wisner later dealt with hamstring problems early last season. Wisner’s workload also changed, and with fewer carries came fewer big plays: his runs of 15 or more yards dropped from 15 to six.
The deeper issue was the absence of a true secondary threat after Jaydon Blue moved on. Blue had a breakaway rate of nearly 40 percent and produced nine runs of 15-plus yards, including touchdown bursts of 38 and 77 yards in the College Football Playoff win over Clemson. Baxter, meanwhile, never broke a run longer than 10 yards after his hamstring injury, and his breakaway rate sat at 9.3 percent.
As a team, Texas had trouble generating chunk plays on the ground. The Longhorns finished tied for No. 78 nationally with 57 rushing plays of more than 10 yards. Strip out Manning’s runs, and that number drops to 36.
That kind of production doesn’t fit the profile of a team trying to chase a title. Over the last decade, the lowest rushing average by a national champion came from 2024 Ohio State at 166 yards per game, and five of the last 10 champs topped 200 yards per game on the ground.
Texas went looking for answers and found two of them in the portal: Arizona State transfer Raleek Brown and NC State transfer Hollywood Smothers.
“I just felt like we had an opportunity to get back to the style of players that fit what we were trying to do,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said.
“Two really versatile players that are explosive, players that can run the style of runs that we like to run, that are very versatile of catching the ball out of the backfield and have home-run hitting ability. We have to get back to being the explosive offense that we’re accustomed to be, that those two guys fit.”
Brown and Smothers arrived with plenty of production attached. Brown ranked as the No. 3 transfer running back in the 2026 window and is coming off a 1,000-yard season with 6.13 yards per carry. Smothers was the No. 6 transfer back and averaged more than six yards per carry across two seasons with the Wolfpack, which is exactly the kind of efficiency Texas wants back in the room.
The Longhorns are not asking either player to be Bijan Robinson, whose two Sarkisian seasons produced averages of 5.8 and 6.1 yards per carry. But Texas did need more than what it got from the backs who left, even with Wisner’s rise from former three-star recruit to 1,000-yard rusher on a team that was in the national title mix.
Now the program has two backs who could start elsewhere, and that’s the point. The unusual part is that neither player is walking into a clear bell-cow role, but Sarkisian said the pair has embraced the setup.
“Oddly enough, since they’ve come in they’re probably two of the closest transfers. They’ve almost become best friends on our team already - they understand they need each other,” Sarkisian said in the spring. “I think they understand, historically for us in our program, we’ve always done well when we’ve had two that can play off of one another, and so it’s been a great marriage.”
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