In case you weren’t keeping receipts on our hot takes from the preseason, we’ve dug our own skeletons out of the closet for you to see. 

Here’s a ranking of the players we overlooked (1 being most overlooked) and then proved us wrong, in the 2024 season.

1. Baylor QB Sawyer Robertson

I’m pointing the finger directly at myself here. On a preseason Republic of Football podcast, I said that if I were Dave Aranda, I wouldn’t trot Robertson out at quarterback with my job on the line. Fast forward, and Robertson replacing an injured Dequan Finn at quarterback saved Aranda’s job.

What I failed to account for is that the shaky 2023 Robertson (56 percent completion rate, 2:4 TD/INT ratio) would prosper switching from old offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes’s wide zone to Jake Spavital’s Air Raid, the same scheme Robertson starred in at Lubbock Coronado. Robertson passed for over 3,000 yards and ranked seventh nationally with an 82.9 QBR while leading Baylor to a six-game win streak.

2. TCU WR Jack Bech

We mentioned five wide receivers by name in TCU’s team preview for the 2024 Texas Football Magazine, none of whom were Jack Bech, who finished as the Horned Frogs’ leading receiver. After playing in just eight games due to injury in 2023, Bech became the fifth TCU receiver in program history to have a 1,000-yard season. He was quarterback Josh Hoover’s favorite target en route to the TCU record with single-season passing yards (3,949).

3. Texas RB Tre Wisner

After CJ Baxter’s season-ending injury in fall camp, Texas was a preseason Top 5 team with one running back on its roster (Jaydon Blue) with over 12 college carries. The Longhorns were banking on a breakout year from Baxter and instead got one from the second running back from the Class of 2023, Tre Wisner.

Wisner blossomed into a 1,000-yard back with a legacy performance in the first edition of Texas vs. Texas A&M’s rivalry renewal (33 carries for 186 yards) and combined with Blue for 292 rushing yards in the College Football Playoff First Round win over Clemson.

4. SMU QB Kevin Jennings

It’s not that we didn’t think Kevin Jennings capable - he’d proven that with his state championship at South Oak Cliff and leading SMU to the American Athletic Conference Championship in a spot start. We just assumed he would back up incumbent Preston Stone for most of the offseason.

After an uneven start to the season offensively, SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee made Jennings the full-time starter, and the Mustangs never looked back. The All-ACC selection led SMU to the conference championship game and the College Football Playoff in its first season as a Power Four team.

5. UTSA CB Zah Frazier

We (I) spent all offseason hyping up new UTSA cornerback Denver Harris, a former five-star from Galena Park North Shore, as a program-changing Transfer Portal pickup, only for the other cornerback to emerge as a First Team All-AAC selection who led the conference with six interceptions.

Before Harris, Zah Frazier was the highest-rated recruit out of JUCO in 2022. While he got off to a slow start with the Roadrunners (10 tackles in the 2022 and 2023 seasons combined), he put himself on NFL radars with a breakout redshirt junior campaign.

6. Sam Houston C Ethan Hagler

My 2024 Sam Houston team preview in the Texas Football Magazine is basically a giant ‘Old Takes Exposed.’ Here’s the snippet from ‘DCTF’s (a.k.a mine) Take.’

“The Kats are proud to have retained most of their roster, citing the culture they’ve created. The continuity can pay off. It also limits their ceiling. The manpower along the line of scrimmage is the most drastic change from the FCS, and Sam Houston has kept the same linemen. A more favorable schedule and injury luck gets Keeler and Co. to .500. They didn’t make enough moves for more.”

I thought Sam Houston was doomed because they kept four of five linemen from a unit that paved the way for a nation's-worst 88 rushing yards per game. Hagler and the boys proved me foolish. The redshirt senior was named Second Team All-Conference USA center.

7. North Texas WR DT Sheffield

While we did list Sheffield as a breakout candidate on the 2024 Texas Football Magazine preview (shoutout Craven), Sheffield still cracks this ranking because we didn’t list him as a starter. 

Until 2024, North Texas head coach Eric Morris and Sheffield were two ships passing in the wind. While the offensive coordinator at Washington State, Morris recruited Sheffield, a JUCO All-American, but took the North Texas job before Sheffield got to campus. Morris and Sheffield finally linked up this past season, and it was a match made in Air Raid Heaven. Sheffield led the American Athletic Conference with 11 receiving touchdowns, earning a First Team all-conference nod.

8. Baylor LB Matt Jones

We rated Baylor’s linebacking corps as a B- in our 2024 Texas Football Magazine, and Matt Jones and Keaton Thomas earned First Team All-Big 12 honors. While Jones and Thomas were the first linebacker duo to each make over 100 tackles in a season since 2012, Jones gets the nod on this list because he was the incumbent we were most familiar with. Or, so we thought.

Jones entered the season as a sixth-year linebacker overseeing the unit’s regression from a Big 12 Championship unit, allowing 18.2 points per game, to the nation’s 116th-ranked defense by 2023. He went from a solid linebacker to an all-conference nod in one season with Aranda calling defensive plays, leading the Bears with 10 tackles for-loss and four sacks.

9. Texas DT Alfred Collins

The trenches are the biggest difference between the Big 12 and SEC. Texas lost Outland Trophy winner T’Vondre Sweat and Byron Murphy, the first defensive player selected in the NFL Draft, as it made the jump. That’s why we wrote in July that Alfred Collins ‘must step up and reach his five-star potential as the main cog of the Texas Longhorn defensive tackle unit.’

There was some doubt Collins could capitalize on those former five-star traits and play up to the standard Sweat and Murphy set after starting just 12 times in four seasons. But Collins quelled all of it by leading Texas’ defensive line with seven pass breakups and earning PFF’s seventh-best interior defensive grade for the season.

10. Texas Tech LB Jacob Rodriguez

Rodriguez’s breakout season in 2024 was supposed to happen in 2023 when Texas Tech elected him to the captain’s circle. But a Week 1 injury limited him to four starts on the year, and kept the secret going. 

Rodriguez became a First Team All-Big 12 selection after leading the conference with 72 solo tackles. He also led the Red Raiders with 10 tackles for-loss and five sacks. His opting to return for a final year of eligibility was one of the biggest wins of Texas Tech’s offseason.