The Pac-12's Texas Bet

Texas State has been playing football since 1904, and for most of those 122 years, nobody outside central Texas paid much attention. 2026 becomes the year that starts to change.

The program sits on a foundation most G6 schools would trade their conference affiliations for — 44,000 students, I-35 halfway between Austin and San Antonio, the most football-obsessed state in the country. For most of that history, none of it translated into sustained winning with an all-time record slightly above .500.

The Bobcats went FBS in 2012, moved from the WAC to the Sun Belt, and stayed stuck in the gap between potential and results. As a member of FBS, Texas State is a woeful 63-108-0.

The Pac-12 is betting that GJ Kinne and the conference's higher profile flips the trajectory. Three straight bowl wins and a top-five offense for four consecutive years suggest they might be right.

Kinne's career mirrors the trajectory Texas State is trying to make.

He's from Gilmer, a small East Texas town, and signed with Texas in 2007 as a dual-threat quarterback under Mack Brown. He redshirted his freshman year behind Colt McCoy, transferred to Tulsa looking for a chance to play and landed in an offense where Gus Malzahn was running the No. 1 attack in the country. Chad Morris was the OC in 2010 and Mike Norvell was on that staff. He spent three years with the Philadelphia Eagles under Chip Kelly, with Ryan Day coaching quarterbacks in 2015. He circled back through UCF under Malzahn in 2021, coaching Dillon Gabriel — now with the Cleveland Browns after a first-team All-American season at Oregon in 2024 — then took his first head coaching job at FCS Incarnate Word in 2022.

Every stop in that journey shows up in what he runs at Texas State. He's 37 years old, one of the youngest head coaches in Division I football, leading a program from the Sun Belt into the Pac-12. Texas State finally has a coach whose ambition matches the program's unrealized potential — and a conference that believes in the destination.

The Pac-12 is the future, but September is the proving ground.

Texas State opens Saturday at No. 5 Texas on ESPN — Kinne walking back into Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium as a head coach, nearly two decades after redshirting there as a freshman quarterback under Mack Brown, to face Will Muschamp's defense and Arch Manning under center.

"Reminds me of Josh Allen a little bit as far as talent-wise," Kinne said of Manning. "He'll probably be the first overall pick next year."

After Austin, the Bobcats come home to host UTSA and North Texas — two American Conference Texas rivals — before wrapping September against FCS Incarnate Word, the program Kinne built before San Marcos. Texas State could lose all three of those FBS games and nobody would blink. But what an opportunity to make a national statement before they've played a single Pac-12 game. The Pac-12 bet on what this program is becoming, not what it's been.

That bet could end up being a very good one.

On this year's Bobcats, Kinne said:

• Quarterback Brad Jackson, entering year three in the system and year two as the starter, drew a comparison to Colt McCoy — "the consistency, the person he is, the work ethic, the leadership." Kinne called him "super athletic, great arm, really accurate" and said he's "primed to take that next big step."
• Wide receivers Beau Sparks and Chris Dawn Jr. were the only pair of 1,000-yard receivers on the same team in the country last year, and both returned. Kinne called it "a big win for us in the offseason." The three of them — Brad, Bo and Chris — work together every Saturday at 10 a.m., a routine Kinne described as "like clockwork."
• The run game remains the offensive staple despite the spread label. OC Jordan Shoemaker, with Kinne since Incarnate Word, is "the mastermind behind the run game." Kinne's philosophy: "It's really just a numbers game at all times. You combine that with tempo."
• New DC Will Windham came from South Alabama, where he coached linebackers under Kane Wommack (now DC at Alabama) and Corey Batoon (now DC at Missouri). "South Alabama schematically always gave us a ton of fits," Kinne said. He added: "I could just feel his presence."
• Defensive players to watch: DL Chancellor Owens (transfer, "a really, really good player"), safety Jayden Bradley ("big, physical, can run, can hit, can cover") and returning all-conference safety Ryan Nolan.

After that September, the Bobcats play eight straight Pac-12 opponents — and the geography alone tells you how much Texas State's world is about to change. The closest conference opponent is Colorado State, 840 miles from San Marcos. The farthest is Oregon State, 1,712 miles away in Corvallis. Texas State is a geographic outlier in this remade league.

The Bobcats have never played any of their new Pac-12 opponents except Utah State — a 38-7 loss in Texas State's inaugural FBS season of 2012, when both were members of the WAC and Utah State was the eventual league champion.

2026 represents an opportunity for Texas State to introduce itself to its new conference mates — and an opportunity for the whole country to see the Bobcats in a new light.

Watch the full Inside Texas interview with GJ Kinne: