For Texas, the first two weeks of the season couldn’t have been scripted any better.

It began with a highly anticipated season opener against Notre Dame, team that demolished the Longhorns last September. True freshman quarterback Shane Buechele dropped a dime into Armanti Foreman’s breadbasket on their opener drive and, with Tyrone Swoopes making major contributions out of the “18 Wheeler” package, helped them beat the Fighting Irish in a 50-47, double-overtime thriller. Buechele followed that up by having nearly as many touchdown passes (four) as incompletions (five) in a lopsided 41-7 victory over UTEP.

Texas started at No. 43 in the rankings put together by the preseason model that was used here to assign each FBS team a rating and project the outcome of every FBS game this season. The Longhorns have since moved up nine spots to No. 34. They turned in Game Scores of 50.17 and 68.93 in their first two games, respectively. The Game Score metric measures non-adjusted team efficiency every game on a 0-100 scale, where 50 is exactly average.

Texas already has as many above-average Game Scores in 2016 (two) as it had in all of 2015, when it had an average Game Score of 43.12 — No. 110 out of 128 FBS teams last season. Its Game Score against UTEP was more than 10 points better than any of its Game Scores from 2015. The Longhorns hit the road for the first time this year when they face Cal on Saturday. The Golden Bears beat Texas by a single point in Austin last year when Nick Rose missed what would have been a game-tying extra point with 1:11 left in the fourth quarter.

Jared Goff left and went on to be the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft by the Los Angeles Rams, but Cal’s passing attack hasn’t missed a beat with Davis Webb taking the snaps. Webb’s 963 passing yards are second in the nation, behind only former teammate Patrick Mahomes (1,023), with whom he’s tied for the most passing touchdowns in the country (nine).

Cal, however, has been abysmal against the run, allowing 291.0 yards per game on the ground so far this season — the fourth-worst in the country. D’Onta Foreman is healthy and, between him and Chris Warren, the Longhorns shouldn’t have much of a problem piling up the rushing yards this weekend. That’s a big reason why Texas is projected to beat Cal by 7.0 points on Saturday.

But what, of course, has been the most pleasantly surprising part of the season for the Longhorns has been the performance of Buechele. The first true freshman to start at quarterback for Texas since Bobby Layne 72 years ago, Buechele was a four-star prospect in the 2016 class and the No. 4 dual-threat quarterback, according to the 247Sports Composite player rankings. Among those with at least 50 passes this year, Buechele ranks 11th in the country in yards per attempt (9.9), is tied for 7th with Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield in completion percentage (71.7) and has posted the fifth-best passer rating (188.3), one spot ahead of Mahomes and two spots ahead of Louisville’s Lamar Jackson.

The advanced numbers love Buechele just as much as the traditional ones. He has posted double-digit EPA (Expected Points Added) in each of his first two starts, with 10.18 (6.30 pass, 3.89 rush) against Notre Dame and 12.56 (13.96 pass, -1.40 rush) against UTEP. Of his 22.75 total EPA this season, 20.26 has come with Buechele throwing the ball — 4.76 more than Texas had throwing it all last season.

Buechele impressing early bodes well for Texas considering the tough three-game stretch that lies ahead. After this week’s first road test in Berkeley, the Longhorns get a bye week before another road game at Oklahoma State and the annual Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma in Dallas. The Cowboys currently have a 18.33 rating, No. 26 in the model’s rankings, while the Sooners are No. 4 with a 27.55 rating going into their game against Ohio State this week.

Texas is projected to win this week by a touchdown but the model is pegging the Longhorns as underdogs in their next two contests. It projects them falling to Oklahoma State by 5.2 points and to Oklahoma by 10.5 points, with a 38.4% and 27.5% chance to win those games, respectively.

Texas knew the first half of its schedule was going to be brutal coming into this season but it is in a relatively favorable position right now. The Longhorns’ chances of starting 5-0 are slim (6.9%) but they will very likely have a winning record after their first five games, with a 84.6% shot to do so. They have a 33.0% chance to be 4-1 after the Red River Rivalry and a 44.7% chance to be 3-2, the most likely outcome. The worst case scenario, losing three in a row to fall to 2-3, has just a 15.4% shot of happening.

This upcoming three-game stretch would be brutal for any team, much less one that wasn’t even bowl eligible a year ago. But the Longhorns have played as well as any squad in the nation so far and have a great chance — 65.6%, to be exact — to improve to 3-0 this weekend. Getting a bye week before two more tough games away from home will help. After starting 1-4 last season, the fact that the Longhorns are extremely likely to have a winning record after five games this year should be considered a huge accomplishment.

It’s a reflection of how well they’ve played — and particularly how well Buechele has performed in the first two games of his career. Thanks to an overwhelmingly front-loaded schedule, they’ll get plenty of chances over the next month to prove those two victories were not a fluke — but a return to national prominence and consistent title contention.

Christian Corona is a contributing writer to 247Sports focusing on analytics-oriented college sports content. He is a data analytics consultant based in New York whose college football model went 54.1% picking every FBS game against the spread over the last two months of the 2015 regular season. You can reach him at @ChristianC0rona on Twitter.