The SEC has been the nation’s most powerful recruiting league for close to a decade now, and last year alone the 14-team conference claimed three of the nation’s top 5 recruiting classes, five of the top 10 and 12 of the top 25 classes in the nation (according to the 247Sports industry composite recruiting rankings).

But this isn’t to say the SEC doesn’t have recruiting rivals outside the conference. It absolutely does, and its recent domination of the recruiting trail only broadens the bullseye the SEC wears on its back.

We thought of 11 true SEC recruiting rivals from the other power conferences, and elaborated on how those rivals might be able to knock the SEC down a peg in the coming years.

Take a look:

1-2. The Former SEC head coaches

The two coaches we’re referring to are Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer, formerly the head coach at Florida, and Penn State Vanderbilt James Franklin, formerly the coach at Vanderbilt.

Meyer has out-recruited his competition wherever he’s been, be it at Utah, where he was the first head coach to lead a non-BCS school to a BCS bowl game, or Florida, where he won two BCS titles in a three-year span, or now at Ohio State, where he just won his third career championship. He has strong ties to SEC country from his days at Florida, and there are stars from SEC states littered throughout his current roster, be it tailback Ezekiel Elliott (a Missouri native), or quarterback J.T. Barrett (a Florida native) or even star defensive back Vonn Bell (a Georgia native) who logged 92 tackles and six interceptions a year ago.

Furthermore, Meyer is now on a tier of elite coaches that belongs solely to he and Alabama head coach Nick Saban. Those two coaches have won enough championships and maintained enough consistent success through the years to go into any state and nab its best player on coaching reputation alone. Nothing affirms a player as an elite recruit like interest from Meyer or Saban, and players know this. When Meyer gives you a look, you’d be stupid to shrug it off, and Meyer uses this to attract the best players at every position from the backyards of all the power conferences, including the SEC.

Franklin’s work in three years at Vanderbilt speaks for itself. He attracted top talents to Vanderbilt, a school known for academics and its usual place at the bottom of the SEC standings, and led the Commodors to consecutive nine-win seasons in the hyper-competitive SEC as a result.

He’s now coaching one of the nation’s longtime power programs with one of the nation’s most passionate fan bases, and that combination meshed with Franklin’s personal recruiting prowess has made him a force to be reckoned with on the recruiting trail. His rebuilding of the Penn State program in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal is still a work in progress, but he’s beginning to haul in handfuls of four-star talents each year to aid in that effort.

Most of Franklin’s recruits hail from Ohio and western Pennsylvania, a recruiting hotbed for the Big Ten, but also for the SEC. Many SEC coaches love to invade Ohio to steal prospects from the Big Ten, and Franklin is now making that tougher than ever.

3. The SEC Villain

I suppose there are a handful of authentic SEC villains, but in this instance we’re referring to Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops. The Sooners national title-winning head man has not been shy in sharing his distaste for the SEC, and more specifically his belief that the SEC is not as powerful as perceived. And his recruiting success at one of the nation’s most powerful programs is one way he’s able to knock his rival conference down a peg.

Due to Oklahoma’s proximity to the state of Texas, a Big 12 recruiting hotbed that the SEC has begun to invade since adding Texas A&M to the league (that’s a big reason A&M was added in 2012), Oklahoma is now a major SEC recruiting rival when it comes to Texas recruits. But that’s not to say Stoops hasn’t ventured into the rest of SEC country, because he has.

Four of his 24 signees in 2015 alone hailed from Mississippi or Louisiana, and 11 more come from the state of Texas, a greater number than the number of Oklahoma-based signees he added in the past year.

Oh, and did we mention Stoops is the brother of Kentucky third-year head coach Mark Stoops? If you’ve read up on Mark now that he belongs to our league, you know he’s the son of a coach and a Youngstown, Ohio, native with strong ties to the wealth of football talent in that state, especially in the Youngstown area.

Logic tells us that Mark’s brother has the same father and grew up with the same connections to that region, a region the Big 12 rarely explores. Bob isn’t necessarily reliant on Ohio to strengthen his recruiting classes (Mark definitely is given Kentucky’s proximity to the state of Ohio), but he has those ties if he ever needs to use them, which should make the SEC at least a little nervous.

4-7. The In-State ACC Rivals

More often than not, the simple answer is the right answer, and this is one of those instances. The SEC East’s four in-state rivals from the ACC — Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech and Louisville — are not just rivals on the field, but on the recruiting trail as well.

These battles have been relatively even in recent years, which should come as no surprise when considering both schools in a given competition belong to the same state as well as to fellow power conferences that can offer exposure and a pipeline to the NFL. Even in Florida, where Jim McElwain spent the past recruiting cycle playing catch-up, the Gators nabbed two of the state’s top 5 prospects to counter FSU adding five of the state’s top 11 talents.

Georgia has dominated Georgia Tech lately (UGA added five of the state’s top 10 players this past year and grabbed 11 players better than Tech’s highest-rated in-state recruit), but that’s mainly due to Tech’s unorthodox triple-option attack and the unorthodox recruiting it must to as a result. Georgia Tech’s victories over UGA and Mississippi State last year proved that Tech’s recruiting success is based on fit, not star ratings.

Clemson and Louisville make up for Tech’s recruiting struggle in their respective states, dominating South Carolina and Kentucky in talent accumulation. The Gamecocks grabbed two of the top 10 talents from the Palmetto State in 2015, but Clemson added four in the top 10 and seven in the top 20, while USC maintained just the two touted signees.

Louisville doesn’t add many players from the commonwealth of Kentucky, but that’s because the commonwealth isn’t known for top-tier high school football talent, and UL feels better garnering its talent elsewhere. Still, much of that talent hails from fellow SEC states like Georgia and Florida, cementing UL on this list.

8-11. The Texas Rivals

As we noted earlier, a big reason Texas A&M was added to the SEC in 2012 was to incorporate the football-rich state of Texas into SEC country, and that has begun to take form in the last three years as more Texas-based recruits consider SEC schools.

However, Texas is still a Longhorns-first state, and the recent emergence of schools like TCU and Baylor won’t make A&M or the rest of the SEC’s job any easier in recruiting in the Lone Star State (Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech is another coach with recruiting upside). The Big 12’s lack of a title game or a network of its own give the SEC two massive advantages on the recruiting trail against its Texas rivals, but the Longhorns have their own network and a new, trendy coach, putting them in a different position than the other teams in the state.

If recruits noticed how many Louisville defensive players were drafted in this year’s NFL draft after playing for defensive-minded head coach Charlie Strong, they’ll begin giving Texas a closer look, which could mean trouble for a Texas A&M team pulling out all the stops to revamp its defense, beginning with adding John Chavis to the coaching staff.

Strong also served as Florida’s defensive coordinator during the Meyer era, and then coached at Louisville, which, of course, hails from an SEC state. So he has more than one SEC connection in his back pocket, and he’s familiar with the recruiting landscape in the state of Florida, a state he dominated while at Louisville thanks to his time with the Gators. If Strong can win over both Texas and Florida — two of the biggest, baddest football states in America — the Longhorns could be back to perennial title contenders sooner than later.

And if TCU follows through on its playoff expectations in 2015, that could be yet another barrier between the SEC and its intended Texas domination.