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SEC indictment or just coincidence? A trend worth remembering when assuming Texas’s long-term success
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I’d consider myself a Texas believer.
I believe Texas will win a national title during the Steve Sarkisian era. I believe Texas deserves to start as the No. 1 team in college football in 2025. I believe Arch Manning will be a star as a Year 1 starter in what’ll be the Longhorns’ Year 2 in the SEC. I believe that Texas will be a regular SEC contender, and if you don’t, I’d be more inclined to talk some sense to you as opposed to nodding my head.
But there’s this one thing that I continue to think about. Depending on what lens you look through for your SEC takes, it’s either an indictment of the conference or just a bizarre coincidence.
Think about the last 4 teams to join the SEC. Texas became the 3rd squad to have historic success within its first 2 years of joining the conference. The Longhorns obviously went to the SEC Championship Game in Year 1, and did so en route to matching a program-record 13 wins. Mizzou went to the SEC Championship Game in Year 2, and did so en route to matching a program-record 12 wins. Texas A&M didn’t go to the SEC Championship Game in Year 1, but Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel led the Aggies to their best AP Top-25 finish since 1956.
And Oklahoma, well, Oklahoma is still working on having historic success in the SEC.
Still, though. That’s 3 of the last 4 teams that joined the SEC and earned a top-5 finish in the AP Poll within the first 2 years. If you’re anti-SEC, you’ll point out how that’s a sign that the conference isn’t the gauntlet that people say it is. If you’re pro-SEC, or rather just someone who wants to look at the bigger picture, you’ll point out that Mizzou and A&M have 1 combined AP Top-5 finish in the decade-plus since their historic starts, which happened during the 2020 COVID season. A&M is 49-45 in SEC play from 2013-24, while Mizzou is 43-47 in conference play from 2014-24.
So what does that mean? Is Texas about to fade into SEC mediocrity like Texas A&M and Mizzou mostly did?
Not necessarily. If you’re like me, you believe that Texas is built for this.
Then again, I’d love to go back to the takes that were firing about 2012-13 A&M. It’s not that there was an assumption that Manziels would start growing on trees in College Station, but Kevin Sumlin guided a 3-star redshirt freshman to a Heisman and a top-5 finish that included an Alabama victory. With those resources and that recruiting ground, why would anyone assume that A&M would fade into mediocrity after that kind of start? As it turned out, a team that had 1 AP Top-25 finish in the 21st century prior to its SEC arrival wasn’t destined for long-term success.
(Kliff Kingsbury’s post-Year 1 departure was part of that, and Sumlin also never found the right defensive coordinator.)
Whether either fanbase wants to admit it or not, there’s plenty of overlap with the early SEC discussions of Texas and Texas A&M. In Texas’s 14 seasons before joining the SEC, it had at least 4 losses all but once. That outlier year was the 2023 season, wherein Texas followed in 2012 A&M’s footsteps by pulling off an upset at Alabama. Both of those were seen as “you’ve arrived” moments, though Texas’s win came a year before its SEC arrival.
We can debate whether the NIL/revenue sharing era will give Texas a higher floor than it had in the previous era — believe who you want on that report of Texas having a $35-$40 million roster in 2025 — but it’s not like A&M was working with budgetary constraints when it gave Jimbo Fisher a fully-guaranteed 10-year, $75 million contract. If money were the solution, A&M would’ve never had to fork over a $76 million buyout, and Texas would’ve never fallen off the wagon like it did in the 2010s.
2 things could prevent the Longhorns from fading into mediocrity throughout their next decade in the SEC
One is that Sarkisian is better suited for the job that he has than Sumlin or Fisher were at A&M, where they had 1 top-10 finish apiece.
Consecutive top-4 finishes for Sarkisian included a pair of multi-game injuries to starting quarterback Quinn Ewers, and Texas didn’t lose any of those games. Fisher never had consecutive AP Top-25 finishes at A&M, and Sumlin only did it in his first 2 seasons with Manziel starting every game. Sure, we can say that the strength of schedule during Year 1 of Texas’ SEC era was down, but Sarkisian has as many wins vs. AP Top-25 teams in the last 2 years (10) as Fisher had in his 6 seasons at A&M (Sumlin had 12 in his 6 seasons).
There’s something else that probably goes without saying, but it’s worth referencing once again — the barrier to entry that existed for both Texas and Texas A&M in the 2010s no longer exists.
That’s twofold. One is that Nick Saban is no longer the thing standing in the way of a path to an SEC Championship and, in many cases, the Playoff. Or if you do believe that’ll just be passed along to Kirby Smart, ask yourself this. How many times did Texas lose to Smart last season? Twice … and it still had a shot to play for a national title if it could’ve gotten a body on Jack Sawyer.
In the 4-team Playoff, we watched teams like A&M (2020) and Georgia (2023) both suffer their first and only loss vs. Saban’s Alabama, only to miss out on a shot at playing for a title. Texas will never have to worry about that as a member of the SEC because of the existence of the 12-team Playoff, which already yielded a flawed, but extremely talented national champion.
That doesn’t mean that Texas will turn 9-3 into a title season in a given year. It just means as long as Sarkisian can have a higher floor and truly avoid mediocrity, he’ll get far more bites at the apple than the SEC newcomers before him. That’s not a guarantee, even with Texas stacking top-5 recruiting classes in a way that A&M fell short of and Mizzou never sniffed.
But if you’re a believer, you know that the pieces are in place for Texas to find the long-term success that eluded SEC newcomers in the 21st century.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
