First-year Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is familiar with life in the SEC, arriving in Austin after serving as Alabama’s offensive coordinator. Sarkisian says the move to the SEC gives the Longhorns a bigger target on their backs.

“I didn’t take this job blind,” Sarkisian told ESPN’s Dave Wilson. “We’re everybody’s biggest game. I think coming out of [the SEC move] and the talk of what’s happened, our bull’s-eye got a little bit bigger. We can’t be naive to that. Whether it’s crowd noise, whether it’s yelling at us on the bench, whether it’s the ‘Horns Down’ signal, all those things are really irrelevant to our ability to execute and succeed at a really high level.”

Texas being “everybody’s biggest game” will certainly be news to many SEC programs, especially programs with 24/7/365 rivalries.

Texas will face at least one SEC program in 2021. Sarkisian’s Longhorns travel to Arkansas on Sept. 11. Entering his first year at Texas, Sark told ESPN the team is focused on “unfinished business” in the Big 12.

“We’ve got a lot of unfinished business here in the Big 12 that we want to make sure we take care of,” Sarkisian said. “This year is really the start of it. That’s really where our focus is. I don’t know what the timetable on this other thing is looking like.”