Texas hopes timing continues to work in its favor in the SEC.
Matt Zemek, 16powers.com.
Timing, it is said, is everything. Timing smiled on the Texas Longhorns in the 2023 college football season. Texas played at Alabama at a point in time when the Crimson Tide were a mess. Jalen Milroe had not yet stepped forth as the high-level quarterback he became late in the season when the Tide defeated eventual Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels of LSU and then dethroned defending national champion Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. When Texas traveled to Tuscaloosa, Milroe was still in the process of figuring things out. Nick Saban and new offensive coordinator Tommy Rees hadn’t yet cracked the code for their quarterback or their offense. In most of the past decade, playing at Alabama at any point in a season was a recipe for trouble. This time, Alabama was uniquely vulnerable, and Texas pounced on the opportunity.
That win made the difference for the Longhorns in their journey to the College Football Playoff, but it made the difference in part because the Oklahoma Sooners – who defeated Texas last season – stumbled twice in the Big 12 Conference. Had Oklahoma lost only once, the Sooners would have created a rematch against Texas in the Big 12 Championship Game. Because Oklahoma lost twice, Texas avoided the Sooners in December and instead played a grossly inferior Oklahoma State team. Texas hammered the Cowboys in a Big 12 title game blowout and made its way to the four-team playoff. The 2023 season was not a parade of uninterrupted dominance for Texas. There were multiple games in which the Longhorns were shaky but came up with the right play at the right time, such as a red-zone stand against Kansas State and just enough late-game points against Houston.
Timing worked in Texas’s favor in 2023. Now we get to see if timing can help the Longhorns again in 2024.
We can’t know everything with certainty, but an early survey of the 16-team SEC Texas is joining would suggest that the Longhorns are getting in at just the right time.
Let’s go back to Alabama for a brief moment. Kalen DeBoer could be a great successor to Nick Saban over the longer reach of time, but for Bama to not have Saban on its sidelines invites inevitable questions about the quality of the Crimson Tide this season. Maybe DeBoer will be a rock star in 2025 and beyond, but the simple reality of a major transition in 2024 could hamper Alabama just enough to make a major difference. Alabama is expected to make the 12-team playoff this year, but it wouldn’t be a seismic shock if Bama went 9-3 and just missed the postseason party. It is not absurd to say that Texas has a better, more direct path to the playoff than Bama in 2024.
Texas is also joining the SEC at a time when LSU faces tons of questions under Brian Kelly, especially now that Jayden Daniels and his Heisman-level skills are gone in Baton Rouge. Florida is a total mess. Auburn, a school which has made a strong run at the national title once every four to six years for most of this century, is building under Hugh Freeze but is not at the same level of the Ole Miss teams Freeze coached to New Year’s Six bowls a decade ago. Tennessee could be very good in 2024 but is coming off a 2023 season in which it regressed. On many levels, the SEC is not necessarily vulnerable, but it is unsettled. The power structure in the conference is still likely to be relatively similar to what it has been, but the familiar faces at the top of the league aren’t quite as airtight as they previously were. Alabama is not the slam-dunk, automatic-playoff team it was several years ago. Even Georgia – still the class of the conference – has lost a small but real measure of the dominance it previously possessed. Texas is striding into the SEC and can credibly say that the conference is there for the taking. Texas isn’t the clear-cut favorite, but neither is it the obvious fourth- or fifth-best team in the room.
The only real way in which the timing of Texas’s entry into the SEC isn’t ideal is that Missouri and Ole Miss could be very strong. Mizzou and Ole Miss haven’t been consistently elite over the past 50 years of college football. They both had their moments. Missouri played for a spot in the BCS National Championship Game at the end of the 2007 regular season but lost to Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game. The Tigers also won two SEC East championships roughly a decade ago. Ole Miss had the great Hugh Freeze teams a decade ago and reached the Sugar Bowl two years ago under Lane Kiffin. For the most part, however, the Tigers and Rebels have suffered on the gridiron since the early 1970s. This year, however, the two teams are supposed to be playoff contenders. They have favorable schedules and returning veteran talent. That might be the only way in which Texas didn’t get dealt the perfect hand at the SEC poker table. That said, Texas could have received a much worse set of cards. You will not find the Longhorns complaining about their situation.
Now all that’s left is for Texas to prove that it can deal with the weekly challenge of SEC football. It’s less about the one really big game against Georgia on October 19; the bigger challenge is that in the SEC, good teams will usually have to play two big games in consecutive weeks. For Texas, it’s the double stack of playing Oklahoma one week before Georgia. Winning one game isn’t an overwhelming or impossible task, but winning both is the hard part. Then there’s the return of the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry in late November, one of the more anticipated events of the SEC season.
The SEC isn’t the strongest it has ever been, but even when the top teams face significant questions, and even when an icon such as Nick Saban leaves the stage, the SEC is still a contentious and dangerous place. Even if the timing of its big move feels just right, Texas has to show that its talent is worthy of the test we call SEC football.
Let’s say this in closing: Texas has a lot of favorable circumstances aligned in 2024. If the Longhorns don’t take advantage now, the stars might not line up as favorably in 2025, deep in the heart of Texas.
