New adds eager to compete
Texas, Oklahoma joining an SEC that features stellar teams in many sports besides football
COLLEGE STATION — The Southeastern Conference earned its prodigious reputation on the strength of seven consecutive football national titles starting in 2006, right after Texas won its last title.
But the SEC, by paraphrasing its longtime mantra, will “just mean more” than robust football to new entrants Texas and Oklahoma. While football has been the primary watercooler topic around the country in the past week, loads of other sports also will provide the Longhorns and Sooners plenty of splash as the league’s 15th and 16th members.
Regents from UT and OU on Friday voted to accept invites from the SEC beginning July 1, 2025, but the powerhouse duo is expected to join the conference sooner, perhaps as soon as 2022.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about items of significance over the last year and a half or so,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told the SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum. “This rockets to the top of that list.”
The Longhorns’ and Sooners’ lengthy lists require prepping for more than what goes on in their respective Memorial Stadiums. Take UT baseball coach David Pierce’s new tasks at hand, maybe as soon as spring 2023: Conference series against LSU, Vanderbilt and Mississippi State, for starters, among a handful of other traditionally strong baseball programs.
This summer three of the eight College World Series teams represented the SEC, and eventual national champion Mississippi State won two out of three games against Texas.
“Two great teams,” Pierce said at the time, “going at it.”
UT traditionally has been great in baseball, with six national titles, but none since 2005. Meantime, much like its dominance in football, the SEC has won seven of the last dozen national titles in baseball. The conference also has had at least one team in the best-of-three finals in 12 of the last 13 seasons.
Two SEC teams, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt, battled for the 2021 baseball title, the second time in the last four College World Series two of the league’s representatives were the last two teams standing in Omaha, Neb.
New Texas A&M baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle, late of TCU and the Big 12, simply beat Pierce to the punch in competing in the league known for its ultra-competitive baseball.
“It’s exactly what we signed up for,” Schlossnagle said. “I left a supercomfortable situation, and there were definitely things left to do at TCU … but for me, it was about, ‘Let’s see what we can do in the SEC West.’ ”
A&M and UT are expected to meet annually in the “big three” of football, basketball and baseball, based on their 100-mile proximity and the common-sense financial approach of reuniting old rivals as much as possible as conference members — a conference that as recently as 2011 had Fayetteville, Ark., as its westernmost outpost.
The good thing for Pierce, who’s made the CWS in two of his first four opportunities in Austin, is a program only needs to be middling, or even a little worse, in SEC play to make the 64-team NCAA baseball tournament. For example, the 2018 Aggies squeezed into the NCAA postseason with a 13-17 league record, primarily based on playing in the powerful conference.
Speaking of the diamond sports, OU is expected to add instant eminence to an already-strong softball league. The Sooners, behind iconic coach Patty Gasso, have won four of the last nine Women’s College World Series since 2012, while SEC programs (Florida twice and Alabama) have won three titles in the same span.
On the hoops front, new UT and OU men’s coaches Chris Beard and Porter Moser appear to have caught a bit of a break with a change in league venues. The SEC hasn’t won a national title in basketball since Kentucky in 2012, and the league’s previous two titles were in 2006-07 by Florida.
Baylor of the Big 12 won its first men’s basketball national title this year, while the SEC didn’t have a representative in the 2021 Final Four, and had only had two participants in the last five Final Fours.
In January, Alabama football coach Nick Saban won his sixth national title with the Crimson Tide, and Alabama is by far the biggest reason for the SEC’s dominance in football since Texas won a national title in 2005 (11 SEC championships in 15 years). Asked the key to longevity in the SEC, Saban said it’s a quite simple formula.
“You’ve got to win,” he said. “What does it take to win? That answers the question better than anything.”
The SEC, nearly across the board, has figured out the answer. The conference this summer collected nearly a third of the top 30 finishes in the Directors’ Cup, the annual tabulation of overall success in an athletic department. Texas won its first Directors’ Cup this year, on the strength of national titles in men’s swimming and diving and women’s rowing and women’s tennis, while Oklahoma placed 24th.
No. 5 Florida earned the highest finish among nine current SEC members in the top 30, and Alabama (seventh), Arkansas (eighth) and Georgia (10th) also earned top 10 finishes. No other conference had more than two members in the top 10.
“We saw 67 percent of our teams access … postseason tournaments or playoffs,” said Sankey, who’s served as the SEC’s commissioner since 2015. “We had eight different universities with nine teams earning national championships. What that means is more than half of our universities celebrated their own national championship moments.”