Arkansas, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas A&M entered this college football season with 88 combined years of experience in the Southeastern Conference.
And with zero league championships.
Texas is less than two months into its first SEC season yet could take a huge step toward Atlanta’s conference title game in early December with a victory against visiting Georgia on Saturday night (7:30 Eastern on ABC). Occasionally viewed as the biggest underachiever in the sport — the tradition-rich Longhorns somehow went 23-27 during the 2014-17 seasons — Texas opted for its fourth coach in nine years after the 2020 season by bringing in Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian.
Sarkisian had just guided a Crimson Tide offense that cruised to the 2020 national title behind three of the top five vote-getters for the Heisman Trophy — receiver DeVonta Smith, quarterback Mac Jones and running back Najee Harris — and he immediately went to work on trying to build that next power.
“You don’t come to Texas just to be a head coach,” Sarkisian said Wednesday during the SEC’s weekly Zoom call. “You come to Texas to compete for championships. We felt like if we wanted to win a national championship in the old model, you were going to have to beat Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and maybe Notre Dame, because those were the teams that were kind of rotating in the College Football Playoff. To make that happen, we felt like we had to get bigger up front on both sides of the ball and that we had to get faster on the perimeter.