After three years of waiting, it’s finally here. The No. 1 Texas Longhorns will play SEC football for the first time this week.
Recently the SEC slogan, “It Just Means More,” has been thrown around. While it’s business as usual for head coach Steve Sarkisian and his team this week, he understands the significance of this weekend’s game, as he knows that Texas has to win every remaining game this season if it wants a shot at playing in the SEC Championship game.
“This is our first SEC game at home, and we’re going to embrace that side of it, but it’s not going to affect the way we prepare for the game and the way we go about our business in the game,” Sarkisian said. “The way we look at it, this is an SEC championship game.”
When Sarkisian first came to Texas, he didn’t know the school would be making the move to the SEC, but he did know one thing: Texas expects championships.
“When (I found) out, (I was) like, okay, all right, it’s a little bit of a shift,” Sarkisian said. “But it wasn’t that big of a shift from the idea of what we thought we needed to do to be a championship team here at Texas.”
Sarkisian proved he could put together a championship team in the Big 12, as the team won the conference championship last year. Now, in his fourth season with the Longhorns, he has realized that he is the man to represent the University of Texas on one of the biggest national stages.
“There’s a standard here that is very high, and there’s an expectation of performance,” Sarkisian said. “Whether it was the Big 12 or the SEC, there’s an expectation that we’re going to compete for a conference championship year in and year out, and there’s an expectation that we’re competing for a national championship, and so the conference may have changed, but our standard and our expectations really haven’t.”
This year, winning a conference championship is as important as ever. With the new look of college football, 12 teams will make the College Football Playoff with the Power Four conference champions getting a first-round bye. But this year the task is more difficult than ever, especially for SEC teams.
Heading into week five, four of the top-five teams in the AP poll are in the SEC. Finishing at the top of the conference will be key to having a path to the championship game because when the SEC got rid of divisions this year, they eliminated the rule where the automatic division champions play for the top spot.
Not only does Sarkisian understand the importance of winning every game, but the players do too. Fifth-year offensive lineman Jake Majors will have a full-circle moment in his final year at Texas, as he was a redshirt freshman at Texas when the move to the SEC was announced.
“I’m just really excited to be a part of a conference that I grew up watching,” Majors said. “Back (in 2021), it seemed like it was so far away, and now it’s here, and I’m really excited.”
Everyone in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium on Saturday will share the excitement as the Longhorns will take on the 1–3 Mississippi State Bulldogs for their first ever SEC opponent.
