Is Texas ready for the SEC? Longhorns soon will get a taste of South's football fanaticism

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — One of the dozens of honky-tonks that line Lower Broadway Street in downtown Nashville, Robert’s Western World offers “The Recession Special,” a fried bologna sandwich with chips, a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a moon pie, all for just $6.
It’s not brisket, it’s not breakfast tacos, and it's certainly not Tex-Mex. But it’s the SEC, and Austin better get used to it by the start of the 2024 season.
As longtime Texas fans have learned in the occasional tussle with Arkansas or LSU or any of the other dozen current members of the nation’s preeminent athletic conference, the SEC identity extends beyond sports. It’s a culture of competition unique in college athletics, as seen by the unusual combination of intense rivalries and conference solidarity that was on full display at the recent SEC football media days.
There’s a reason fans from College Station to Columbia, S.C., break out the “SEC! SEC! SEC!” chants whenever a conference team faces off with a foe from another league. The pride especially resonates during football season for a conference that has won four straight national titles with three different teams and has captured 13 national championships in the past 17 years.
As Auburn linebacker Luke Deal explained in one of the breakout sessions at media days, next summer’s addition of Texas and Oklahoma will only add to the SEC's allure — both on and off the field.
“I'm a college football junkie,” Deal said. “I always have been since I was a little ball boy for my dad's high school football team. I love going to different away games. I love playing in the White Out game (at Mississippi State). I love playing in the Swamp (at Florida). I love playing in Baton Rouge and doing all these different things. So whenever I see that the greatest atmosphere, in my opinion, in college football is going to be even better, that's music to my ears.”
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Adding a size or two to the SEC ‘footprint’
The SEC’s expansion to Austin and Norman, Okla., will certainly hit all the right notes financially. Adding Texas and Oklahoma helped initiate a $3 billion deal with ESPN that will give the network the broadcast rights to all the conference’s games.
But expansion makes sense from a cultural and geographic sense, too, league officials and coaches emphasized during media days. Unlike the awkward link for UCLA and USC with the Big Ten, the addition of Texas and Oklahoma just stretches the SEC’s boundaries west from College Station another 100 miles or so. It also happens to lock down the ever-growing media markets in Houston, San Antonio, Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex — which, not coincidentally, will host the SEC's media days next summer.
Expanding in the right way and maintaining the SEC’s identity are important, said Florida coach Billy Napier, a Georgia native who has spent almost his entire career coaching in the South.
“I love this league that we compete in. I love this footpint,” Napier said. “I'm the son of a high school coach. My dad's family is from Tennessee. My dad is from Celina, Tenn. Got lots of family in Crossville (Tenn.). My mom's parents had a tobacco farm in Sparta, Tenn. My mom is from Huntsville, Ala. I spent 15 years in the state of South Carolina. I've got four years as the head coach of the University of Louisiana, and now to be the head coach of the Florida Gators. So this is special to me.”
Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, the architect of a burgeoning dynasty that has won the past two national titles, has spent 30 years as a player or coach in the SEC. The Bulldogs will be one of the first teams to welcome Texas to SEC play when they visit Royal-Memorial Stadium in 2024, and Smart hopes that Longhorns and Sooners fans will quickly embrace the pride that he feels representing the conference.
“I enjoy the SEC footprint,” Smart said. “I'm very comfortable in that footprint. I love going to see our conference dominant (in all sports). All the spring sports that we compete in seem so dominant. I love and embrace SEC athletics.”
Maybe to the exasperation of his wife, Smart also loves that footprint once the season ends. Smart’s son plays for a high-level youth baseball team that competes across the South, including a tournament in the Memphis suburb of Southaven, Miss., this summer.
“I also got to spend five days in the SEC footprint in Mississippi,” Smart said. “Travel baseball dad, which is fun and exhilarating. My wife wants to go to Italy and the Amalfi Coast, and instead we spent (five days) in Mississippi. I enjoyed every minute of that.”
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SEC coaches, players: Competition is at different level
But how much will Texas fans enjoy the action on the field? As anyone with a microphone on “radio row” at SEC media days will tell you, the SEC rivals the NFC South when it comes to the level of competition.
Jayden Daniels, LSU’s star quarterback, grew up in Southern California and spent three seasons at Arizona State before transferring to LSU prior to last season. From his perspective, the combination of size and speed on both lines stands out down South. He sees it every day in practice when LSU’s offense goes against 6-foot-5, 315-pound Maason Smith, a defensive tackle with a linebacker’s speed.
“The biggest thing I see the difference from Pac-12 to SEC is the big boys up front, with the line and how big they are,” Daniels said. “You have guys like Maason. That's a humongous human being that can move like that. You know, you are playing against those guys each and every week.
“I say just to be a successful SEC quarterback you have to go in there and just really prepare like a pro. If not, you might get exposed in this league because there are some great players out there playing against you.”
The rabid fan bases play a role, too. In the Big 12, Texas can count on a large burnt-orange presence in the stands on road trips to Baylor or TCU. That comfort level won’t exist in the SEC, said radio and television personality Paul Finebaum.
“With the Big 12, people tell me that I don't know what it is like to go to Ames, Iowa, on a Saturday,” Finebaum told TexAgs Radio, referring to the home of Iowa State. “First of all, I don't want to go to Ames, Iowa, and I can assure you Saturday night in Iowa does not compare to a Saturday in Auburn, the Swamp, Knoxville, etc. You could go 11 stadiums deep in the SEC. Do you think it's easy to play at South Carolina? The Big 12 is a good league. Good for TCU. The SEC is a different world.”
Jimbo Fisher, a former offensive coordinator at Alabama and head coach at Florida State, has led the Texas A&M program since 2018. The Aggies endured their first losing season since 2008 a year ago, when they went 5-7. There’s no room for error against teams that are almost all loaded with future NFL players, Fisher said.
“In this league, no matter whether you won 11 games or you've won five games like we did (in 2022), there's such a fine line in games you won and games you lost,” he said. “It's making a few critical plays at a few critical times in the game and finding those inches in which you've got to fight, scratch and claw for each and every play. And then that's how quick it can go from the top to the bottom, and any team that can find that.”
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Does the SEC really mean more when it comes to wins?
But when it comes to conference dominance, does the perception of the SEC match reality, or does the conference ride the coattails of Alabama, Georgia and LSU, who have combined to win 11 national titles over the past 20 years?
The numbers give mixed results. A&M and Missouri left the Big 12 together after the 2011-12 school year to join the SEC. In 11 years of SEC football, A&M has a 48-41 conference record. In their previous 11 years in the Big 12, the Aggies went 41-48 in conference play.
Missouri is almost the opposite. The Tigers went 47-42 in conference games in their final 11 Big 12 seasons and have a 41-49 SEC record since 2012.
As a whole, the SEC has a 65-38 record over the past five years against the other Power Five conferences, including a 32-15 mark against the ACC. However, the trio of Alabama, Georgia and LSU do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to that interconference record; take away a combined 25-5 record from those three, and the SEC has just a 40-33 edge against the other power conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 — in that same span.
Oh, and the SEC’s record against the Big 12 over the past five years? It’s 13-11, with Alabama, Georgia and LSU combining for an 8-2 mark.
As for the Longhorns, they’ve had mixed results against their future conference mates since 2000. Texas has a 6-7 record versus the SEC in that span, including three straight losses. The most common SEC foe for the Longhorns in recent years has been Arkansas, which has won three of five games against Texas since 2000.
Arkansas defensive end Landon Jackson, a Texas native from Texarkana with NFL aspirations, might be on the welcoming committee when the Longhorns visit Fayetteville, Ark., as part of the 2024 SEC schedule. He thinks both Texas and Oklahoma will fit in quickly with their new rivals and add an extra dash of prestige to the nation’s most heralded conference.
“They've been dominating the Big 12 for years,” Jackson said. “I mean, it just brings more rivalries to the SEC. For us personally, we now got that OU-Arkansas rivalry beyond the border. I wasn't here at the time, whenever Arkansas played Texas, but talking to the players and the fans that were here, they stressed how big of a game that was. I think that will bring a big rivalry. You get that Texas A&M-Texas rivalry again. It brings in a lot more fun to the SEC, so I like that.”
Even Alabama coach Nick Saban, college football’s reigning curmudgeon, likes the move orchestrated by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and the university leaders at Texas and Oklahoma.
“Oh, I think it's a great addition to the SEC,” Saban said. “You have two great programs that have great traditions, that have great fan support. They are going to add a lot to the competition. I think with the new scheduling that we'll have in the future, it's more good games for fans, more diversity in who you play. So there's a lot of positives about it.
“From a coaching standpoint, it's going to be much more challenging to be able to compete week in and week out. I think when you look at the SEC, the thing that separates it is not the top, but the depth, how many good teams there are.”
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Do Texas fans have an appetite for increased competition?
But back to that fried bologna sandwich on Broadway. Will Longhorns fans learn to love hot Nashville chicken? Will they choose grits over huevos rancheros for breakfast? And can pulled pork ever replace homemade smoked sausage?
LSU All-American defensive tackle Mekhi Wingo thinks the new SEC arrivals will embrace all things South, even beyond the football field.
“The food has been phenomenal,” said Wingo, a native of Missouri who’s about to start his second season with the Tigers. “This is definitely a place I haven't had a problem keeping my weight on.
“At first, I didn't really vibe with the crawfish, but I grew into it. It's really good now. They have some really good food down in Baton Rouge — but I'm not too much of a gumbo person.”
Of course, Texas fans will pass on the best of any cuisine if it means wins over LSU or the other elite programs in the SEC. The Longhorns have one more season to navigate the Big 12 before severing almost all of the ties to the defunct Southwest Conference, which dissolved in 1996 while melding with the Big Eight to form the Big 12.
“The one thing I would tell them: Get ready to play the best of the best,” said Florida wide receiver Ricky Pearsall, who grew up in Arizona. “I mean, that's the reason why I came here. I wanted to play against the best of the best every single snap. The SEC is that conference to do that.
“And get ready for the traditions and histories that lie in the SEC, as well. I think that was a big thing that stood out to me and I was excited for.”