Steve Sarkisian didn’t spend SEC Media Days pretending Texas had already arrived at the top of the league. He knows the Longhorns still have one giant problem in front of them, and it has a name: Georgia.
Until Texas beats the Bulldogs, Sarkisian isn’t ready to talk like his team owns the SEC. That’s the blunt reality after Georgia has taken all three meetings since the Longhorns joined the conference, including a 22-19 win in the 2024 SEC Championship Game.
“If you want to be the champion, you’ve got to beat the champion,” Sarkisian said. “We’ve played Georgia three times and they’ve beaten us.”
That line says everything about where Texas stands. The Longhorns have closed plenty of ground in talent, but the results still belong to Kirby Smart’s program. Georgia has won three of the past four SEC championships and has turned itself into the standard every contender has to measure against.
Smart’s run has already produced national titles in 2021 and 2022, after Georgia also reached the title game in 2017. The Bulldogs don’t just recruit at an elite level; they keep reloading and make championship football look normal.
Texas, meanwhile, still hasn’t solved the Georgia problem.
The good news for the Longhorns is they won’t see the Bulldogs in the 2026 regular season, but that only makes another collision in Atlanta feel even more possible. The media picked Georgia and Texas as the SEC’s top two teams, so a fourth meeting doesn’t sound far-fetched at all.
That’s why this matchup carries so much weight for Texas. Beating Oklahoma matters.
Getting through Ohio State, LSU, Tennessee and Texas A&M matters. A trip to the College Football Playoff matters, too.
But until Texas knocks Georgia off the mountain, any talk of an SEC crown comes with one obvious question hanging over it: can the Longhorns finally beat the team that keeps beating them?
In Other News...
Texas Landed A Transfer Whose NIL Value Is Turning Heads Nationwide
Texas has become part of a national NIL arms race that keeps widening, and one of its newest additions is right in the middle of it. David Punch, a Texas native who transferred in after two seasons at TCU and was ranked the eighth-best available transfer by 247Sports, is projected to be one of the biggest college basketball earners in the country as the Longhorns continue building around high-end talent.
The broader picture is even more striking for Texas, because Punch is not the only player on the roster drawing that kind of attention. Spears, a former top prospect, is also being mentioned as a potential major NIL earner before he becomes NBA draft eligible, which only adds to the sense that Texas is operating in a different financial lane than most programs. The numbers attached to both players are eye-opening, and they raise the obvious question of just how far this roster can go if the on-court production matches the off-court investment. [Read more 🡒]
Texas And Baylor Are Bringing Back A Rivalry With New Stakes
Texas basketball is heading back to San Antonio for a matchup that carries more history than your average nonconference date. Texas Athletics announced the Longhorns will face Baylor on Sunday, Nov. 15, at the San Antonio Hoops Showdown inside the Frost Bank Center, giving the program a chance to play in the city for the first time since the 2003 NCAA Tournament.
The opponent only adds to the weight of it. Baylor has been Texas most frequent foe in program history, and the schools spent generations together as conference rivals before Texas moved on to the SEC after the 2024-25 season. Even with the conference landscape changing, this one keeps a familiar edge, and it comes with a setting that should feel a little different for both sides. [Read more 🡒]
Texas Fans Wont Believe Sarkisian Is Already In This Conversation
Steve Sarkisians name is already getting pulled into a bigger conversation than most Texas fans would expect this early, and it starts with the kind of outside speculation that tends to follow any high-profile program after a rough stretch. Michael Bratton raised the idea of what a failed season could mean for Texas, using James Franklins firing at Penn State as a reminder of how quickly expectations can shift when a team falls short of the standard.
Chris Del Contes track record suggests Texas has not been quick to panic with its coaching hires, which makes the chatter feel more theoretical than immediate. Even so, the fact that Sarkisian is being mentioned at all says plenty about the pressure that comes with the job, even if the current read is that he is not being pushed into a must-win corner this season. [Read more 🡒]