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Will Texas and Oklahoma be able to hang in the SEC?

Tuesday marked the beginning of a new era, as Texas and Oklahoma both joined the SEC.

the dawn of a new era.

welcome to the @SEC, Longhorn Nation. now let’s get to work. 🤘#HookEm pic.twitter.com/P9WRaWgKQf

— Texas Longhorns (@TexasLonghorns) July 1, 2024

I suspect that Longhorn and Sooner fans expect their teams to take another step in the College Football landscape. After all, these are two programs steeped in history who are often in the national championship race, so joining the premier conference in the country should only help that, right?

Well, if you have some Texas or Oklahoma fans in your life, you might want to tell them to slow down a little bit. It turns out that in the SEC, it does just mean more, which means that winning this conference vs. winning the Big 12 is a completely different animal.

Conference Recruiting Ranking

Years ago, I wrote about recruiting within the context of a conference. Here was the graphic I produced for the SEC.

Win percentage versus SEC roster talent ranking overall and against top-10 talented teams from 2015-2018. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

What we see is that there is a steep drop-off in win percentage as the 247Sports Composite recruiting ranking goes from first to third, and then things level out as you get to the fourth through eighth placed teams. You might dismiss this as just a place and time in the conference – after all, Georgia and Alabama have been dominant leaving little room for the other programs recently – but the problem with that argument is that you see the exact same trend in the Big 10, ACC, (former) Pac-12 and (former) Big 12.

Instead, I think this is indicative of the better recruiting teams in the conference consistently beating those ranked beneath them over long time-spans. In the Big 12, Texas and Oklahoma were ranked first and second in average recruiting ranking and could be the bullies. That just isn’t true anymore in the SEC.

So what does that picture look like now? Well, in the new SEC hierarchy, the average of recruiting rankings for the past four seasons would be the following: Alabama, Georgia, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, LSU, Texas, Florida, Auburn and Tennessee.

Things have certainly changed with the transfer portal in college football. But we showed in our Gators Preseason Magazine that high school recruiting is still king when it comes to winning in college football. That means it may be rough sledding for Texas and Oklahoma long-term in their new conference.

Recruiting correlation to performance

“But Texas made the playoff last year and beat Alabama!” This might be something you’d hear from fans from one of these programs, and they’d be absolutely correct.

But what if we looked at a team’s performance over an entire year compared to its recruiting ranking for the previous four years?

That’s exactly what I’ve done here, as I’ve plotted average recruiting player ratings from the 2020-2023 classes against each team’s 2023 Pro Football Focus (PFF) ratings. We see a strong correlation between these two at the top and then a fair amount of noise towards the middle of the conference. That noise is why we see the leveling-off of winning percentage as recruiting ranking drops.

Certainly Texas and Oklahoma are in the first grouping of teams. But not only are they below Alabama and Georgia, they’re also competing closely with Texas A&M and LSU as well. LSU went 10-3 last season. Texas A&M went 7-6. That kind of record disparity is what can happen to good and talented teams in the SEC because they don’t get games against Iowa State, Texas Tech and Houston.

Quarterback Play

Last season, the SEC had six QBs with a positive Yards Above Replacement (YAR, my proprietary stat, where YAR = 0 is average, -1.0 is bad, 1.0 is good and 2.0 is All-American level). The teams with those QBs went a combined 66-14 and 38-10 in SEC play.

Texas has a returning starter in Quinn Ewers who had a YAR of 0.82 in 2023. That bodes well overall for the Longhorns this season but also suggests Ewers is not a transformational QB. For comparison, Missouri’s Brady Cook had a YAR of 1.03 last season and Ohio State’s Kyle McCord was at 0.94.

Oklahoma actually had much better QB play last season, as former Central Florida QB Dillon Gabriel had a YAR of 1.73. The only reason the Sooner’s weren’t in the playoff was because of two one-score losses to Kansas and Oklahoma State where Oklahoma kept putting the ball on the ground (6 fumbles, 4 lost).

With former 5-star recruit Jackson Arnold taking the reins, there’s an expectation that the Sooner’s offense will be cooking, but I’m doubtful he’s going to be able to approach the level of efficiency provided by Gabriel.

Takeaway

Texas and Oklahoma had to come to the SEC. College football’s realignment dictated that big-time programs either come together or be left behind. That’s why we’ve seen this move and why it was followed up by the Pac-12 migrating to the Big Ten. We’re eventually going to have two superconferences and this is the first step towards that.

But all change comes with growing pains. Gary Pinkel had a couple of great seasons in the SEC at Missouri in 2013 and 2014, but the Tigers had been mired in mediocrity until last season’s surprise 11-2 season.

Florida has come face-to-face with its own mediocre seasons since 2009, with 10 of 14 seasons since Urban Meyer’s departure producing single-digit wins and as many 4-win seasons (two) as 11-win ones.

That doesn’t mean Florida can’t have an elite season, or that Texas or Oklahoma can’t as well. But what it does mean is that when the competition gets stiffer, it becomes harder to do so on a regular basis. That’s particularly true when you’re no longer the top-dog in the recruiting world.

That’s become evident to Florida fans longing for the quality of football from the Meyer days. In those days, Florida had the best recruiting program in the country, and it showed on the field.

So what does that mean for the Longhorns and the Sooners? Well, if we look at the last decade, their recruiting profile looks very similar to the one in Baton Rouge. LSU has had some great teams and won the championship in 2019 over that span. But the Tigers have also had six seasons of single-digit wins in those ten years as well.

It turns out, it’s a lot harder to win consistently when you’re not top dog anymore.

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