Texas center Jake Majors grew up shouting “Roll Tide!”

“My dad’s from Alabama. So I grew up an Alabama fan,” Majors said. “I watched Greg McElroy, A.J., McCarron, Mark Ingram, all those guys.”

Defensive end Barryn Sorrell grew up in Louisiana. Nobody makes it out of Death Valley at night, right?

“Coming from Louisiana, watching LSU football and watching those big SEC games, you just see like, how competitive it is and how big, how big football is in that conference.

The Texas Longhorns have waited more than three years to join the Southeastern Conference, but the wait is finally over. Texas joins the SEC this season and plays its first conference game Saturday at home against Mississippi State.

This is no fluke, the Texas defense is real, ready for the SEC after another strong showing vs. ULM

After four games, the Longhorns are among the top-five defensive units in college football

The Horns aren’t trying to make it bigger than what it is. But don’t let them fool you, either. News first broke about Texas’ desire to change conferences in the summer of 2021. This moment is a big deal for the entire university and athletic department.

“This is the baby NFL, what they call it,” receiver Johntay Cook II said. “So just want to show them what we got.”

Oklahoma made its SEC debut last weekend and got a rude welcome from Tennessee. The Bulldogs (1-3, 0-1 SEC) aren’t exactly going to find pushovers in Royal-Memorial Stadium. No. 1 Texas is 4-0, and so far, it’s looked every bit like the nation’s top-ranked team.

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Here’s what Texas QB Quinn Ewers must do to convince Steve Sarkisian he should play in SEC opener

Quinn Ewers did practice on Monday, but his status for Saturday’s game is still questionable

Not only did Texas win last season’s Big 12 championship on the way out the door, the Longhorns have won three of the last four Directors’ Cups for the nation’s most successful athletic department.

“The SEC slogan, ‘It just means more,’ matters,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. “But I feel like at Texas, when you take this job, it just means more here, too.”

Sarkisian has long joked that “I wish they had told me before I took the job” the school was changing conferences. But that wouldn’t have changed how he went about reshaping the roster and lifting the program out of mediocrity.

Sarkisian thought Texas had too many finesse players, too many receivers and defensive backs. Over time, his staff brought in more “big humans” in the trenches and beefed up just about everything and everyone.

Landing quarterbacks Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning sure helped speed along the offensive development, too.

“The thought was we had to build a roster and a team that could go beat the best team in the SEC anyway, if we wanted to be a national champion,” Sarkisian said. “So when the announcement came, it was kind of like, well, we just kind of need to execute the plan now, because that's what’s going to be needed moving forward here in a couple years when it all comes to light. So it’s been, it's been a heck of a journey.”

Bijan Robinson, Xavier Worthy share special moment as Texas Longhorns after Chiefs-Falcons matchup

Texas exes Bijan Robinson and Xavier Worthy had their first matchup as NFL pros Sunday night, and the two got to share a special moment afterward. Worthy’s Kansas City Chiefs captured a 22-17 win against Robinson’s Atlanta Falcons. Robinson was at the center of the storm on the game’s pivotal play as he was stopped […]

Already this season, some SEC fans have been complaining that Texas was given an easy SEC schedule. These were the same fans crowing about how hard Texas would have it in the new league.

The Horns can only play the schedule they were given. First up comes a Bulldogs team down on its luck after losing starting quarterback Blake Shapen for the season. He was injured in MSU’s conference opener against Florida.

Texas is idle next week. Then come the annual rivalry test against Oklahoma and a huge home game against Georgia in Austin. On and on it goes, as Texas faces some of the most bold-faced names the SEC offers — Florida, Kentucky and Texas A&M, for example.

Every team on campus is giddy for the stepped-up competition. But the spotlight will be squarely on Sarkisian and his football team the next two months while the SEC schedule unfolds.

“There’s a standard here that is very high, and there’s an expectation of performance, and it's not just in football, it's in every sport,” Sarkisian said. “But for us, like 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 that we’re competing for a national championship.”

“So the conference may have changed, but our standard and our expectations really haven’t.”