What a week for SEC coaches.
First, new LSU head coach Lane Kiffin went off about the supposed difficulty of the SEC’s schedules, then bragged about his easy non-conference schedules giving him 20 free wins over five years. Incredibly, Kiffin then said that the SEC plays tougher games late in the season, when he gave Ole Miss a free bye week in November by playing The Citadel.
Then Steve Sarkisian, who said undefeated teams were a thing of the past just a few months before the Indiana Hoosiers went 16-0, took his turn at SEC superiority.
According to Anwar Richardson, the Texas Longhorns head coach was speaking at The Touchdown Club of Houston this week and took the opportunity to seemingly criticize his in-state rival Texas Texas Red Raiders. “There’s a team in our state that plays in another conference that has a schedule that I would argue if I played with our twos and our threes,” he said, “We could go undefeated, and they’ll probably make the College Football Playoff this year.”
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Wonder who that could be, other than Texas Tech!
Someone else found it exceedingly obvious who Sarkisian was referring to, and took the opportunity to fire right back at the Longhorn coach and his athletic director. In a post on X, billionaire Texas Tech donor Cody Campbell went right to the point.
“Schedule us then!” Campbell replied to a post about Sark’s comments. “We’ve been talking about it for years and we are more than willing!!”
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Seems a bit unlikely, especially considering Sark’s comments about scheduling after losing to Ohio State in 2025 and missing out on the playoff. When the Longhorns, at 9-3, didn’t get into the tournament field, he explained that all future scheduling non-conference decisions are now under review.
“Yeah, you know, I think there’s a couple things, there’s layers to this. Bear with my answer,” he explained to the media at the time. “First of all, we’re gonna honor Ohio State and Michigan. You know, that we went there, we went to Ann Arbor, we went to Columbus, and we’re gonna honor those return trips. So for the next two years, we know what our non-conference schedule is gonna look like, and that’s the right thing to do. We made the commitment to play them. Now we’ll honor that commitment for them to come play us here. I think anything beyond that is up for discussion.
“We need to take a good hard look at what our non-conference schedule looks like beyond the next two years.”
To be fair to Sark, no one would seriously argue that Texas Tech has a tougher schedule than Texas. Or even remotely close to Texas. Particularly in 2026. In fact, one ranking system has the Longhorns with the hardest schedule in the country. Obviously, that matters, and it puts him and Texas at a severe disadvantage.
The Texas Tech schedule is weak to say the least:
- Abilene Christian
- at Oregon State
- Houston
- Sam Houston
- at Colorado
- Arizona State
- at Cincinnati
- Arizona
- West Virginia
- at Oklahoma State
- at Baylor
- TCU
That said, a lowly Big 12 team, Arizona State, arguably outplayed Texas in the College Football Playoff just a few years ago. Texas Tech is clearly trying to schedule tougher teams, and finding it hard to do. Scheduling is a two-way street, after all, and many other big programs likely don’t want to risk the non-conference loss.
And the Longhorns played in the Big 12, until very recently. As one user on X noted, they went 60-61 in conference play from 2010-2022. They’re a better program now than they were then, but the “we would go undefeated in every other conference” act is getting very tiresome. Particularly when the SEC has struggled so much against other conferences in recent years. Specifically, given how Texas actually played last year.
They lost to 4-8 Florida, one of the worst Power 4 teams in the country. They beat Kentucky, another underwhelming SEC opponent, 16-13 in overtime. They needed a miraculous fourth-quarter comeback to get to overtime with woeful Mississippi State. They scored 27 points against UTEP in a 27-10 win.
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By the end of the 2025 season, advanced metric system SP+ had Texas with the 13th toughest strength of schedule, and 16th best strength of record. Texas Tech had the 45th toughest schedule and third-best strength of record, because they didn’t just win games, they won them handily. Like beating a very good Utah team 34-10 on the road. And handling a top-15 caliber BYU team by a combined score of 63-14.
Regardless, Texas likely has the most expensive roster in college football. They’re arguably the richest individual program in the sport. Nobody’s going to feel sorry for them. And with how hard their schedule is, they don’t need to go anywhere near undefeated to reach the playoff anyway.
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