OK, Texas. The eyes of the SEC are upon you. Or will be, all the livelong day Friday, unless it turns out to be a snow day in the Dallas Metroplex. It’s time for you to justify your existence in the Southeastern Conference.

Along with Oklahoma, you were gifted a spot in the SEC, which didn’t need to expand and may one day come to regret that decision. In your first year in the conference, you were gifted the easiest schedule in memory, maybe in modern history, and still you didn’t win the league because you went 0 for 2 against a Georgia team in decline.

You were gifted a playoff path that began with the two lowest-ranked teams in the field, and after struggling to put away Clemson and barely surviving Arizona State, you’ve been gifted a semifinal in your home state.

Oh, sure, it’s against Ohio State, the hottest team still standing, and though it’s called the Cotton Bowl, it’s not being played in the Cotton Bowl, but you do get to bring Bevo.

All things considered, even though you haven’t completed your pledge period, you’re the SEC’s last hope. The rest of the country already has started dancing on the league’s grave. If you lose, the Big Ten may stage a New Orleans-style funeral for SEC football on Peachtree Street in Atlanta as a lead-in to the National Championship Game.

No pressure, Steve Sarkisian, but it’s about time a Nick Saban disciple other than Kirby Smart rises to the occasion this deep in the season.

Which is really the point of this tough-talk pep talk to the Burnt Orange Nation. The rest of the country is missing the point as it delights in delineating all the reasons for the purported death of the SEC’s dynastic control of college football.

Everybody can pay players now, as if the SEC were the only conference with generous boosters prior to the introduction of NIL money. The transfer portal has dented the SEC’s talent advantage, as if the top three and seven of the top 10 high school recruiting classes in the early signing period don’t belong to SEC programs, as do three of the top four and six of the top 10 portal hauls.

There will be a question to be asked if Texas loses Friday, which would make the National Championship Game SEC-free for a second straight year for the first time since 2004 and 2005. That question won’t be whether SEC football as we know it is dead and buried, gone, GONE! It’ll be this:

Can SEC football dominate the national landscape if Alabama isn’t dominating the SEC? Because the former has never happened without the latter.

Consider. The 2024 SEC football media guide says league schools have won 28 national championships, starting with Tennessee in 1951. Remember that the conference began in 1933, and it counts only those titles awarded by a wire service media poll, coaches’ poll, the Football Writers Association of America, the BCS and the College Football Playoff.

In the 46 years from 1951 to 1996, the SEC lists 13 national championships. Alabama won seven of them, six under Bear Bryant and one under Gene Stallings. Six other league schools added one each: Tennessee (1951) Auburn (1957), LSU (1958), Ole Miss (1960), Georgia (1980) and Florida (1996).

That stretch alone tells us the SEC didn’t truly begin to own college football until the BCS began in 1998 with Tennessee winning it all. From 1998 through 2022, the conference won 15 national titles in 25 years. Alabama captured six of them, all under Saban, and he added a seventh at LSU.

More than any other single event, Saban’s arrival at LSU in 2000 and his return to the conference at Alabama in 2007 forced the rest of the conference to step up or fade out. Since his BCS championship at LSU in 2003, five different conference schools have earned a banner. Four of them – Alabama (6), LSU (3), Florida (2) and Georgia (2) – have hung more than one. Auburn added the other in 2010.

But now that Saban has retired to become Pat McAfee’s professional sidekick and Coach Prime’s commercial running buddy, there is a serious void at the top of the SEC food chain. Is there a future GOAT candidate among his disciples Smart, Sark and Lane Kiffin? Can his successor, Kalen DeBoer, turn a rocky start in Tuscaloosa into a lengthy, rewarding stay?

Is the SEC even capable of re-establishing its hegemony if Alabama proves incapable of leading the way in a post-Saban world?

There’s one thing we know for sure that the rest of the country seems to have forgotten. Football is too important at too many places in the SEC for the sport to roll over and play dead for long. Texas, given the deep pockets of its big cigars, is on the short list of realistic candidates to be the Alabama of the future, if that kind of dominance is even possible in an NFL Lite environment.

But first things first. Friday presents an excellent opportunity for the other UT to prove it belongs and to demonstrate the SEC is not going away. You’ve been warned, Longhorns. Around here, coming up short on the big stage is not alright, alright, alright. A’ight?