If the numbers are on the money, the cost of doing business in college football just hopped a rocket to the moon.

If Texas is going to spend $35-40 million on its roster for the upcoming season, as veteran columnist Kirk Bohls reported in the Houston Chronicle, everything is bigger than we thought in the Longhorn State.

If Ryan Day and Ohio State won the last national title with a payroll in the $20-million range, what kind of expectations do UT’s Big Cigars have for Arch Manning, Steve Sarkisian and company? A Heisman and an undefeated season?

Anything less, and their heads may end up on Quinn Ewers’ big-game trophy hunting wall.

After tumbling to the seventh and final round of the NFL Draft, Ewers has gotten some blowback for turning pro rather than spending another year in college cashing NIL checks. With Manning ready to take the reins in Austin, Ewers would’ve had to transfer to do so, but given the market for even mediocre quarterbacks, he could’ve commanded a pretty penny at a school in desperate need of a two-year playoff starter.

Instead he recognized the long-term value of ending his college career as the Texas quarterback who made the words “We’re back” mean something without the need to say them. If you think college football needs its own DOGE boys in a Department of Gridiron Efficiency to scale back the waste, fraud and abuse perpetrated by the likes of the Family Iamaleava, you should applaud Ewers for keeping his college legacy rooted in the 40 acres.

Which brings us to Nick Saban, the man who didn’t take the money and run to Texas a dozen years ago when he could’ve left Alabama to attempt an unprecedented national championship hat trick by winning a big ring at a third school.

Before he became Pat McAfee’s straight man on College GameDay and Donald Trump’s warm-up act as a University of Alabama commencement speaker – or is it the other way around – Saban made quite the debut as a full-time talking head last summer.

Let’s revisit one of his more memorable moments from the SEC Network’s coverage of SEC Football Media Days 2024. The subject: The University of Texas entering the Southeastern Conference.

“What kind of tickles me is all these people asking these questions about how Texas always ran the conference they were in,” Saban said with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle in his voice. “They’re not going to run the SEC. There’s a whole lot of arrogant people in a lot of places in the SEC. So you can forget all about that.”

Yeah. About that. Someone alert @OldTakesExposed. Texas may not be running the SEC in its first year in the league, but in the running for the best department-wide performance in the conference, especially in the most popular sports, Alabama, Auburn and the rest are staring at the southbound end of northbound Bevo.

With a month and a half left on the college sporting calendar, Texas has the No. 1 baseball team in the country and the No. 5 softball team, which only recently fell out of the top spot in the polls. The women’s basketball team was ranked No. 1 in the nation for two weeks as was the football team.

Football had the best conference record in the regular season before losing to Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. Ewers and the Longhorns reached the College Football Playoff semifinals, the deepest run of any SEC team, before falling to eventual champion Ohio State.

Vic Schaefer’s women’s basketball team tied for the regular-season conference title but lost to South Carolina in the finals of the SEC Tournament and the semifinals of the Final Four. Men’s basketball barely made it into the NCAA Tournament First Four, and after losing to Xavier, UT fired head coach Rodney Terry and replaced him with Xavier’s Sean Miller.

At 19-2, the baseball team has matched the best SEC start in that sport since the league went to a 30-game schedule in 1996, joining 2013 Vanderbilt and 2022 Tennessee. In his first season in Austin after leaving Texas A&M, Jim Schlossnagle has the Horns positioned for a run at their seventh College World Series title, their first since 2005.

Mike White’s softball team just got swept at rival Oklahoma but is one of the favorites to return to the Women’s College World Series. The Longhorns would love another shot at the Sooners, who beat them in last year’s championship series.

My research indicates that no SEC school ever had teams in four of the five major sports – football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball – reach No. 1 in their national rankings in the same academic year. Texas has done it in its first year in the SEC.

If the cost of doing business has reached a place where one football roster comes with a $40-million payroll, Texas is uniquely positioned to succeed at the highest level in any sport it chooses. At that price tag, UT could pay every single player on a 105-man football roster $380,952.38.

Maybe payrolls across the board will decline once the House settlement with revenue sharing is approved. Maybe everyone is front-loading exorbitant NIL deals right now to get them done before the new oversight board gets to work making sure those deals equate to fair market value.

Even so, it makes you wonder. If Texas has gotten this good this fast in the dog-eat-dog SEC, can Alabama and Auburn keep up?