A major conference shakeup could be coming in college sports, but Texas A&M may be trying to stand in the way of it happening.
The Houston Chronicle’s Brent Zwerneman reported on Wednesday that Texas and Oklahoma have reached out to the SEC about joining their conference. Zwerneman went as far as to say an announcement about the two schools moving to the SEC could come within the next few weeks. Now, some are wondering if Texas A&M may have planted the story.
Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports laid out some of the reasons Texas A&M would be motivated to pull back the curtain on talks of Oklahoma and Texas joining the SEC. At the moment, Texas A&M is the only Texas team in the country’s strongest football conference. They probably don’t want the Longhorns joining them. The logic is that Texas A&M may have leaked the story so that political forces and fans could push back against the conference shakeup and potentially scuttle it.
As Thamel notes, Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork was one of the few SEC ADs who attended SEC Media Days this week. Thamel wonders if that was a “convenient way to shine a spotlight on Texas’ reported conversations.”
Texas A&M currently has a monopoly on recruits who want to play football in both Texas and the SEC. That would change if the University of Texas joins the conference.
This is not the first time there has been talk of Texas and/or Oklahoma changing conferences. If the SEC added Texas and Oklahoma, they would go from 14 schools to 16, and would add to the strongest athletic conference in the country. That would, in theory, make it even tougher for Texas A&M to break through and contend. You can certainly see why the Aggies would be opposed to the idea.
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