ESPN Analyst Predicts SEC Championship Matchup

College football will kick off in just over a month, and Texas Longhorns fans are eagerly awaiting the season, which seems to be already rife with hype.

The pre-season media poll from the SEC media days saw the Longhorns get the coveted number one ranking, making the target on their back larger than it already was. Now, though, the target will only grow as ESPN Analyst David Pollack made his picks for the conference championship.

On his show See Ball Get Ball, Pollack picked the Texas Longhorns to make the game in Atlanta for the second year in a row, but this time, he has them facing a new but familiar foe.

A Season of Parity

At SEC Media Days, the preseason conference ranking revealed that the Longhorns were the number one team, followed by the Georgia Bulldogs, who beat Steve Sarkisian's team twice last season, including once in the conference championship. Pollack opted for another team, though, and one that is all too familiar in Atlanta for SEC fans, the Alabama Crimson Tide.

“Man, I feel like if I’m gonna go to the next team. I do feel like Bama sits pretty good this year from a schedule standpoint. “From a weapons standpoint, from an experience standpoint. Do I have question marks about them? Yeah, but I have question marks about everybody.”

Alabama, which was picked third in the preseason rankings, missed the SEC Championship last season for only the fifth time in the previous 13 years. Kalen DeBoer, who took over for the legendary Nick Saban, hopes to get his team back where they have spent so much time over the last decade.

Pollack believes both teams won't have any easy path to Atlanta, though, stating the parity of the SEC this upcoming year:

“So, I’m thinking Texas and Bama will play for the SEC Championship. But I don’t think — I have no doubt saying that neither one of them are going in undefeated. Like, not a chance in Hades are they going in undefeated. And we’ve seen that a shoot ton in this league. We’ve seen a ton of Georgia, Alabama, undefeated. We’ve seen LSU undefeated. Like, we’ve seen a lot of that. I’m ready to put that stamp down right now. Ain’t nobody going into that title game undefeated.”

Should Alabama and Texas meet in Atlanta on December 6th, this will be the two teams' first meeting against each other under the SEC banner. The Longhorns beat the Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa in 2023, but before that had only played them once since the turn of the century, in 2010, when Alabama defeated the Colt McCoy-led Longhorns to win the National Championship.

For Texas, making back-to-back SEC championships, they would become only the fourth team in the past decade to do so, joining Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. For Alabama, it could return the success they sustained under Nick Saban. And for fans, it would be a game you can't miss.