Texas A&M Football: Has addition of Aggies benefited SEC over the years?
By John Scimeca
Recruiting
From the 2011 high school recruiting class, all of ESPN’s top 10 high school players from Texas signed with Big 12 schools (Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska). The 11th player who broke the trend signed with TCU, which joined the league a couple years later.
Contrast that with ESPN’s top recruits of 2020. A staggering eight of these top 15 Texas-born players signed with SEC schools, ranging from the likes of Alabama, Texas A&M, and Georgia to Auburn and Florida, as well. Three signed with Texas, one signed with OU, and one signed with TCU.
That’s similar to the year before, in 2019. Half of the 10 top-rated Texas high school recruits signed with the SEC, including four with Texas A&M and one with Alabama.
These numbers play out with national championships, too. For Alabama’s 2017 national title-winning team, 13 Texans dotted the roster. For Alabama’s 2009 triumph against the Longhorns, the Crimson Tide featured only three Texas-born players.
This season’s Alabama squad features 10 Texans, indicating an important trend that’s not going away any time soon: SEC teams are discovering a fertile recruiting ground in the metro areas of Houston and Dallas, including smaller towns in between. Arguably, the arrival of Texas A&M to the conference nine years ago has had a significant impact.
It’s hard to pick out exact correlation vs. causation, but the demise of Texas from this past decade is notable in light of the Aggies’ departure from the Big 12. The Longhorns have won more than eight games only twice since 2010, and they’ve had three losing seasons in that span.