Texas A&M’s defection from the Big 12 to the SEC might have been a bigger deal than anyone at the time realized.
According to a report from USA Today’s Dan Wolken, a decline in Big 12 schools’ abilities to sign players from Texas is a large factor in the Big 12’s relative struggles in recent years, and A&M’s conference-switch is the key factor in shifting dynamics in Lone Star-state recruiting.
From Wolken’s piece:
Prior to realignment, the Big 12 could reliably count on the vast majority of elite Texas high school players ending up in its league, with Texas and Oklahoma annually dominating the state. But the minute Texas A&M left in 2012, the Big 12’s home-field advantage began to disappear, opening up the state to raids from the SEC and others.
Between 2007 and 2011, 72.8% of players ranked in Rivals’ top-50 for the state of Texas signed with Big 12 schools. In the past four classes, however, that number has dropped to 47% — and it’s not simply a matter of Texas A&M’s numbers being transferred from the Big 12 to the SEC.
Since Texas A&M joined the SEC, LSU has more consistently recruited top players in Texas, Alabama (which wasn’t a factor at all) has come in to grab elite players, and even Ole Miss has made its presence known.
As of Monday, 40 of the top 50 Texas players in this class were verbally committed, with 19 headed to Big 12 schools and 15 going to the SEC. That includes the No. 1 player in Ole Miss offensive tackle commitment Greg Little from Allen, Texas. The Big 12 did get good news Monday, when four-star defensive end Mark Jackson Jr. flipped from Texas A&M to Oklahoma.
The Big 12 has not won a college football title since 2005, when Texas defeated USC in the BCS championship game. Since then, the SEC has emerged as the country’s dominant conference, capturing eight of 10 titles. No Big 12 team has even appeared in a title game since 2009. In the six years since, the SEC has earned six berths in the final contest, the ACC two, the Pac-12 two, the Big Ten one and independent Notre Dame one.
The Big 12’s relative decline is generally attributed to factors like the conference’s diminished size, lack of a championship game and lack of a television network, but Wolken posits that the problem really lies with recruiting, specifically in Texas. The departure of Texas A&M plus the increased exposure out-of-region teams get in the era of broad television coverage and social media, likely explain much of the Big 12’s problems bring in Texas kids.
According to Wolken, the SEC now grabs an average of 17.3 of Texas’ top 50 recruits, more than three times as many as they got before realignment (5.3).
“There’s a connection to the SEC now, and the biggest thing is there’s so much parity,” said John Walsh, head coach at Guyer High in Denton, Texas and father of former Oklahoma State quarterback J.W. Walsh. “Alabama is the constant, but across the nation there’s just a lot of parity and with the Internet and social media, everybody gets advertised so much better. They can have instant advertising on the phone. Even 15 years ago, you wouldn’t know a whole lot about Ole Miss unless you really did some research. Now if you are on Twitter and follow the right people, you’ll find everything you want to know. It really opened up the nation to what I think is the best high school football in the country.”
Clearly, for the Big 12 to re-emerge as one of the nation’s two or three premier conferences, its schools will have to fight back against the SEC’s incursion on its sacred recruiting territory. Not that a conference title game and TV network would hurt either.
