“I Think It’s a Special Game”: Steve Sarkisian Continues to Support the SEC Championship Game

Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was one of the first coaches to talk to the media in Destin, Florida, today for the SEC Spring Meetings.

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To no one’s surprise, the majority of questions revolved around the future of college football and where the SEC stands on numerous topics that continue to divide the sport.

While the potential of an expanded playoff or the ever-changing landscape were quickly brought up for Sarkisian to comment on, one quote brought another widely discussed topic into the fold.

“I think change is inevitable,” Sarkisian said.

With change comes the breaking of old standards, and a few things in this sport are more historic than conference championship games, specifically in the SEC.

With the potential expansion to 24 teams in the College Football Playoff, which half of the SEC athletic directors now seem to be in favor of, conference championship games would both feel obsolete and mess with the hopes of squeezing an entire season in before the third week of January.

But that’s not the outcome, at least from the championship game perspective, Sarkisian is in favor of.

“I love the SEC championship game. I think it’s a special game. It’s a special moment for the two teams that have an opportunity to play in that game. Clearly, the fans love it. The viewership is incredible for that ball game,” Sarkisian said.

The 2025 SEC Championship between Alabama and Georgia was the eighth most viewed game in the nation, ahead of Alabama’s own first round CFP game, Oregon vs Texas Tech and even the CFP Semifinal Fiesta Bowl between Miami and Ole Miss.

When Texas competed, it was the sixth most viewed game of the year in 2024, beating out multiple prominent CFP games and every regular season matchup.

But looking forward, Sarkisian draws a comparison between the prospects of competing for this year’s championship with the one he won with Alabama in 2020 as an offensive coordinator.

“I will tell you, when we won the SEC championship in 2020 and that was the COVID season. Some would argue that the celebration was as big or better than when we won the national championship later in the year, because of just how hard it is to win this conference in that year. In COVID, it was an SEC-only schedule, and so that made it even more gratifying,” Sarkisian said. “I think this year is going to be very similar to that, with us going to nine conference games now, and the teams that can come out of the gauntlet of playing nine conference games and have an opportunity to play for an SEC championship in that game. I think it’ll be special, and so I’m hopeful that we can maintain that game.”

The 2020 Crimson Tide team played 10 SEC teams without an out-of-conference opponent or break, playing three of the other four teams that finished over .500 in the regular season.

In 2026, every single SEC team is tasked with playing 10 P4 opponents, nine of which come from the newly integrated nine-game SEC slate. A team like Texas or Oklahoma plays multiple SEC teams expected to compete for a College Football Playoff spot, on top of a game against a top-tier B10 opponent.

But that last sentence is what remains important for Texas’ head coach: can they maintain this spectacle?

“I don’t know if that’s a reality, depending on the change that potentially is coming, but in the short term, while we have it, man, I surely hope those teams that do make it cherish,” Sarkisian said.

But as a reporter pointed out, Texas itself was at the forefront of a game that will be harshly observed when making this decision. In 2024, Georgia QB Carson Beck went down for the season in the SEC Championship game, and one could argue Georgia would’ve made a further run at the ultimate goal, the national title, had he been healthy.

“I think that’s part of the problem right now in college athletics, everybody’s chasing one end goal and we’re losing sight of the small victories along the way,” Sarkisian said. “We live in an era right now of college football, it’s playoff or bust, and I feel for people because there’s only 12 teams that get in, and we have close to 70 power four schools, not to mention the G5 schools, and so the disappointment for the majority of these fan bases, because they all live with a playoff or bust mentality, and that’s the mentality right there with the question you just asked, that we’re minimizing the value of an SEC championship, all with the hopes of just winning a national championship, and just one team gets one of those.”

Sarkisian would go on to point out how, in every era, it still felt like teams could celebrate their seasons past the binary question of ‘can we win the national championship?’ That spanned the test of time pre-BCS, during that era, and even when there was a four-team playoff for over a decade.

“The rest of these teams can have really good seasons and celebrate their seasons, be champions, win a New Year’s Six bowl and still feel great about their season. And now we’ve gotten to 12 and now the tables have kind of turned,” Sarkisian said. “My concern is, I watched a coach get fired five games into a season last year after been in the semifinals the year before, that’s concerning to me about the health of our sport, and so to me I just think we got to find a way to get out of this notion of it’s a national championship or bust for all the schools, because it’s not a healthy way to live for our fan bases, it’s not a healthy way to live for our donors.”

These hopes may be futile at this point, but little has actually been done in terms of figuring out the future of the sport in the spring. The SEC has no plans to make a sweeping choice on their preferred CFP format, and there are a laundry list of issues that these coaches would like to tackle before the end of the calendar year.

Either way, conference championships are still a part of this sport, and Texas will push hard in 2026 with a revamped roster to potentially capture the final SEC conference championship game win.