The SEC oversteps, attempts to claim Texas Longhorns legend for their own

Realignment has turned college athletics on its head. The Big Ten and SEC are doing everything they can to consolidate into super conferences and for the latter, the first step was to get the Texas Longhorns into the fray. The SEC needed Texas and Texas needed the SEC, so the move, along with countless others across the country, made sense, but the history of Texas football, is not in the SEC. 

On Wednesday, the SEC named former Texas quarterback Vince Young to the 2024 SEC Legends Class despite the fact that Young played his entire historic three-year career in the Big 12. Across his three years in Austin, Young only faced an SEC team once, Arkansas in 2004 and he only threw for 150 yards and two touchdowns with 56 yards on the ground. A nice performance in a 22-20 win, but not the stuff of SEC legends. 

Young deserves acknowledgment for his career, but that happens in the College Football Hall of Fame to which he was inducted in 2019. We’re all willing to accept that Texas plays in the SEC now, and that fact provides us with incredible football games on a weekly basis which will make the conference and the school boatloads of money. But the constant desire of these conferences to colonialistically reclaim other conferences’ history for their own is absurd. 

My favorite example came this Summer when the ACC laid claim to USA swimming legend Katie Ledecky, who competed for Stanford from 2016 to 2018, long before anyone conceived of the modern “All Coasts Conference” version of the ACC. 

Vince Young is absolutely a legend, but not of the SEC. Halls of Fame or Halls of Honor only serve one purpose and that is to tell the history of the league, the team, or in this case the conference. While this decision is relatively harmless, constantly rewriting sports history does an unnecessary disservice to future generations. Though, the only thing the SEC has on its mind is taking complete control of college sports, and removing the Big 12 from history any way they can is a step in the right direction.