• If Texas and Texas A&M win out, the winner of the Nov. 30 game will automatically advance to the SEC championship game Dec. 7 in Atlanta.
• Texas and Texas A&M are are tied atop the SEC standings at 5-1 with four teams behind them with two losses each.

Only two teams control their destiny when it comes to winning the Southeastern Conference. And they play another.

But not this weekend.

Texas football and Texas A&M football are on a collision course to play for a spot in the conference title game, but that hype won’t reach a fevered pitch until Thanksgiving weekend.

The path is open but the winning still must happen to get there. Either say, the Horns and Aggies can’t assume wins are coming against either Kentucky or Auburn. Too many upsets have already happened to buy into point spreads or an opponent’s recent struggles.

When the No. 3 Longhorns take the field for Senior Day against the unranked Wildcats, they will apparently walk into Royal-Memorial with no thoughts of the Aggies and the resumption of a football rivalry that’s been lying dormant for the last 14 years.

The same goes for the guys in College Station (wink, wink).

Horns face a Kentucky team that’s struggled lately

Since losing 13-12 against Georgia on Sept. 14, the 4-6 Wildcats have gone 1-4 in conference play. But that win was a 20-17 doozy at Ole Miss, which is currently playing as well as anyone in the country.

The league has been all over the place in 2024 from that UK upset in Oxford to Vanderbilt posting wins over Alabama and at Kentucky one season after the Commodores went 2-10 overall and 0-8 in conference play.

“That’s obviously the craziness of the SEC,” UT tight end Gunnar Helm said. “Everybody’s good and everybody’s beating everybody. There’s not one team that’s sticking out that’s beating everybody like there’s been in years past. So everybody’s good. Every road win in the SEC is huge, and we know that, but obviously, we’ve got to move forward and get ready for a great Kentucky team coming in here.”

The Longhorns avoided the upset bug in a real dogfight over the weekend, and the 20-10 decision over Arkansas was rightfully celebrated by a locker room that’s won 10 straight road games dating back to the 2022 season. Six of those victories have come by double digits.

One thing is for certain. If I’m either one of those teams from Texas that sit atop the conference with 5-1 records, the last thing I’d want would be to be stuck in a quagmire of programs that could all finish the regular season at 6-2 and be at the mercy the tiebreaker gods. That should go double for Texas which lost to Georgia, one of those that’s desperate to remain inside the top 12 of the College Football Playoff rankings.

Texas is no stranger to scoreboard watching

Coach Steve Sarkisian said the Horns can take a lesson from the 2023 team that was scoreboard-watching as it fought to secure a spot in the playoff, which was just four teams at the time. 

“We were at the mercy of other teams dictating our fate and our future,” Sarkisian said. “Last year, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to control what we do’ and we’ve kind of continued to sing that same song this year with what we’re doing. I think our players, in a weird way, they see all that.”

The big difference is the comfort in them knowing that two wins and another in Atlanta will get them a first-round bye and a spot in the national quarterfinals.

“They recognize that, but they’re so focused on what’s happening right now and what’s right in front oft hem, that I don’t know if they’re that concerned about that,” Sarkisian said. “But they’re so focused on ‘Man, I just want to play good this week,’ and that for a coach… that’s a really good place to be.”

As for Saturday, expect to see a lot of pregame pageantry as locker room veterans like Helm, Jahdae Barron, Barryn Sorrell, Alfred Collins, Jake Majors, left tackle Kelvin Banks Jr. and yes, quarterback Quinn Ewers — who was mum on the possibility of coming back for a fourth season — will take center stage. But the goal is the goal.

The Horns aren’t winning with style, but they’re winning behind a defense that’s on pace to be the best in school history and an offense that has made the right plays at the right time to keep its conference title dreams on the right track.

Three seasons after a 5-7 nightmare that was its head coach’s first season, the Horns are so close to making SEC history, which would come with beating their heated rival when a whole nation will be watching. 

Ahem, in two weeks.

Saturday’s game

Kentucky (4-6, 1-6) at No. 3 Texas (9-1, 5-1), 2:30 p.m., ABC, 1300, 98.1, 105.3 (Spanish)

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Texas education officials are expected to hold a vote on Monday on the use of Bible readings in the public school curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade English and language arts classes.

The board listened to hours of testimonies from those for and against “Bluebonnet learning”, a new curriculum that will affect millions of the state’s elementary public school students.

Those in favor of a Bible-infused curriculum argue that the holy book contextualizes material about famous artworks or texts like Leonardo da Vinci’s mural painting The Last Supper and Dr Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Specifically, as the New York Times notes, The Last Supper would be taught to fifth-grade students through an account of the final meal shared by Jesus and his 12 disciples. The lesson would also involve several verses from the Gospel of Matthew.

In the instance of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, King uses biblical characters in his letter to clergymen around the south. Advocates for this curriculum argue that students would need biblical context to comprehend the letter.

The Texas Freedom Network, a watchdog organization which advocates for religious freedom, individual liberties and public education, opposes the curriculum on the grounds that it is biased towards one religion, Christianity.

Carisa Lopez, deputy director of Texas Freedom Network, spoke out against the curriculum during a hearing in September, saying: “Teaching about the influence of religion in history and culture is an important part of a well-rounded education, but you can’t turn public schools into Sunday schools. This is fundamentally a question of respect for religious freedom. Public schools can’t favor one particular religion and promote religious beliefs many students and their families simply don’t share.”

The Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union in the country, said in a statement ahead of the vote that it believed this curriculum “violate[s] the separation of church and state and the academic freedom of our classroom” and “the sanctity of the teaching profession”.

David R Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar who reviewed the curriculum, told the Times that while he has “long been an advocate of teaching about religion in public schools”, he believes lessons should be factual, balanced and not promote one religion over another. He emphasized to the outlet that the Texas curriculum did not adhere to those tenets.

While the curriculum would not be mandatory if approved by the board, schools would be financially incentivized to adopt the new religious-leaning curriculum, receiving roughly $60 per student from the state.

The US constitution prevents public schools from promoting or advancing any particular religion, but states like Texas are part of a growing trend of conservative Christian ideology in public school classrooms.

Oklahoma’s state superintendent, Ryan Walters, announced earlier this year that all schools were required to teach the Bible and the Ten Commandments. Around the same time, Louisiana became the first state to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom.

Texas was also notably the first state to allow public schools to hire religious chaplains as school counselors.

This movement will likely see support from the upcoming administration of the president-elect, Donald Trump, who in addition to calling for the shuttering of the federal department of education, has vowed to bring prayer back in schools.

If approved, districts could begin using the curriculum by August 2025.