Five summers ago, in the dead silence of a COVID-strangled sports calendar, two athletic directors climbed into a white Chevy pickup in Dallas and pointed it east toward Birmingham. Nine hours. One leaky tire. No spare.
Fifty miles in, the tire-pressure light glowed on Chris Del Conte’s dashboard. He and Oklahoma’s Joe Castiglione would stop roughly every hour to pump air back into it, crawling across the South toward a meeting with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey that nobody outside the cab knew was happening.
“We were the Blues Brothers,” Del Conte told Horns247. “We were on a mission from God.”
That clandestine drive — the “Mission From God,” as the two ADs dubbed it — set in motion the most consequential conference realignment in college sports history. Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC. The Big 12 destabilized. The playoff expanded. The entire economic architecture of college football redrawn. All of it traced back to two guys in a truck with a bad tire and a movie quote.
Castiglione, who has announced he will retire as Oklahoma’s athletic director in June 2028 after 28 years on the job, kept the full story close. “One day, we’ll tell all the tales of the Mission From God,” he said. “But I’m telling you that my man CDC — the two of us together are kind of lethal.”
Lethal enough. The move that began as a secret road trip is now simply reality, and this week the Longhorns take their turn at SEC media days in Tampa — the last team through the league’s media “car wash” on Thursday. Steve Sarkisian will bring three players: quarterback Arch Manning, edge rusher Colin Simmons, and offensive tackle Trevor Goosby.
Manning will own the room. There is no real debate about this. No name in the SEC — maybe in the entire sport — carries more gravitational pull, and reporters will cluster around his podium in numbers that dwarf every other player’s session. He will almost certainly deliver careful, media-trained answers that reveal nothing, and it will not matter. The crowd comes for the name.
Sarkisian, for his part, will work the schedule angle. ESPN’s Football Power Index ranks Texas’ 2025 slate as the third-toughest in the country, and Sarkisian has already pushed that narrative publicly multiple times this offseason. Expect at least one more headline out of it Thursday.
The real fireworks, though, could come from Simmons. The sophomore edge rusher has never met a microphone he feared, and he has a habit of saying things about Oklahoma, Texas A&M, or whichever opponent is handy that end up circulating through rival fanbases like a brush fire. A Simmons comment making national rounds by Thursday evening is as close to a lock as media days offer.
Goosby is the insider’s story. He missed all of spring camp, and Texas fans want a health update. More than that, he has had a front-row seat to the Longhorns’ offensive line rebuild — transfers like Laurence Seymore and Melvin Siani brought in to restock the trenches. His quotes won’t lead SportsCenter. They will dominate Longhorn message boards.
Five years removed from a pickup truck with a slow leak on an Alabama highway, Texas is settled into its new league, preparing for a brutal schedule, and bringing the most famous quarterback in college football to a podium in Tampa. The Mission From God has a media day now.
Sources
- Five years ago, how the biggest move in realignment history — Texas and OU to the SEC — all went down — 247Sports
- Expectations for Texas at SEC media days: Manning still the main event — Yahoo Sports / Longhorns Wire