Texas Longhorns win a share of the SEC regular-season title, setting up a rematch with South Carolina

The coin on the back of Greg Sankey's hand said South Carolina received the No. 1 seed in the SEC women's basketball tournament, but the net around his neck – cut down after another Longhorns victory – told a different story.

The coin on the back of Greg Sankey’s hand said South Carolina received the No. 1 seed in the SEC women’s basketball tournament, but the net around Vic Schaefer’s neck – cut down after another Longhorns victory – told a different story.

Schaefer’s Texas Longhorns are SEC champions, too.

And no coin flip would erase the smile from Taylor Jones’ face as she slid through burnt orange and white confetti on the court at Moody Center after No. 1 Texas smashed Florida, 72-46, on Sunday to secure a share of the SEC’s regular-season title in the Longhorns’ first season in the conference.

“We worked hard to get to where we’re at now,” Jones said afterward, “and I don’t think that will stop, either way the coin landed.”

Texas and South Carolina tied atop the SEC standings with just a single conference loss. The teams played each other twice and split those games. So, a commissioner’s coin toss determined the No. 1 seed for this week’s SEC tournament.

The toss went South Carolina’s way. Just about everything else is coming up Longhorns.

Texas rides a 13-game win streak with a team built to contend for a national title. No clearcut frontrunner exists for the national championship. Southern California, UCLA, South Carolina, Notre Dame and UConn join Texas among the favorites.

“I’m not trading my team for anybody,” Schaefer told me last week. “I love my team, I love my kids, and I’ve seen my kids do some really special things this year.”

This is the sort of team and season Schaefer envisioned when he accepted the Texas job in 2020.

Texas has long ranked as a strong program – it’s an NCAA Tournament regular – but it last won a national championship in 1986, when Jody Conradt's Longhorns went 34-0.

Schaefer previously coached Mississippi State to two national runner-up finishes, and when he left that job for Texas, he declared that he was coming to make Texas great, not good.

Now, he works just a couple of blocks away from the address of a since-demolished hospital where he was born in Austin.

“I’m a Texas boy,” said Schaefer, who grew up in Houston and graduated from Texas A&M, “and, in my industry, I felt like the University of Texas was the best job in the country. I felt like coming here, this was a place where you could win multiple (conference) championships and have a chance to win a national championship.”

Texas shows versatility during climb to No. 1 in country

These Longhorns win in a variety of ways.

Last week, they gutted out a 57-26 win against Georgia by limiting the Bulldogs to 30.6% shooting. Six days later, they received 32 points from their bench while dominating the Gators in the paint.

Texas and UConn are the nation’s only teams that rank in the top 20 nationally for both scoring offense and scoring defense.

They force bundles of turnovers that jumpstart their transition attack.

Madison Booker, one of the nation’s best players as a sophomore, teams up with Jones, a sixth-year senior, to provide Texas with a formidable frontcourt. Senior point guard Rori Harmon stirs the drink on offense and provides dogged defense.

Schaefer considers this the best shooting team of his career, but the Longhorns also defend the way their coach likes, helping them survive the occasional off shooting night.

“I believe in my team,” Schaefer said. “I’ve seen them fight for some gritty, gritty victories. They’ve shown me a level of toughness that I’m convinced on any given night, they can compete with anybody in the country.”

'Job's not done,' as Longhorns enter SEC Tournament

Schaefer won a national championship as an associate coach at his alma mater under Gary Blair, before he elevated Mississippi State to its best run of success in program history. His Bulldogs snapped UConn’s 111-game winning streak in the 2017 Final Four. Schaefer looks back fondly on his years coaching the Bulldogs and says no other job could have pulled him out of Starkville except for Texas.

Schaefer remembers a meeting with Texas’ other head coaches in 2022 after his team had reached the Elite Eight in his second season. As Schaefer scanned the room, he realized the coaches of 10 Texas teams either won the national championship or finished as the national runner-up during that athletic season.

“My team went to the Elite Eight, and we weren't even good enough to finish in the top half of the room,” Schaefer said. “That