Texas football and the Southeastern Conference have existed for years on parallel tracks except for the occasional blockbuster game, like Texas-Alabama for the national championship two years ago, or the occasional player who crosses the Red or Sabine rivers to the nation's most successful college football league.

But now, with Texas A&M's pending absorption into the SEC, the twain are about to meet come signing day 2012. And chances are that both sides of the equation will benefit.

"Any time a Texas college steps into new territory, it makes it easier for other schools to come here," said Randy Rodgers, the former University of Texas recruiting coordinator who now works as a consultant to colleges seeking Texas talent.

That could mean a new shot of adrenaline for a pipeline that, oddly enough, has dried up in recent years. Only eight Texas high school players signed with SEC schools last February, down from as many as 28 in 1996 at the dawn of the Big 12 era.

As for the Aggies, Rodgers said, the SEC offers an exciting line of rhetoric and an enticing challenge to dangle in front of young men conditioned to thrive on challenge.

Dave Martin/STF

"The good players want to play the best competition, and no one is arguing that the SEC isn't the best conference," Rodgers said. "So from A&M, the talk track will be that you can stay in Texas, play as many home games as you're playing now, and then when we go out of state, you'll go to Auburn and Alabama and LSU and Tennessee instead of Iowa, Kansas State and Missouri."

Rhetoric, though, is the easy part.

"Whether the Aggies can win in the SEC has yet to be determined," Rodgers said. "If they can't win, the recruiting pitch doesn't become quite as attractive."

Word of Texas A&M's hopes of joining the SEC came during the opening week of game preparations, but it still caught the eyes and stirred the imaginations of some SEC coaches.

"Certainly, we would think the Texas student-athletes will have an opportunity to see themselves attending SEC schools," LSU coach Les Miles said, "and hopefully this would give us an opportunity to be even more serious about those guys."

Penn State and Big Ten

Alabama coach Nick Saban harked back to the impact Penn State had in opening the East Coast to Big Ten recruiters during his days at Michigan State.

"The fact of the matter is Penn State made the league better and opened up the Big Ten to the East, and it helped us all recruit better in the East because those kids got exposure in the East from Penn State," Saban said. "The East became one of the best recruiting areas for us as a far-away recruiting area at Michigan State, whereas before, we could never get a player there."

Thus far, according to the recruiting site Rivals.com, SEC schools already have eight commitments from Texas players - three for Arkansas, two each for LSU and Tennessee, and one for Alabama. That matches last year's record-low output, and chances are there are more to come.

As for this season, SEC schools opened with 26 players from Texas on their two-deep rosters, led by Arkansas with nine. They follow in the steps of such recent SEC standouts as Greg McElroy of Alabama (Southlake Carroll), Ryan Mallett of Arkansas (Texarkana), Matthew Stafford of Georgia (Highland Park) and nine-time Pro Bowler Alan Faneca of LSU (Lamar Consolidated).

Auburn rarely has recruited Texas over the years and has only three Texans on its 2011 roster.

Defensive lineman Nosa Eguae of Mansfield Summit, who started 11 games for Auburn last season and had four tackles in the BCS Championship Game, remains a champion of Texas high school football, but he also is an advocate of the SEC's focused intensity on college football.

"When you're in Arlington, you've got the Cowboys and the Rangers, and you've got UT and Baylor," Eguae said. "When you come down here, the only thing is Auburn and Alabama. They breathe it. They live it. It's all they've got. If you lose a game on Saturday (in Texas), you've got the Cowboys and the Texans on Sunday. It's different here. It's just so serious the way they play football in the SEC."

Home-field advantage

In keeping with that intensity, the SEC recruits its home turf like no other league. More than 80 percent of the SEC's high school recruits in each of the last four years have come from its home states - Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky - an area that in 2011 represented six of the top 15 states in providing Football Bowl Subdivision high school recruits.

Texas leads that list with an annual crop of more than 360 FBS players, and the Aggies have signed at least 20 Texas high school players in six of the last 10 seasons. So the SEC's home focus hardly will be disrupted by A&M's arrival.

When the Aggies have ventured out of state, Louisiana has been their most frequent target, accounting for 25 of the 41 out-of-state high school players A&M has signed since 1992, the first year of the 12-team SEC. Foremost among that group are three-time all-conference defensive lineman Brandon Mitchell, who went on to an eight-year NFL career, and offensive lineman Andy Vincent, who played three years in the NFL.

Rodgers doesn't expect the top layer of SEC schools to abandon their home-state focus. The bottom half of the SEC, though, could pick up a Texas player here and there, he said.

"For someone trying to get in here and establish a foothold - Mississippi State, Ole Miss, maybe Georgia or Tennessee, certainly Vanderbilt and Kentucky - for schools who have to recruit out of state anyway, it gives them another avenue," he said.

A foot in the door

As for Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas and LSU, they will continue to go head-to-head with Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas and, of course, the Aggies, for the state's blue-chippers. And now, with A&M in the SEC, they will have another bargaining chip, and perhaps Texas' contributions to the SEC will grow beyond the new contingent in College Station.

"The top SEC schools have always been recruiting the same guys as Mack Brown at Texas and Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, and they weren't able to get them a lot of the time," Rodgers said. "Maybe now, they can."

david.barron@chron.com