-
Jeremy Willis, ESPN.com
On Thanksgiving in 2011, we thought we saw the end of the Texas-Texas A&M football rivalry.
When Texas senior, and future NFL great, Justin Tucker nailed a 40-yard, winning field goal, it gave the Longhorns a 27-25 win over their hated rivals and closed out a series that had been played since 1894.
“It was special,” Tucker said at the time. “This is what we play for in college football. … And being able to put a smile on every Longhorns [fan’s] face tonight was special to me.”
It was the end because conference realignment was splitting up the Aggies and Longhorns. Texas A&M was leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. It would take another titanic round of conference realignment for Texas to join the Aggies there.
And to get the rivalry back on the schedule.
Though, by Saturday, the Aggies and Longhorns won’t have met on a football field in 4,755 days, the hate went nowhere.
The teams have met in other sports. The Horns also swiped Texas A&M’s baseball coach, Jim Schlossnagle, in June. His hiring came a day after he said: “I took the job at Texas A&M to never take another job again.” But since that Thursday 13 years ago, the football rivalry has largely been reduced to political maneuvers, social media spats and rote answers from new coaches.
Here’s a look at the timeline of pettiness before the Longhorns and Aggies finally play again (Saturday, 7:30 p.m. ET on ABC/ESPN+):
2012
The SEC’s addition of Texas A&M and Missouri was the conference’s first movement outside its traditional footprint. The chance to add new TV markets and expand into new regions has been a factor in expansion ever since. But then-Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds didn’t think the SEC was getting much out of the deal.
When it was said SEC expanded its footprint into Texas by adding A&M, Dodds said, “They have a sliver down the East side” of Texas.
— Kirk Bohls (@kbohls) May 31, 2012
One year after Tucker beat the Aggies, the teams were moving on. TCU replaced A&M as Texas’ Thanksgiving Day opponent in 2012 and the Aggies would play Missouri during the holiday weekend.
With the breakup still raw, Texas’ Alex Okafor felt pity for A&M’s players.
Texas DE Alex Okafor: “I feel sorry for A&M. We still have a big-time game on Thanksgiving. They’re missing out.”
— Kirk Bohls (@kbohls) November 19, 2012
The Aggies, riding the mania around Johnny Manziel’s Heisman run, an upset of No. 1 Alabama, and an 11-2 season, might not have been too concerned about their holiday plans.
2013
Throughout this time without the rivalry, the Texas state government tried its hardest to enact laws to force the two teams to play each other.
The first came with HB 778, filed by state representative Ryan Guillen, a Texas A&M graduate. The bill, which never made it out of its legislative committee, did feature a penalty.
“Whichever institution refused to participate in the showdown would suffer restrictions on its athletic scholarships,” the Texas Tribune reported.
Another similar bill was filed by representative Lyle Larson in 2018. In 2019, the bill gained support from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Texas graduate. Abbott even called attention to the measure in his state of the state speech that year.
That measure also died in committee.
Though the legislature was trying to force the two sides back on the field in 2013, everyone from chancellors to athletic directors, coaches and players were trading shots at one another.
“They left,” Dodds said, sounding not at all like the scorned party, in March 2013. “They’re the ones that decided not to play us. We get to decide when we play again.”
At SEC meetings that year, then-Texas A&M chancellor R. Bowen Loftin was asked for a one-liner about his school’s former rival.
“I don’t have to make it anymore,” Loftin said. “[The rivalry is] not relevant to us anymore, that’s the whole point. It’s not an important issue.”
Being continually asked about it kind of makes it relevant but that shouldn’t get in the way of pettiness. But then the football season came around.
In the second week of the 2013 season, Texas was crushed by BYU 40-21, with Cougars QB Taysom Hill racking up 388 total yards and three scores. Aggies defensive back Toney Hurd Jr. made a bold declaration.
Texas A&M is the university of Texas.
— Toney Hurd Jr. (@HURDjunior) September 8, 2013
The tweet reached then-Texas coach Mack Brown, who bristled at the notion.
“We are the university of Texas in this state and will be, regardless of what some [Texas A&M] kid tweets,” Brown said.
The Aggies still had Manziel and were heading to a 9-4 season. The Longhorns would finish 8-4 that season, but Brown would announce his departure in December.
By November 2013, nearing two years since the last game, it was time again to ask people around the programs about whether they wanted to renew the game. Jason Cook, then an associate athletic director at A&M, took his turn in stating that no regular-season game was coming.
“We hope to play them again in a BCS bowl or playoff game at some point,” Cook told ESPN at the time.
2014
The end of 2013 saw huge changes at UT. Brown was gone and Dodds announced his retirement. Steve Patterson, a Texas alum, would take over as AD and Charlie Strong replaced Brown.
Though Strong was the first of many new coaches at the programs to generically endorse the rivalry’s return, saying “I’d love to play it,” his AD wasn’t feeling the same way.
“There’s a lot of great tradition with Texas A&M. At some point in time, does it make some business sense, some branding sense to play again? I don’t know,” Patterson said in early April. “It’s not at the top of my list.”
Later in the month, Patterson said more to SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum.
UT AD Steve Patterson told us “unless there is a compelling reason,” the football series between Texas and Texas A&M is dead.
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) April 25, 2014
In May, the Horns and Aggies would meet again, but in an NCAA baseball regional. Aggies football coach Kevin Sumlin said, “Eventually, I think it will happen,” referring to renewing the rivalry.
Though the spring was busy, another football season went by without the teams meeting. Strong went 6-7 in his first season in charge of the Longhorns. The Aggies went 8-5 and Sumlin & Co. were rolling on the recruiting trail, signing a class that included five-stars Daylon Mack and QB Kyler Murray, who had teased the Longhorns about potentially coming there.
2015
Strong and Sumlin again said they’d like to see the rivalry return. Strong was more cautious about it this time.
“Let me win some games first,” he said. “Then I can push it. I don’t know if I want to go walking into College Station right now.”
The Aggies didn’t miss their chance to capitalize on the Texas coach capitulating to A&M.
— Daylon Mack (@DaylonMack) April 16, 2015
Though the coaches were playing nice, administrators in College Station were ready to crank up the hating again.
Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp first said playing the Aggies meant getting on “real TV,” a veiled shot at UT’s Longhorn Network (which was run by ESPN).
Then, when Texas announced it would begin selling beer and wine at football games, Sharp came out firing.
“Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol,” Sharp said.
2017
By 2017, it had been more than five years without the rivalry. That didn’t lessen any of the bitterness from some of those involved. Bill Bryne, A&M’s AD from 2003 to 2012, looking back on his time, said he wanted the SEC to keep Thanksgiving weekend open to continue the rivalry but was thwarted by his counterpart in Austin.
“Their AD [DeLoss Dodds] at the time came out and said we will never play Texas A&M again, and they worked along with Baylor and the conference to have no one in the [Big 12] schedule us,” Bryne told AL.com a few years later. “There were other forces at work to make sure we didn’t play.”
Byrne would go on to say, “We don’t need them anymore.”
Despite his desire to see it happen, Strong’s tenure at Texas came and went without the rivalry. He was fired after the 2016 season. Soon after Byrne’s comments, new Texas coach Tom Herman echoed his predecessor’s desire to see the game return.
2018
Before the 2018 season, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas had tried to schedule a home-and-home series with Texas A&M for the 2022 and 2023 seasons. That would have given college football back the rivalry two years soon.
The Aggies said no.
“We were already booked,” Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward told the Chronicle. “We’re booked 10 years out. He had an opening at the time, and it suited him, but it didn’t suit us.”
Woodward also said that playing in the SEC West was all the Aggies needed.
“You have Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss and Mississippi State rolling in here every other year and Arkansas in Dallas every year. That’s a pretty darn good schedule,” Woodward said.
The Longhorns scheduled Alabama instead. Their win over the Tide in 2023 helped put them in the College Football Playoff. The Aggies would lose nonconference games to App State and Miami in those seasons.
The Aggies got a new coach in 2018 — Jimbo Fisher, who hired ace recruiter Tim Brewster, to his staff in College Station.
Brewster wasted little time getting caught up in the rivalry sniping by being subtweeted by then-Texas QB Sam Ehlinger who tagged then-Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa, who had just led the Tide to a national title.
Tell him to stop riding on your back! @Tuaamann_ https://t.co/d2HNnHhL3e
— Sam Ehlinger (@sehlinger3) February 20, 2018
2020
After years of administrators and politicians stating how much they wanted the game back, pushing for the game to come back or saying the game would come back at some point in the future, nothing much had changed.
Fans, too, called for the game to be back. Texas A&M AD Ross Bjork, who was hired in 2019, got back to one hopeful fan.
Howdy Josh! Sorry my friend, ain’t going to happen this year nor is this being discussed anywhere at A&M. I’ve been here over a year & no one from there has asked me to play them. Let’s get this season going & keep moving forward 👊👍
— Ross Bjork (@RossBjorkAD) July 29, 2020
2021
A year after Bjork’s tweet, things were indeed moving forward, without A&M’s input. In July 2021, reports began circulating that Texas, along with Oklahoma, were in discussions to join the SEC.
The Austin American-Statesman reported at the time that the Big 12 believed talks between the SEC and the two schools had been going on for months, though Texas A&M had been left out of the discussions. An SEC source told ESPN’s Heather Dinich that it was inaccurate that A&M was left out of the conversation.
Bjork countered, saying he will be “diligent in our approach to protect Texas A&M.”
“We want to be the only SEC program in the state of Texas,” Bjork said. “There’s a reason why Texas A&M left the Big 12 — to be standalone, to have our own identity.”
Texas A&M’s board of regents even called a meeting for the “discussion and possible action on contractual and governance issues relating to Texas A&M University and the Southeastern Conference.”
Bjork said at the time that he didn’t believe there was anything in A&M’s affiliation with the SEC that prevented the league from pursuing other Texas schools.
Loftin, who had retired by this latest round of expansion, said he believed there was an unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” about inviting other teams from member states.
“There’s this understanding among the membership — at least it was 10 years ago — that you don’t admit a school from the same state as a member school unless that member school’s OK with it,” Loftin told ESPN’s Dave Wilson in 2021. “We talked about it from time to time among ourselves, that this was the way it was going to be, that if we had another school in Texas wanting to enter the SEC, Texas A&M would have veto power.”
That bluster was probably the perfect coda to this chapter of the rivalry — a lot of big talk that ultimately didn’t mean anything. Also like most of the games on the field in the history of the rivalry (Texas holds a 76-37-5 record), the Longhorns came out on top.
And when it was becoming clear the Aggies would no longer be the lone Lone Star State SEC school, Loftin couldn’t resist a shot at the Horns.
“They have a very high opinion of themselves — which is not surprising — but not always justified. And that drives a lot of thinking there,” Loftin said in 2021. “… But the fit, culturally, of A&M and the SEC is very good. The fit of Texas is not. That’s just plain and simple.”
2024
With the game finally about to return, the Longhorns and Aggies have each had three coaching changes since 2011. All of those new coaches said they wanted to resume the rivalry yet never got to see its return.
Each program had athletic directors say some spicy things. But Patterson was relieved of his duties in 2015 and Bjork left Aggieland for the AD job at Ohio State. Neither got to back up their words.
The coaches new to the rivalry, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian and Texas A&M’s Mike Elko, echoed, at least some of their predecessors, in respecting the history of the game and being glad it’s back.
“We should play them,” Elko said in May. “When you have two programs like that in same state two hours away, they should play every year and it should mean a lot.”
If the 13 previous years are any indication, Saturday’s game should mean quite a bit.
