In November's issue of Texas Monthly Magazine, there was a great article about the dissolution of the rivalry between A&M and UT. I'm cutting and pasting portions of the article. You can read the whole thing
here if you'd like.
But for those who won't read this, I'll summarize... A&M has gotten a lot of ribbing for being a pouty kid who can't stand that the Longhorns have a deal with ESPN and so we're leaving the Big 12. This article explains how that was the straw that broke the camel's back, but not the entire reason.
It gives a lot of history and background into the rivalry and why it's time for A&M to go.
Sure, we will be the whipping boy of the SEC for a little while. But give it some time. We'll recruit some good players over the next several years, and we're going to come back stronger than ever.
I thought this would be an interesting read for some of you... I especially thought of you, Laura.
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"UT, for its part, has far fewer traditions and slang terms for A&M, but this is only because UT’s favored mode is to behave as if A&M is beneath it, unworthy of elaborate rituals and responses. But don’t be fooled. For UT, to defeat A&M has always been critically important, a way to reaffirm the natural order of things: the primacy of power, wealth, sophistication, and social status. If you grow up in a UT family, you are likely to view the Aggies as a cult of hicks and rubes; as Aggies like to say about themselves, “From the outside, you can’t understand it; from the inside, you can’t explain it.” Of course, if you grow up in an Aggie family, you view UT and its students as insufferable.
Why is this rivalry so intense? It is due partly to the circumstances of the institutions’ births. The state constitution of 1876 required the Legislature, “as soon as practicable,” to establish a “university of the first class . . . for the promotion of literature, and the arts and sciences.” That was UT. No such lofty ambitions were prescribed for A&M. The constitution said only, “The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas . . . located in the county of Brazos, is hereby made, and constituted a branch of the University of Texas, for instruction in agriculture, the mechanic arts and the natural sciences connected therewith.” From the very start, A&M was the stepchild, the little brother, a status it has never quite shaken. It wasn’t intended as a “university of the first class.”
Conceived thus, over time the two schools have come to perfectly represent the two facets of Texas identity: rural roots and urban sophistication. For most of its history, A&M has been a school for families who lived far from the bright lights of the cities, whose children rode to school in buses that traveled on dusty roads, families who looked eagerly to the sky when dark clouds closed in over their cotton fields. Until the sixties, students, all male, were required to enroll for military training in the Corps of Cadets, fostering a highly disciplined, ascetic attitude that for decades was synonymous with “Aggie.” UT, by contrast, has always been the school for city folk, located smack in the middle of Austin, with its never-ending enticements of music and food and drink and the aura of power emanating from the Capitol, just a few blocks away. UT was the school for matinee idols like Farrah Fawcett. For the crew-cut young men of A&M it could sometimes represent everything in their lives that seemed unattainable. Conversely, for the many UT students who came from small towns, A&M could seem like everything they had wanted to leave behind. When the schools met on the football field, they were playing for more than just bragging rights. They were playing to vindicate their place in the world.
Over time the rivalry became a theater in which the clashes embodying the modern social and economic history of Texas were performed, season after season. The most basic narrative in Texas over the past century has been the transition from a rural state with agrarian interests to an urban, high-tech, global economy, and it is not a stretch to say that this narrative found its perfect corollary in the UT-A&M rivalry. Throughout the twentieth century, the conflict between rural and urban interests was played out innumerable times: at the Legislature; in the boardroom; on farms, ranches, and oil fields; and every Thanksgiving on the gridiron in Austin or College Station.
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HOW COULD SUCH a storied and important rivalry be allowed to expire? The long answer is that the Big 12, formed in 1994, was an awkward contraption to begin with, an amalgam of athletic haves and have-nots from the old Southwest Conference (minus Arkansas) and the defunct Big 8. A number of its members were not enamored of their new digs, especially Nebraska, which had been the dominant program in the boardroom and on the field in the Big 8 but now felt it was playing second fiddle to Texas and the Big 12 South schools. In 2009 the conference championship game was moved from Kansas City to Dallas, over Nebraska’s objections. By the summer of 2010, the disgruntlement of the former Big 8 schools had peaked and Nebraska and Colorado had withdrawn. Meanwhile, rumors flew that UT, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Texas Tech would move as a group to the Pac-10 and that A&M would bolt for the SEC.
“There were issues of equality and respect,” Loftin told me. “Equality” meant “equality of money” but also, as one A&M official told me, “equality in terms of voice.” The Aggies, and other schools, tend to feel that UT’s voice is twice as loud as theirs. “It has to do with mutual respect and influence and stature within the Big 12,” the official told me. “There’s such a big discrepancy among the membership.” To make matters worse, the Big 12 did not divide the money from its TV contracts equally, as the Big Ten, the Pac-10, and the Southeastern Conference do. In the Big 12, half of all television revenue was distributed equally; the other half was based on TV appearances. A&M had gone through some down years, and the Aggies weren’t getting the appearances they coveted. The league was structured to benefit the haves, and the have-nots got to hitch a ride. A&M saw itself as a have that was treated as a have-not. It never got over the failure of the Big 12 to address the inequality of revenue sharing.
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With Nebraska and Colorado gone, the conference looked to be in serious trouble, but the remaining partners, including A&M, agreed at the 2010 meetings to stay together as a ten-team league. This was less than ideal, because, according to NCAA rules, a league must have twelve teams in order to hold a championship game, a rich source of revenue. The SEC option remained a possibility for A&M, but the board of regents was not unified at that time about giving up the rivalry with UT, and with a budget-cutting legislative session on the horizon, nobody wanted to make a rash move.
Two things changed in the year since then. One was that Governor Perry named four new regents in 2011, who tipped the balance of the board more favorably toward the SEC. (Perry himself did not play a role in A&M’s decision.) The second was the stunning announcement in January that UT had signed a $300 million contract with ESPN to form the Longhorn Network. A&M had known that a network deal was in the works. Several years earlier, the two schools had even explored starting a network together. But the huge price tag of the ESPN contract surprised A&M—as it did UT administrators, who never imagined they would make so much on the deal.
“Everybody knew we were going to have a network,” DeLoss Dodds told me. “All the athletic directors knew it. Nobody said anything until ESPN paid three hundred million dollars. Was I going to turn that down? Hell no.”
It was as if UT had brought in another Santa Rita No. 1, the famous oil well drilled on land belonging to the Permanent University Fund (the endowment created by the 1876 constitution for the state’s two flagship universities). Royalties from the Santa Rita funded much of UT’s growth in the twentieth century (and A&M’s too), and now the Longhorns had struck another gusher—all for themselves.
Straw quickly piled up on the camel’s aching back. A vice president for ESPN suggested that the network might televise high school football games and referred to specific UT recruits who were unsigned but had verbally committed to UT. Once again, A&M felt blindsided. “I can’t speak for the NCAA,” athletics director Bill Byrne told reporters in January, “but I would imagine the governing body will look into the use of a collegiate television network airing games of prospective student athletes.” (Which it did. In late August, the NCAA outlined what would constitute “acceptable content” on the Longhorn Network. High school games were not included. Or, as a source at UT put it, “They told us we can’t do it.”)
By the time of the July 21 regents meeting, and Loftin’s phone call to Mike Slive, A&M was unalterably set on its course to join the SEC.
That’s the long answer. The short answer is that A&M’s departure to the SEC was simply the natural conclusion of its rivalry with Texas. For a century, the Aggies have been looking for a way to really stick it to UT, and they had finally found it. The A&M community understood at once the significance of SEC membership. This is how the widely read Aggie message board TexAgs.com put it on the day the Aggies’ move to the SEC became official:
Yes, the Aggies are clearly stepping up in class and the TAMU decision-makers believe that playing in the nation’s most prestigious conference—and finally emerging from what many have considered a giant, burnt orange shadow—will produce a significant recruiting advantage in the Lone Star State, something to directly combat the Longhorn Network; if you will.
That line about the giant burnt orange shadow is a window into the Aggie soul. It speaks to the depth of frustration among Aggies everywhere about living in the penumbra of UT for more than a hundred years and bearing the brunt of a jillion Aggie jokes. UT always seemed to have the upper hand; indeed, it even gets two thirds of the Permanent University Fund (according to an old Aggie joke, A&M ended up with one third because it was given first choice). Now A&M had a chance to turn the tables. Loftin described the move to the SEC as a “one-hundred-year decision for Texas A&M,” one that would ensure future success and stability. “The most gutsy, forward-thinking, and aggressive play in the history of Aggie Athletics,” TexAgs.com called it.
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The truth is that the differences between UT and A&M grow increasingly less significant with every passing year. For all the rivalry that exists between the two schools, both take their students from the same wide pool of applicants: good suburban high schools. Even the original reason for the rivalry—the primal struggle between the two facets of Texas culture, urban and rural—no longer exists. Texas is indisputably an urban—and suburban—state now.
So with all due respect to Tommy Williams, perhaps we should simply acknowledge that the UT versus A&M rivalry has run its course. It defined us for the past one hundred years, but the next hundred years will be defined by other conflicts, other rivalries. And that, finally, is what we’ll be celebrating this Thanksgiving at Kyle Field. Sing it with me now, one last time with feeling:
Hullabaloo, Caneck, Caneck.
Hullabaloo, Caneck, Caneck.
Good-bye to texas university.
Texas fight! Texas fight!
And it’s goodbye to A&M."
