Game Over Farmers Flight!
Texas A&M’s decision to ditch the Big 12 (and those teasips in Austin) for the SEC set off a frenzy that seemed to touch everyone, from students and sportswriters to a certain former yell leader. But when the Aggies and Longhorns square off on Thanksgiving for the last time ever, a lot more than pride will be on the line. It will be the final chapter in a bitter rivalry that started with the constitution of 1876—and has defined the state of Texas for more than a century.
Photograph by Randal Ford
Omar G. Rivera says: This was a sharp, historical treatment of the game’s effect on the larger issues in our state’s heritage, right up to the point that Mr. Burka claims “…the differences between UT and A&M grow increasingly less significant with every passing year.” As a former Aggie and cadet, (still reeling from Thursday night’s football game) it is difficult to accept that this is an easily forgettable rivalry. Partiality aside, his treatment of the final match-up game does not hold up as evidence of a dwindling rivalry insomuch as both colleges’ research expenditures are becoming more indistinguishable. That is, it exists on paper alone; on their financial statements to be exact. Otherwise, the income and geographic differentials Mr. Burka offers understate the chasm between two innate but opposing ideas about what it means to be a Texan. Collective identity affirmation this expansive is hardly found in other in-state rivalries except…maybe, Alabama. These differences, while somewhat indefinable, are not so easily forgettable. These differences after all, manifest themselves each fall for the last 118 years in a physical battle where representatives of the school, (our players), were charged with carrying out our collective desire to beat the hell out of another human being while remaining free of prosecution. It meant our approach was the better one. Suggesting these emotions will be diluted by the recruitment of a homogenous class of suburbanites is as flawed as stating that southerners were happily absorbed by The Union at the end of the Civil War. The loss of the game does not mean loss of rivalry, and does little to affect the complex, divergent paths that two people of relatively similar backgrounds choose to take. While it may affect the historical and socioeconomic elements that sustained this rift in the first place, it will do little to close it. If this alone were the cause then the term “house divided” is weightless, and my younger brother would have followed me to College Station and the Cadet Corps instead of graduating from t.u. and later, the Peace Corps. He texted me just after last Thursday’s game. It was hardly consolatory. I responded that I didn’t want to speak to him. I still haven’t. Visiting cousins said it’s just a game. I said it’s Texas. (November 27th, 2011 at 8:38pm)
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The first thing a visitor to the Texas A&M campus sees, as he comes into town from the west and makes the turn onto University Drive, is the football stadium, a giant hulk of white concrete with “Kyle Field” emblazoned on one side in huge maroon letters. The stadium is usually deserted in midsummer, but on July 21, a Thursday, the Zone Club, in the north stands, was occupied by a group of people who would change the course of Texas A&M and the entire fabric of the state.
Hours earlier, the board of regents had assembled for a closed-door meeting in an annex across the street to determine A&M’s athletic future. One of the people in the room was R. Bowen Loftin, who has been president of the university since February 2010. A physicist by training, Loftin retains a certain professorial demeanor. He is partial to bow ties and white dress shirts, and on this occasion he had not deviated from his favorite mode of dress. He listened carefully as the regents discussed their predicament. It was a version of a discussion that they had been having privately since the previous summer, when the Big 12 Conference nearly came apart following the departures of Nebraska (to the Big Ten) and Colorado (to the Pac-10). At that time, A&M had flirted with the idea of heading east, to the Southeastern Conference. The Big 12 had managed to hang together, but now new trouble had opened old wounds. The main sticking point was that the conference leadership was not enforcing agreements that had previously been made, and to make matters worse, from A&M’s perspective, the main beneficiary seemed to be the University of Texas, which had recently announced a new $300 million television venture with ESPN, the Longhorn Network.
A little after two that afternoon, the regents and Loftin emerged and marched across Joe Routt Boulevard, named for an Aggie football hero killed in the Second World War. They entered the massive stadium and made their way to the Zone Club, where they convened an open meeting to discuss general university business. Loftin stepped outside to the patio behind the club. The day was sweltering, but he did not loosen his tie nor roll up his sleeves. To the north, he could see almost the entire campus spread out before him—the Memorial Student Center, which, according to tradition, no Aggie may enter without first removing his cap; Rudder Tower, named for A&M’s greatest president, General James Earl Rudder; and far out in the distance, the field that was the final location of Aggie Bonfire, the site where, on a tragic day in 1999, the stack collapsed, causing the deaths of twelve Aggies. Loftin may have paused for a moment, gazing at these landmarks, to consider the magnitude of what he was about to do. Then he whipped out his iPhone and called a number he had programmed in the previous summer. It belonged to Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, the most fearsome collection of bruising football players this side of the NFL.
“Well, well,” said Slive. “I was just thinking about you. I was sitting here on my porch in Birmingham with a cigar in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other, wondering if you might call.”
Loftin got straight to the point. “Commissioner,” he said, “based on my sense of what’s right for Texas A&M, we’re very interested in discussing our possible membership in the Southeastern Conference.”
Slive took a sip of his drink. “I believe the SEC would favorably consider that.”
And so it began. This phone call, and the process it initiated, would soon send shock waves throughout the state and ultimately lay waste to the world of college sports as we know it. That afternoon, speaking to reporters, Loftin used the word “uncertainty” five times to describe the future of the Big 12, a fitting introduction to the confusing, dramatic, and unpredictable twists the story would take over the ensuing weeks. At first, discussion of A&M’s possible departure smoldered on sports pages, message boards, blogs, talk radio, and Twitter. The flames were fanned on August 10, when a reporter for the Dallas Morning News asked Rick Perry—the first Aggie governor and soon-to-be-first Aggie presidential candidate—about the rumors. “As far as I know,” Perry responded, “conversations are being had.” Two days later, the story exploded when A&M posted notice of a meeting in which the regents would vote on “Authorization for the President to Take All Actions Relating to Texas A&M University’s Athletic Conference Alignment.” On August 15, the board gave Loftin that authority.
Almost immediately the entire region descended into frenzied conjecture. Would the SEC take the Aggies? Would Oklahoma go too? What would happen to the Big 12? Would it collapse? Add another school? Which one? BYU? Notre Dame? Would Texas go independent? Would Texas go to another conference? What about Texas Tech? Everyone had an angle to play. Mega-lobbyist Buddy Jones, the chairman of the Baylor University Board of Regents, swung into action to save his school’s position in the Big 12. Houston-area legislators signed a letter to conference officials asking them to support the University of Houston as the replacement for A&M, and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst was said to back U of H’s candidacy. The national media began to catch on, and stories appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, and Forbes. Administrators at A&M were deluged with interview requests. When I tried calling the university, I got a recording saying, “Your call will be completed as soon as a line is available.” None ever was.
A&M finally confirmed its intentions on August 31, when Loftin sent beleaguered (and soon-to-be-deposed) Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe a letter informing him that the Aggies were headed to “another athletic conference.” The drama would have a few more twists—most notably the Act III appearance of former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now the president of Baylor, threatening to sue college presidents across the southland—but the die was cast. And the implications were far-reaching. Speculation ran rampant that UT and Notre Dame were talking to the Big Ten. Many wondered whether the long-anticipated major NCAA realignment into four superconferences was at hand, nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way American college sports are organized.
That may yet come (in mid-September the Big East Conference saw Syracuse and Pittsburgh depart for the Atlantic Coast Conference, and at press time Missouri was exploring a move to the SEC and TCU a move to the Big 12), but in Texas, the paradigm shift has already occurred. A&M’s decision means the probable end of the 118-year-long association between UT and A&M in athletic competition, and with it the end of the most essential rivalry the state has ever known, a rivalry that has embodied, for more than a century, the major themes and conflicts of the state itself.
UT versus A&M, and in particular the annual football game, has done more than just entertain us: the competition and animosity between these two schools has actually defined us. This month the Aggies and Longhorns will meet at Kyle Field for what will be, barring a miracle, their final Thanksgiving Day game, ending a ritual that most Texans figured was encoded in the state’s DNA. “We’ll play UT anytime, anyplace, in any sport,” Loftin has said, but that appears more and more unlikely. “We didn’t make this happen,” UT athletics director DeLoss Dodds told me. “It’s their decision. The rivalry has been wonderful, one of a handful of great rivalries. A&M wants to change the world, but it’s not a world we would want to be changed.”
On September 24, just one day before the process initiated by Loftin’s phone call finally culminated in A&M’s officially joining the SEC, Aggie nation packed Kyle Field for the biggest game of the day, a meeting of two teams ranked in the top ten of the Associated Press poll: Oklahoma State (7) and A&M (8). This was the first time in 36 years that the Aggies had hosted a top-ten battle on their home turf. The stakes were huge. The survivor would be positioned to play for a berth in a BCS bowl. As I entered the stadium, I noticed that special shirts, complete with a date, seemed to have been made for the game. Yet on closer inspection I discovered that the date on the shirts was not September 24, nor did the message mention anything about beating Oklahoma State. Instead, the date on the back read “11-24-11.” And what is so important about November 24, 2011? It will mark the final Thanksgiving Day gridiron fracas between Texas A&M and the University of Texas. Never mind the top-ten battle that was about to take place on the field. What Aggie loyalists really cared about was winning the last bout with Texas—or, as they like to refer to their archrival, t.u.
To understand the significance of the UT-A&M rivalry, a good place to start is the school’s fight songs. UT’s, titled “Texas Fight!” begins “Texas fight! Texas fight! / And it’s goodbye to A&M,” while the “Aggie War Hymn” goes “Hullabaloo, Caneck, Caneck. / Hullabaloo, Caneck, Caneck. / Goodbye to texas university” (both lyrics, of course, seem freighted with a double meaning now). These songs are sung at all games, no matter the opponent.
Many of A&M’s traditions involve UT. Another song goes “Saw Varsity’s horns off,” a reference to UT’s calling its team “Varsity” in the early years of the rivalry, while A&M was called “College” (for “Agricultural and Mechanical College”). Good Aggies learn to always refer to UT as “texas university” and to its students—who are seen as softies, intellectuals, and brats—as “teasips.” One of the most prominent Aggie traditions was Bonfire, a monumental effort of student engineering and labor that was meant to symbolize the Aggies’ “burning desire to beat the hell outta t.u.” By tradition, the stack of wood was always topped with an outhouse painted burnt orange.
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