be devastatingly good at. “I remember getting frustrated at our defense, because we couldn’t tackle him,” A&M’s former defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter told a sports blog. “[I was] yelling at our guys, saying, ‘If you can’t tackle this little freshman, how in the world are we going to tackle RG3?’ And then after the game, our guys are like, ‘Coach, I’m telling you, that guy was harder to tackle during the week than RG3 was.’ I think RG3 had about fifty yards against us, running the football. Manziel probably had six hundred during the week.” But Manziel would pay a price for his arrogance. Coaches soon ordered him to remove his special black jersey, which signals the defense not to pulverize the quarterback. “They got sick of chasing me, so they put me in a normal offensive jersey where they could hit me, and they would just pop me so hard,” says Manziel. “They would light me up for a couple of weeks.” 

For Manziel, who labored week after week to fit in with a team that he was not really a part of, the world was not a happy place. His future with Sherman, who was running a conservative offense, was gravely in doubt. Many thought he had no future at all. He was stuck; the road that had led him to A&M now appeared to be a dead end.   

While Manziel struggled to adapt to his new obscurity, profound changes were under way at Texas A&M. It could be said, in fact, that more than forty years of tinkering with the very nature of the university were finally coming to a crescendo. Since the sixties, when the all-male military school first opened its doors to women and non-military students, A&M had been making a steady ascent in the academic world to become a top research institution. In 1997 it opened a presidential library, and in 2001 it was accepted into the Association of American Universities, the nation’s most prestigious club of research universities and institutions. Last year, the university drew $700 million in outside funding, acquired a law school in Fort Worth, announced a federal contract that will make it one of the major vaccine-producing hubs in the world (generating six thousand jobs and an expected $41 billion over twenty years), and initiated a plan to increase enrollment to 25,000 at its eighth-ranked engineering school, which is already the nation’s third-largest undergraduate program. 

Yet throughout much of its growth, the university had remained convinced that it had an identity problem, that too many people still saw it as a hidebound regional school far removed from the wealth, power, and sophistication of its longtime archrival, the University of Texas. Although the public seemed to understand that A&M no longer consisted of just the Corps of Cadets (now only 4 percent of the student body), it had not fully embraced the university’s transformation. Thus, A&M embarked on a major campaign to refashion its image before the larger world. This was no easy task. A&M was already so well defined that it was going to take more than slogans and advertisements to change public opinion. 

Hence the university’s dramatic decision to join the Southeastern Conference. (For those interested in tracking the alignments of fate, this took effect on July 1, 2012, the day after Manziel was released from jail.) The move accomplished two things: it uncoupled A&M from UT, and it placed the university on a bigger national stage. The football team, the most powerful marketing tool any major university possesses, would now be playing the best teams in the country, in the most prime television slots. But for many sports fans, posting furiously on hundreds of websites, it was nothing short of a catastrophe. The Aggies were sure to be pounded into paste by a brutal lineup of ranked opponents. There was a sense, moreover, that by withdrawing from the rivalry with UT, A&M had destroyed a cultural tradition. State lawmakers discussed passing legislation to counteract the move. And among the jilted members of the Big 12, A&M was seen as sulky, petulant, and vengeful, unreasonably angry over such perceived offenses as UT’s launch of the Longhorn Network. “The strong message was ‘Why are you messing it up?’ ” says A&M president R. Bowen Loftin, who was the driving force behind the move. “ ‘Why not let things be, because historically, you belong where you are right now?’ ”

But A&M did not want to stay where it belonged. Joining the SEC was a deliberate step away from the university’s past, an outlandish bet that amounted to going all in on its future. “It allowed us to shed the stereotypes that are perpetuated here in Texas and open up the borders of the state, not only to the Southeast but to the rest of the country,” says Jason Cook, A&M’s senior associate athletics director for external affairs (and former vice president for marketing and communications), one of the architects of the conference change. “The move was a manifestation of our growth. It said that we have reached a point where we can stand on our own and be recognized nationally.” 

A lot of that, of course, had to do with getting away from UT. When asked recently for a statement about how the move to the SEC had affected relations with the Aggies’ old nemesis, Loftin said simply, “I don’t have to make [that statement] anymore. It’s not relevant to us anymore. That’s the whole point. It’s not an important issue.” In recorded history, no Aggie in any position of authority had ever uttered such words. 

And yet the potential for disaster was very real. More than forty years of striving had found its final expression in one highly risky gambit. The Aggie brass appeared confident, talking about the long-term benefits of the move to the SEC, but Loftin, Cook, and many others in College Station—including Chancellor John Sharp and Athletic Director Eric Hyman—were all too aware of what the reaction would