The Death of Texas Football
(I’m going to start this off with a caveat: I grew up cheering for the University of Texas. My mom went to both undergrad and graduate school there, and numerous other members of my extended family attended it as well. I still have my Sports Illustrated Special Edition featuring Vince Young on the cover after the 2005 Rose Bowl victory over USC, and to this day that game still ranks extremely high on my list of personal sports moments. I don’t consider myself a Longhorn fan anymore, however, as Vanderbilt now takes precedence in all matters of college athletics.)
I don’t remember the Southwest Conference. I didn’t even give a shit about football until I was about 13 or 14. As a youngster I remember making some sort of unholy connection between the shoulder pads that football players wear and the ones my mom put in her work blazers, which I guess was a thing in the 90’s. I didn’t want much to do with a sport that involved anything from my mother’s wardrobe, so I wrote football off pretty early. This was unfortunate, as I have little recollection of the Cowboys’ dominance in the mid-90’s, instead focusing on the trials and tribulations of a Rangers team that featured Benji Gil at shortstop.
When my sports brain hit puberty in middle school and I started following other sports, Texas football quickly rose to the top. The Texas-Texas A&M rivalry was going strong, and the Red River Shootout was becoming one of my favorite weekends of the year. Dallas would get covered in burnt orange and crimson as loyalists from both sides would plant their flags in their lawns, wear their colors, and sing their songs. Let’s just say I’ve responded to some “Honk if OU sucks” signs in my day. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was a rabid Longhorn supporter. My family from South Texas trained me well, and when Vince Young galloped into the end zone at the Rose Bowl with :17 left on the clock, that moment immediately shot to the top of my all time greatest sports moments list (obviously, this has been surpassed by more recent developments). Texas was the best, just like it should be. Obviously.
It wasn’t until later that I came to fully appreciate what had happened less than a decade prior, when greed and confusion had split apart a conference that had been around for quite a while. The Southwest Conference, the 10 team league that featured 9 Texas schools plus some bastard team from Arkansas, had merged with the Big 8 to become the Big XII (or 12 for those of you that don’t speak Latin). In the shuffle, long-revered programs such as TCU and SMU (still recovering from the death penalty, another topic for another day) had been shoved off to the lower tier conferences that don’t get a free pass to the postseason, as well as Arkansas being shoved over to the SEC, who I guess was surprised after picking up a school they thought would be a punching bag.
Now, 15 years after the creation of a conference with powerhouse programs such as Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Nebraska is all but dead. Last year, Nebraska and Colorado bailed out for the Big 10 and the PAC-10, respectively, and it became clear that the Big 12 was about to be left behind by the more lucrative leagues with their shiny multi-billion dollar TV deals. But the Big 12 was saved by granting Texas, the conference powerhouse, the right to their own TV network, and the revenue sharing was restructured to be basically insanely unfair for every team in the conference without an orange cow on their helmets.
What conflict of interest?
Texas A&M, only a year into the new Big 12 (but really 10), sees the writing on the wall. There’s only one way this conference ends: Texas follows Notre Dame and BYU and goes independent. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, if only by default, get picked up by the PAC-12. After the Aggies join the SEC, that really leaves Texas Tech and Baylor without a home, possibly putting them with the Mountain West. All in all, one thing is clear: Texas college football is no more.
I understand the recent realignment and, honestly, shouldn’t this be flattering for my home state? After all, every conference out there wants a piece of our market-share pie. The Big East and the SEC have made that very clear: we’re hot shit right now. All of this expansion has one goal in mind: make the biggest footprint on the national scene as possible. Amidst all the confusion, however, one thing is clear: we as a state would rather whore ourselves out to the almighty dollar than uphold tradition and, if nothing else, the semblance of collegiate athletic normalcy. Our state is getting chopped up like 18th century Africa, but unlike the people of that era, we’re bending over, letting other people from other conferences slice our home state up into little pieces, and thanking them when it’s over.
Pictured: Texas' conference allegiances in about 5 years.
Glossing over the fact that the same group of people that refuse to give the players a cent for all the revenue they bring into the schools under the guise of retaining “amateurism” are now the same ones forcing their players to, for example, fly for regular season conference games between Texas and motherfucking Connecticut, and the fact that (gasp!) there are other sports besides football that these colleges have, the college sporting landscape is headed in a direction to where our long standing Texas institutions are turning their backs on each other and selling out. Bottom line. I thought we used to take pride in the Lone Star State. I thought there was something about us that made us different from the other states. Well I guess there is: insatiable greed and ego. Soon Texas, A&M, TCU, Texas Tech, Baylor, SMU, and other schools could each represent a different conference. How is this right? How did we get so off track.
I don’t have answers. Just a lot of anger, really. I’m sure people were saying this at the death of the SWC, but at least during that a few Texas schools stuck together, despite the way the big schools jettisoned SMU, TCU, and UH. I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and deal with the fact that my kids will never know the Texas I grew up in. Aggies and Longhorns will live in this awkward co-existence like Cubs and White Sox fans, and our longtime rivalries will be an “oh, remember when?” So much for good honest competition and celebrating our heritage, though I guess those died a long time ago, huh? Welcome to reality, Benton.
