Dear Texas,

We hate you.

We hate burnt orange, drugged-up steers, dress-up cowboys, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and losing to the Longhorns.

We hate the McCoy and Shipley brothers, Vince Young, Chris Simms, Cedric Benson and your dirty, overpriced state fair.

We. Hate. You.

But do you know what we love?

Hearing one side of the Cotton Bowl roar as the other falls silent. Answering your call-and-return “Texas Fight” chants with “sucks.”

Forming our hands into upside-down horns at every opportunity. Listening to you brag about how awesome your high school football is, only to watch the Sooners steal the top recruits out from under your nose.

And then there’s the thing we love the most: beating the living hell out of you in your own state.

We love 55-17. We love 28-20. We love 28-21, 12-0, 65-13, 35-24, 14-3 and 63-14.

To us, the Longhorns represent something more than just a football team.

They’re a symbol for everything we hate about the state of Texas: the entitlement, the inflated sense of importance and self-worth, the bigger-is-better mentality and, perhaps most of all, the lack of courtesy toward others on the road. (Seriously, this is an issue. How hard is it to use a turn signal and not run people off the highway for driving the speed limit?)

Most of the Texas fans I know realize that they’re hated or at least disliked, but they don’t understand why. They casually write it off as envy and carry on their merry way.

They’re the guy at the bar with a man tan and a way-too-tight Tapout shirt smirking and saying “haters gonna hate” when people call him a tool.

They have no clue.

Texas fans think everyone hates them for the same reason everyone hates Alabama football, when in reality, it’s for the reason everyone hates Notre Dame football.

Sorry for relying on cheesy analogies and sports metaphors to define our hate for your university, but it’s a hard thing to explain. People hate Texas because Texas thinks it’s awesome, not because Texas is awesome.

Texas is the Kanye West of universities. I can’t think of a simpler way to put it.

No university has a bigger superiority complex, which creates an interesting dynamic for the Red River Rivalry: the humble folksiness of Oklahoma vs. the pompous pride of Texas.And that’s where the rivalry transcends football. It’s not just a battle of football teams; it’s a battle of ideologies.

We have a saying here in the Sooner state: “Sooner born, Sooner bred, and when I die, I’ll be Sooner dead.”

Now, nothing in there mentions hating Texas or that sorry university that calls Austin home, but nonetheless, we still feel an obligation to despise our neighbors to the south.
So we’ll continue to hate the Lone Star State with every atom of our beings until the day we die. And we’re perfectly fine with that.