Longtime Texas head coach and three-time national champion Darrell K Royal said many quotes during his coaching career. But, one of his most notable is “football doesn’t build character, it eliminates the weak ones.”
While college football and the rest of collegiate athletics is a constant challenge to prevail over your greatest rivals, on rare occasions, you have to extend your hand out to that fierce adversary and go to battle together.
July 1 marks the official end of the Texas Longhorns’ near three-decade-long partnership with the Big 12. Along with the Oklahoma Sooners, the bitter rivals will move their marriage arrangement to the SEC for all athletics this coming fall.
This is not the first time the Longhorns brought an adversary to renew vows. In the Southwest Conference, the Longhorns and Texas A&M Aggies played together until 1996.
By the late 1980s, the cookie began to crumble for the conference, as the surge of conference-exclusive television deals and a multitude of football recruiting violations by all member schools brought it to its knees.
Former SEC commissioner Harvey Schiller approached Texas’ administration with a strong desire for the University to join the conference in 1989. According to Schiller, the Texas State Legislature reached out when they caught wind of the talks and insisted if the conference wanted Texas, they had to take Texas A&M, even despite the Aggies’ reluctance to join the conference at the time.
“The (Texas) State Legislature came back to me and said, ‘If you take Texas, you have to take Texas A&M,’” Schiller said to the Tennessean. “The funny part about it is that A&M was sort of lukewarm at the time about coming in.”
Instead, the SEC acquired the only non-Texas SWC school, Arkansas in 1990.
Options were beginning to look thin. Texas flirted with other major conferences, expressing an interest in joining the Pac-10 due to the league’s academic prowess. Pac-10 members had issues with Texas joining, citing geography and having to take other SWC members as a package deal.
That left the Big Eight, who were in talks with the SWC through the entire process. All 16 members from both conferences met in Dallas to foster a television deal.
“I received a call from Loren Matthews, who was a key executive with ESPN with whom I had developed a good relationship,” Chuck Weinas, the then executive director of the College Football Association, said to Sports Illustrated. “And Loren told me, he said, ‘Here’s my problem. We want the Big Eight, but we don’t want all of the Southwest Conference.’”
The rest was history. Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor made the cut and formed the Big 12 in 1994 and began play in the 1996 season. Eventually, the SEC tune changed on the Aggies and they bolted to the conference in 2011, leaving the Lone Star Showdown on an indefinite hiatus.
Now three decades later, Schiller’s wish has finally come to fruition. With the SEC’s addition of Texas to its ranks, the Longhorns will reforge historical rivalries with their fiercest SWC opponents, Arkansas and Texas A&M, as a permanent fixture to the schedule for the foreseeable future.
Only time will tell if the Longhorns, Aggies and Razorbacks will be able to replicate those iconic and thrilling matchups of eras past.
