Around this time last year, college football fans in Texas were counting down the days until the Lone Star Showdown between Texas and Texas A&M.
For the players and younger fans, it would be their first-ever taste of the rivalry. For the older generations, though, they had been waiting for 13 years.
“It’s great that (the rivalry) is back in play,” Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said before last year’s game. “It divides the state — houses are divided. All eyes are on the state of Texas.”
The 2024 Lone Star Showdown did not just have the first-year anticipation, but it also had a trip to the Southeastern Conference Championship game on the line. The then-No. 3 Longhorns left College Station with a 17-7 win over the No. 20 Aggies.
However, only about a year apart, this year’s game is already looking very different, looking to hopefully become one of the biggest editions of the rivalry.
As of Oct. 27, the Aggies are the No. 3 team according to the AP Poll, while the Longhorns are No. 20. Texas A&M has defeated two ranked opponents, then-No. 8 Notre Dame and then-No. 20 LSU, while Texas has lost to then-No. 3 Ohio State and an unranked Florida team.
Heading into the game, their respective seasons have truly been a tale of two halves for the Longhorns and Aggies. Through the first nine weeks of college football, the Texas offense was the 11th-best in the SEC com- pared to A&M’s fifth-ranked offense in the conference.
Marred by inconsistency, the Longhorns’ offense is led by sophomore quarterback Arch Manning. Once a pre-season Heisman Trophy favorite, Manning has struggled to get the offense rolling and, at one point, was booed off the field by a home crowd against the University of Texas at El Paso.
“I’ve got to play better,” Manning said earlier in the season. “A lot of quarterbacks, a lot of players, want to be great. I know I’m better than this.”
Manning, however, has shown flashes of brilliance from the quarterback position with standout performances against rivals Oklahoma and an overtime win away at Mississippi State, where he had 346 yards on 63% completion percentage and three touchdowns.
On the other side of the field, the Texas defense, aside from a loss against Florida, has been one of the best in the nation. Across their opening eight games of the season, the Longhorns have only allowed 14.6 points per game, only behind the Sooners’ 12.5. Texas A&M’s defense, on the other hand, has allowed 23.6 per game.
“We won the football game,” Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko said after allowing Arkansas to score 42 points. “We won’t win very many games playing football and defense like that. I know that. I think our players know that.”
With the offenses and defenses lining up to hopefully produce a memorable gridiron battle, it is the aftermath that could make this one of the great Lone Star Showdowns.
At the end of the day, all these perspectives about matchups and season momentum are thrown out the door come rivalry weekend — even if the Longhorns and Aggies are on opposite spectrums of rankings and stats.
