Texas-Texas A&M rivalry barely registers with current prospects
RIVALS 3 STRIPE DALLAS: Teams with buzz | Takeaways | Predictions | Full coverage
COPPELL, Tex. – The Texas-Texas A&M rivalry will likely never truly die. Fans in the football-obsessed state that houses it won’t let it. The breaths its breathing here, at a gathering of high school prospects that would have once been next in line to participate in it, are obstructed at best.
The once-great rivalry that was eulogized when the series stopped eight years ago has officially slipped into a coma.
“It was live back in the day, I guess but it’s not really a thing for us,” said Rivals100 running back Noah Cain, a Texas native that carries dozens of scholarship offers. “See, I wasn’t even watching football when I was little. I was watching basketball, so I don’t remember them ever really playing.”
Sunday’s Rivals 3 Stripe Camp presented by adidas in Dallas was filled with opinions like Cain’s. There aren’t many memories here.
Instead, the stakes are a cocktail made of equal parts befuddlement and apathy. A rivalry that once produced strong opinions across the Lone Star State, now induces shoulder shrugs from FBS-bound prospects within its borders.
Asking for opinions about the reasons the two programs haven’t started a non-conference showdown yields similar results. There’s no mention of lingering anger over the split of the old Big 12 and certainly no discussion of the fact that a Texas state legislator once drafted a failed bill requiring the teams to play annually.
Instead, prospects do their best to concoct half-baked reasons for the cold war’s existence. Even here, in a football-obsessed setting, the rivalry’s 2011 series finale seems like a different era.
“It’s the business side, I guess,” said Texas A&M commit Kam Brown. “We don’t really see that side, but wouldn’t it be good on the business side? Wouldn’t it bring a lot of money? I guess I really don’t know.”
Cain, however, stands as the exception to the apathy. Not only does the four-star running back want to see the series resume, he’s done his share of asking around about it, even putting coaches on the spot.
“I actually talked to one of the Texas coaches about it,” Cain said. “He said they are trying to bring it back, but a lot of stuff needs to happen. I had to ask him. So, when we were talking, I was, just like, ‘Coach, we have to bring back the A&M-Texas rivalry.’ He was like ‘We’re trying to bring it back, but you have to get a lot of things worked out.’”
That may or may not have been pure lip service. And even if it wasn’t, it’s not as though the coaching staffs will be the ones to make the call. There are, after all, regents and athletic directors and years of petty grudges.
Interest in the game will always be there at some level, but it’s clear the people who may one day participate in it are getting less emphatic by the year. Turns out, rivalries aren’t killed by conference realignment. They die here, with recruits that may one day be asked to put added emphasis on something that, to them, seems like just another game.
These days, Aggies versus Longhorns is becoming something for old people to fight about.
“I think we just see it as two big fan bases that hate each other, but the two schools aren’t rivals or anything,” said 2020 prospect Darius Snow, who already holds offers from both Texas and Texas A&M. And with each passing year, the second part of his statement becomes more accurate.
