Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Before we get to the Aggies: What a night from LeBarron Johnson on Saturday. College baseball is great because you get all the old-school gutsy stuff from pitchers the major leagues don’t need because relievers are so effective, and a guy throwing 129 pitches and going nine innings to get his team to the brink of Super Regionals is exactly that kind of old-school gutsy stuff. Add in that the guy in question is a 6’4” flamethrower who goes by LBJ in Austin and it gets even better. Add in that Texas was playing Miami, so natural likability was at the very least a wash, and it all made for a spectacular early-summer Saturday night.
Now.
The Aggies.
Texas and Texas A&M were both 2-seeds in their respective Regionals, meaning if they meet in the Super Regionals—which will happen if A&M beats Stanford tonight in Palo Alto—the host will be decided through a bidding process. What’s considered by the NCAA in that bid? The stadium. The hotel situation. How good the teams are? It’s unclear. I think it’s mostly the stadium, but let’s say it’s an all-around question of which school deserves the most honor, because that makes this potential bidding war the most fun.
The thing about Texas and Texas A&M is that their rivalry is best when they don’t play. It’s best when A&M is fleeing Texas, or when Texas is playing in a worse league than A&M, or when the two are trying to out-jumbotron one another. Yeah, sure, the baseball teams might play this weekend, but the *real* question is this: Who’s going to host? Because wins and losses come and go, but being told by the governing body of your world that you are preferable to your mortal rival? That lasts forever.
Texas and Texas A&M aren’t the only rivals like this. Michigan v. Notre Dame has something of this vibe. This sort of thing goes on in England between the soccer teams whose fans try to kill each other. This was the dynamic at the heart of the Cold War. Oklahoma and Texas are rivals, yes, but they get along. They work in lockstep. They ride each other’s coattails. They play each other all the time. Texas and Texas A&M? It’s hard to actually get them into the same room.
If the two do play, sure, the results on the field will matter. They’ll matter a whole lot to both parties. But the results off the field—the results determining the field—can be said to matter even more. Because this is really what college sports are about, at the end of it all: How important are you? What leagues want you to play with them? Which underlings can you bully? If the NCAA has to hold an event somewhere, how badly do they want to hold it with you?
