Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-again column on the Texas Longhorns.
Texas is College World Series-bound. For the second straight year, the fourth time in the last ten, and the eleventh time since Y2K, the Longhorns are headed to Omaha.
It’s a joyful time. The college sports year is winding down, headed to what some bill its best championship, and the Longhorns get to be involved, get to seek their seventh title all-time in baseball, get to seek the athletic department’s fifth national title of the academic year (I haven’t figured out how rugby figures into this, so I’m not wording it perfectly, but something like half of Texas’s teams have finished first or second nationally this year, and yet Steve Sarkisian hasn’t been fired yet and replaced with Shaka Smart, a concerning reflection of Texas’s “love of football”).
Going to Omaha is a victory itself. It means a team was good enough to make the NCAA Tournament and then a combination of good enough and lucky enough to dodge elimination across two straight low-margin-for-error weekends. It also means the fanbase gets to visit Nebraska during the best week of the year to visit Nebraska. But as the conversation turns to fans, we need to acknowledge something else:
Texas A&M and Oklahoma are going to be there.
Better or worse still, Texas A&M and Oklahoma are on Texas’s side of the bracket.
The Longhorns will play Notre Dame in their opener, but after that, they play the Aggies or the Sooners, and then the odds are that they’ll play the Aggies or the Sooners at least one more time. This is exhilarating—Texas’s two biggest rivals stand between it and what I would guess is a historic overall athletic department performance, and between it and glory in arguably the Longhorn fanbase’s second-favorite sport. It’s also terrifying if you like UT. The Oklahoma piece? Not so much. Texas and Oklahoma go back and forth enough that a loss is just one mark among many. But if it comes to pass, a game against the lesser Texas public school would be the highest-profile Texas vs. Texas A&M matchup in any sport since 2011. We shouldn’t overstate this—no baseball game will out-important any football game between the two, at least anytime soon—but we also shouldn’t understate it. This would be a big, big game, and after Texas A&M punked Texas earlier this spring when the Horns were struggling, it would also be an emotional, emotional game.
Texas, as always, has more to lose than A&M. That’s what it means to be big brother, and why the Oklahoma matchup doesn’t hit the gut in quite the same way. Regardless, barring one hyper-specific scenario, Texas is going to be playing elimination baseball against one of its archrivals next week. Win, and they head into the brief college offseason with a big chip in their stack. Lose, and they end the best year in athletic department history with a sour, sour taste.
