Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
We need to get this out there:
We’re still rattled by the Austin FC gamewatch invitation. It’s not that we don’t appreciate it, or that we don’t want to support Austin’s professional sporters. We’re just a little rattled, because it’s the kind of thing that demonstrates a growing truth:
Texas let Austin get away.
Austin, Texas is not a Longhorn city anymore, the same way Philadelphia’s an Eagles town, not a Phillies town. Austin FC isn’t top dog by any means—home football games and the U.S. Grand Prix are the only events capable of changing the city’s weekend chemistry—but kids here are about as likely to get an Austin FC t-shirt for Christmas as they are to get Longhorn merch, and that feels important.
I don’t know when exactly it happened, but Austin stopped being a college town some time ago and started being a national city. It’s not a huge threshold to cross—Minneapolis is a national city, not a college town, and Minneapolis proper has less than half Austin proper’s population—but the shift has happened, and it’s not nothing. Simultaneously, the relative power of college football and men’s college basketball, the industries, has dwindled as other college sports have grown and as F1 and MLS and other former afterthoughts have gained territory on the mind. Importantly, all of these developments have manifested concretely in Austin. The University of Texas is an athletic powerhouse…in everything but the big money sports. F1 thrives here. MLS thrives here. Football and men’s basketball? They’re doing ok.
It’s a reach to link performance on the field and court back to city-wide interest, and we don’t want to imply that waning local fandom in a relative sense (not even an absolute sense) is responsible for Texas not being “back” yet. But generally, for a variety of reasons, you want to be rule the roost in your hometown, if you can. The argument used to go that Austin would never be a professional sports city because it was already so tied to UT. That argument doesn’t hold water anymore. The only thing keeping Austin from homing Big Four teams is its proximity to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Maybe UT holds some lobbying power, but culturally, it’s relinquished its hold.
This isn’t Austin FC’s doing. Austin FC hasn’t ‘taken away’ from UT. Austin FC’s just a great reflection of the trend. This is a transplant city more than it’s ever been, and it’s a young-white-affluent-family city more than it’s ever been, and in a weird twist, those things don’t translate to a university holding prominence the same way they translate to folks thinking it’s fun to get on board with the local version of MLS. Texas will be fine. Texas will still have its people. Locals just won’t automatically become those people like they often used to.
