Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our mostly-weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
We promised a column on what Texas’s College World Series loss to Texas A&M means.
It means nothing.
This isn’t entirely true, of course. Texas A&M now gets a chance at possibly its most significant national title, in any sport, in school history. The Texas athletic department’s historic year will not be quite as historic as it could have been. A small quantity of Texas A&M fans believe, “We really got those guys from Austin,” while a smaller quantity of Texas fans are feeling immensely peeved. But on that last note? What it means for the rivalry? It means nothing.
Texas is a single-power state, meaning it does not have a single, binary, state-defining rivalry in college sports, nor does it have an intermeshed web of rivalries between three prominent schools, as is the case in Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina. It does, though, have one primary power, setting it apart from, say, California.
Texas is rivals with Texas A&M. Texas is rivals with Texas Tech. Texas is rivals with Baylor, and with TCU, and one could argue with Rice and SMU and in a theoretical world, Houston or Texas State or UTSA. Some of these schools are also rivals with one another. But Texas Tech is big enough and good enough, and Baylor and TCU are good enough, that the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry is not the main show in town. This is a problem for A&M, the little brother in the rivalry.
Does A&M have a better football program right now? Yes. Did A&M just beat Texas in one of the state’s favorite sports? Yes. Does that lift A&M to Texas’s level? No. Texas is another beast entirely compared to Texas A&M. There is no history of success at A&M, and nationally, the school’s relevance is historically intermittent while its prominence is something that has not yet happened. Johnny Manziel was prominent. Texas A&M was not prominent.
Texas is a national school while Texas A&M is a state school, and though in other states, that would have the makings of a good rivalry, there are too many universities on A&M’s level for it to be the defining rivalry in Texas. Five years from now, we may be singing a different tune, with the two together in the SEC, and if A&M does put it together in football and grab a title, that day will come sooner, so long as the Big 12 doesn’t transform itself into a major national player and give Baylor or Tech or Houston or TCU the platform to turn Texas into an anarchical state in the rivalry realm.
For now, Texas is Texas A&M’s biggest rival while Texas’s biggest rival might still be Oklahoma. You don’t want to be Texas A&M in that scenario, and nothing that happened or will happen in Omaha meaningfully changes any of it.
