Yes, Texas officially joined the SEC. Plenty has been said about this. Plenty more will be said over the next few months. We will say plenty about it. Of more immediate importance:
Texas’s athletics website has a new domain name.
For a long time, to keep up with Texas sports, you would visit TexasSports.com, alternatively styled TexAssPorts.com. Nobody else ever seemed to find this as funny as I did, but I found it hilarious, and I still do. Ass ports! Buttholes, by a different name.
Thankfully, ass ports will still get you to the Longhorn information you need and crave. Texas still owns its ass ports, and if you visit them Texas will kindly redirect you to the new site. You can still type Tex Ass Ports dot com into your web browser and find out just how many Texas Exes will be representing their country (the United States, not Texas) in the upcoming Summer Olympics. The new domain, though, is TexasLonghorns.com.
Should it have always been this? Probably. Probably, someone should have looked at texassports and said, “Dammit, that says ass in the middle, doesn’t it.”
Did someone say this? Maybe. The furthest the Wayback Machine goes for TexasLonghorns.com is May of 2000, at which point it was owned by what appears to be a family farm and vineyard in Cat Spring, over by Brenham. TexAssPorts.com, meanwhile, first indexes in December of 1996. TexasLonghorns.com may have been registered at that point, but we don’t have web crawler confirmation. Maybe someone beat Texas to it. Maybe Texas was just a little dumb. My favorite theory is that the couple listed on that May 2000 website is an A&M couple. Think about it: They were working in agriculture and they were located between Austin and Houston.
It’s hard to tell if ownership of TexasLonghorns.com ever changed hands prior to its recent acquisition. As recently as December of 2022, the site consisted of a brief description of Texas longhorns (the cattle, not the athletes) and a form for prospective domain name buyers. Do you think someone at Texas filled out the form? Was it Chris Del Conte? Steve Sarkisian? Arch Manning, as part of a 100-level business class? It’s funny to think of an enterprise with a nine-figure annual budget filling out a form and waiting for some ranchers in Cat Spring to get back to them. But would it really be faster to do it another way?
Whatever the case, Ass Ports are out and Longhorns are in, and considering we don’t have confirmation Ass Ports existed before December of 1996, the end of Texas’s first football season in the Big 12, it’s possible Ass Ports was a Big 12 thing all along. Maybe it was a condition of the merger. Maybe Oklahoma said, “We’ll take you. But. You know that Internet thing that’s taking off? You need to name your website after an anus.”
Quick(er) Hitters
The first feature story on the new site? A recap of Sunday’s Pitbull concert/SEC entry celebration, featuring big inset quotes like this one:
“I see the future but live for the moment. Makes sense, don’t it?” – Pitbull
In other news that is not the Olympics:
- In a bit of a blockbuster, the men’s basketball program grabbed Arthur Kaluma out of the transfer portal. This isn’t as big of news as it would have been a year ago, with Kaluma disappointing last year alongside the rest of the Kansas State team, and Texas’s net transfer season was still poor. But! It gives Rodney Terry another competent player and a little more length. Texas should be rather deep, but the starting lineup shouldn’t be one of the SEC’s better units.
- The football team picked up a commitment from Smith Orogbo, a four-star defensive lineman from Hastings High School in Alief.
- Troy Tulowitzki’s staying on the baseball staff. We have no way to know how impactful this will be, but as has always been the case with Troy Tulowitzki, his name is Troy Tulowitzki and he was cool in the pros.
- Tommy Morrison, a rising junior on the golf team, won the European Amateur. The cool thing about Morrison is that he’s 6’9”. That’s two inches taller than Arthur Kaluma and five inches taller than Smith Orogobo.
- Longhorn Network has graduated to a higher plane of existence. It is now a streaming service, not a mere television channel. It still has a few levels to attain, though, before it reaches Clear.
In Olympic news:
- 2021 alum Tara Davis-Woodhall joins the legion of Longhorns headed to Paris after winning the long jump at the U.S. Olympic trials.
- In Jamaica, rising senior Ackelia Smith won the national championship in the long jump, sending her to Paris. I don’t think she qualified in triple jump, where she finished second, but I could be mistaken.
- In Canada, 2019 alum Mariam Abdul-Rashid won the national championship in the 100-meter hurdles, sending her to Paris as well.
- Elena Bruckner, whom we mentioned last week, finished sixth in the U.S. Discus Finals and did not qualify. Lot of other Longhorns in that boat of getting close but not making the cut. It’s possible I missed some qualifiers. We’ll try to get a full list of Longhorn Olympians out there before competitions begin on the 24th.
