Texas Longhorns

Too much sense for Aggies, Horns to play, and one day they will again

Published Apr. 27, 2015 9:26 a.m. ET

Jeff Caplan

The two coaches never to coach in a Texas-Texas A&M football rivalry game recently set the news cycle on fire talking about actually coaching in one.

From Austin: Yes Sir, we want to play them Aggies! Texas’ Charlie Strong said.

And from College Station: You bet we want those Longhorns! A&M’s Kevin Sumlin said.

Their soundbites snowballed into a week’s worth of Internet overload, nonstop bloviating on sports talk radio and enough newspaper columns written to strip a Redwood forest bare.

Bring back one of college football’s oldest, most passionate traditions? Now this was stop-the-presses news.

Only it wasn’t. It was only coachspeak. Heck, what else were these two men whose head-to-head battles are reserved for the recruiting trail and Twitter only, going to say?

Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp on Friday made perfectly clear where this idle rivalry is going by slamming the door shut on the silly notion of a return. He might as well have swallowed the key, too.

The chancellor to the Houston Chronicle: "My sense is with the 12th Man - we've got new friends,” referring, of course, to the Aggies’ recent membership in the mighty SEC.

Friends? When were Aggies and Longhorns ever friends? They’re mortal gridiron enemies. It’s why they play the damn game. It’s why students, fans and alumni on both sides still want them to play the game.

The game, after all, turns the calendar back to 1894, starting up barely 30 years after, you know, the Civil War. Its beginnings as an annual rite of fall started in 1915, you know, eight years after the first Model T hit the showroom, and still three-quarters of a century before fans could anonymously complain ad nauseam in Internet chat rooms.

The game rolled on and on, year after year, Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving. Until it stopped.

The final gathering place was in College Station, a great game if not played between the two greatest teams these esteemed programs have ever produced. The Longhorns took the final victory lap that November night in 2011, about three months after Sharp was appointed chancellor of the Texas A&M University System.

Sharp, a former student at A&M and proud member of its famed Corps of Cadets, whose wife hails from Austin, said as the Aggies were packing up for the SEC he reached out to Texas officials to see if they wanted to save the rivalry.

The answer he says he received was a definitive no.

But rest assured, the Aggies and Longhorns will one day again resume tradition. It will take new leaders inside the current wood-paneled ivory towers at both universities, leaders who will put ego and pettiness aside and do what’s right.

And when they do, they will be hailed as heroes.

Decade after decade, the rivalry survived, through two world wars, Vietnam, Charles Whitman turning students into targets from the UT tower and the A&M Bonfire tragedy.

Surely, this great game will survive knee-jerk switches of conference allegiance and the ego of men who think of themselves as being bigger than the game, bigger than the universities they are in office to serve.

Profit alone demands this game be played. Ultimately money won’t have to be the driving force as it so often is in college football. Purer forces will prevail.

The game will be played again because future decision-makers in Austin and College Station will understand that the game and their universities are far mightier than they, and they will do what’s right.

Photo Credit: Credit: Thomas Campbell-US Presswire