By its own standards, Texas Longhorns football has fallen on some hard times. In 2009, the team finished 13-1 and played for the national title. Since then, they haven’t been able to get back to double-digit wins in a season and are coming off of three consecutive years with a losing record.
In that time, the college football landscape shifted under Texas’ feet, sending rival Texas A&M to the SEC where they’ve become the better overall in-state football program. Because of the conference shift, the two schools also stopped playing one another, driving a stronger wedge between the two and, in a way, stoking the rivalry even more.
Texas’ new season has been so-so but they’re coming off a 17-7 victory over Iowa State and apparently feeling pretty good about themselves. That’s even more clear given the results of a campus-wide vote that came out in support of reinstating the Texas A&M-Texas football game.
As The Battalion reports, 7,764 votes were collected on the topic and 96.71 percent of students voted “yes” to reboot the rivalry that ended in 2011.
NEW: UT student gov. surveyed students on if they support reinstating the A&M rivalry game. Result (7,764 ttl votes):
Yes – 96.71%
No- 3.28%— MelanieTorre (@melanietorre) September 28, 2017
The vote isn’t binding by any measure, but it’s a decent indicator that younger Horns are just as excited about the idea of a renewed rivalry as older ones. UT head coach Tom Herman even commented on the results.
“Any time the student body rallies around a cause, I think the powers that be listen,” Herman told the Daily Texan. “Now, the powers that be are in that position because they have to make decisions.”
While the game makes sense logistically, its finding room on each team’s nonconference schedule that is the tricky part.
A&M already has a stacked OOC non-conference schedule through 2024 that includes Clemson, Colorado, Miami and Notre Dame, not to mention the buzzsaw that is playing in the SEC West. As for UT, they have home-and-home series on the books with LSU, Ohio State, and Michigan in the coming years.
