Twelve years of posturing and preening are about to come to an end, and the reunion between Texas and Texas A&M will be, bar none, the most intense college football game of the 2024 season.
The Iron Bowl, Red River, Ohio State-Michigan, name any game you want: no matter the records, none will match the cocktail of emotions brewing inside Kyle Field on Nov. 30.
Let's start here. If it were up to A&M, this game wouldn't happen.
The SEC's annexation of Texas and Oklahoma happened behind A&M's back, made clear when then-A&M AD Ross Bjork was blindsided by the news when it broke at SEC media days in 2021. Texas A&M built an identity in its separation from Texas, with its membership in college football's most exclusive club serving as a trump card on the recruiting trail.
"We want to be the only SEC program in the state of Texas," Bjork said at the time. "There's a reason why Texas A&M left the Big 12 -- to be standalone, to have our own identity."
"I don't know how I feel about it," then-head football coach Jimbo Fisher said that same day.
Three days later, Texas A&M president Katherine Banks released a statement that included the words "challenging" and "unsettling," but also confirmed Texas A&M would not leave the SEC out of protest of the conference's addition of its archrival, and on July 29, 2021, Texas and OU were unanimously voted in to college athletics' premier conference.
In the dozen years of darkness, the void of competition on the gridiron was filled by preening, posturing and proxy battles. The Longhorns and Aggies played each other in basketball, baseball and Olympic sports from time to time, but in football they competed only for recruits and in a nauseating battle to prove to the nation who missed the other the least.
But as the inevitability of UT's official July 1 admittance approaches, both the rhetoric and the stakes have ramped up.
The games started in February, when Texas threw some not-so-subtle shade at the space the Aggies will purportedly occupy in the state they share.
In May, Texas and Texas A&M met in a softball Super Regional in Austin. The 16th-seeded Aggies pushed Texas to the brink, nearly ending the top-ranked Longhorns' season on their own field.
But none of that holds a candle to the events of this week.
Three weeks after their season ended (on A&M's field, no less), Texas finally fired embattled baseball coach David Pierce -- not so coincidentally, on the day Texas A&M played Tennessee for its first national championship. Casting an aggressively passive-aggressive pall over the biggest day for Aggie men's sports in living memory, Texas forced A&M head coach Jim Schlossnagle to answer questions about his interest in the Texas job minutes after his team lost a 6-5 decision to Tennessee.
And then, Texas pulled off the unthinkable. They actually hired Schnlossnagle. After taking A&M to two College World Series in his three seasons, Schlossnagle will now become A&M's chief enemy.
Introducing the new Head Coach of your Texas Longhorns, @CoachSchloss 🤘#HookEm pic.twitter.com/f1T0CH8cIt
— Texas Baseball (@TexasBaseball) June 26, 2024
Where does this leave you if you're A&M? After breaking away from your arch rival by leveling up your conference and providing your athletic teams with the ultimate trump card, in a single move Texas went behind your back, coordinating with your enemies to erase that advantage and lock you both back in another 100 years of endless competition. And then they took the most successful coach on campus, days after his team played for a national championship.
If those events happened in the personal life of a loved one, you'd probably order them an emergency mental health intervention.
And so that brings us to Nov. 30.
Texas and A&M will have already met on the soccer field, the volleyball court and the, um, cross country course(??) by then, but all of that will be mere prelude to the gridiron reunion, 13 years in the making.
No longer can these two toxic siblings posture in the press. There will be no hiding under those Kyle Field lights, and the verdict will be merciless for whoever comes up short that day.
If Texas loses, the Longhorns will be cast as pretenders. A team with SEC and national championship implications that couldn't even beat these Aggies, with modest expectations under a first-year head coach? Even the 2023 Big 12 championship and resulting College Football Playoff breakthrough will be rewritten as the spoils of winning a minor-league conference. Obviously, Texas wouldn't be prepared to compete in the S-E-C, and would immediately return to second-class citizen status within their own state.
If A&M loses, a 12-year head start on building the necessary fortitude to win in college football's toughest conference will officially have been wasted, squandered. Particularly if Texas uses the win in College Station to propel them to Atlanta for the SEC Championship -- a place the Aggies have yet to reach in a dozen tries. One can hear the mocking now: We've done more in one year than you've done in 12. Oh, and the loss would occur on A&M's home field, a last-second demand of Bjork as penance for the SEC's burnt-orange betrayal behind their back.
The emotional damage would be incalculable. Picture a volcano explosion, taking place during a tsunami.
Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder must've not been a college football fan. In Texas, absence has only built animosity. But in their 12 years apart, Texas and Texas A&M skirmish in their various proxy battles -- in recruiting, online, in sports other than football -- then retreat to their respective corners, each convinced that when the football reunion inevitably happened, their side would emerge victorious. On Nov. 30, reality arrives, and then the real fun begins.