Texas Heartbreak, Forever
Texas-Oklahoma isn’t just a stubborn holdout in college football’s age of change. It’s also a symptom of it. See you next year at the State Fair of Texas. Except both teams will be in the SEC.
Where to start with the final Big 12 edition of the Texas-Oklahoma game? One play speaks for the 34-30 Sooners win. In the fourth quarter, the Longhorns were down by seven. It was fourth-and-goal at the Sooners’ 2-yard line. Here was the Longhorns’ chance to banish the “Texas is back” comedy that keeps America in stitches.
Longhorns quarterback Quinn Ewers threw a quick pass to receiver Xavier Worthy. Worthy stretched toward the end zone, but the refs marked him just short. The reporters in the Cotton Bowl’s press box waited for an ABC replay to appear. Then, we saw the telling image: Worthy was seated on the wrong side of the goal line. “Naw,” someone said. “His ass was down.”
I come to Dallas for the annual Texas-OU game to create memories like that. In 1996, when the first Big 12 edition of this game was played, I was an 18-year-old Texas freshman. I went to Texas partly because of the Big 12, which now sounds like being called to a career in politics because of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
Returning to the Cotton Bowl this year, before Texas and Oklahoma portal themselves to the SEC, was fun and almost enlightening. There has been a lot of angst about what college football will look like in its realigned future. I’d argue the Texas-OU game offers a place where you can see a vision of the sport’s future clearly.
But let’s start with Saturday’s game. No football game this year will have a screwier, more dramatic start. On the second offensive play of the game, Ewers threw a pass into the hands of Oklahoma defensive back Gentry Williams. Then Dillon Gabriel, the OU quarterback, ran for a touchdown. Then the Longhorns pulled off a fake punt. Then they converted a fourth down and got a fumble call overturned by review—on the same play. Then a Texas pass was knocked out of tight end Ja’Tavion Sanders’s hands for another OU interception. Then Texas blocked a punt, recovered the ball in the end zone, and tied the score at 7-7. After all that had happened, there was still 9:02 left in the first quarter.
The game did not exactly settle down from there. Texas-OU had “mood swings,” to quote sportswriter Mike Shropshire. Even the game’s seven lead changes don’t quite describe its state of uncertainty. Oklahoma was playing well enough to win but didn’t pull away when Ewers fumbled at midfield in the third quarter. Texas was playing badly enough to lose (running into the punter, a dropped interception in the end zone) but hadn’t managed to blow it—yet, at least.
Oklahoma came in as one of the most mysterious undefeated teams in the country. To beat Texas, the Sooners first needed Gabriel to play hellaciously against a good defense. Gabriel had 285 passing yards and 113 rushing yards (8.1 yards per carry)—many of the latter yards came when he couldn’t find open receivers. Second, the Sooners needed to outmuscle Texas’s “bigger humans.” They did that on both lines—Ewers was sacked five times. The Sooners needed to force turnovers. They did that, too. After the game, Oklahoma has some of the same juice that Texas had before it.
After the loss, Texas fans began a familiar tradition of thinking, “God, why was I fooled again?” Ewers had a great line (31 of 37 for 346 yards) but did the one thing he couldn’t do: give the ball to Oklahoma. Coach Steve Sarkisian got a temporary reputation cleanse after his aggressive play-calling beat Alabama in September. On Saturday, with the game tied and 1:24 left in the fourth quarter, Texas had third-and-10 at the Oklahoma 35. Sark called for a running play. It’s the kind of call that gets your heart broken rather than one that ends the game. Sure enough, after Texas kicked a field goal, Gabriel went 75 yards in five plays and threw the winning touchdown. If that sequence gets forgotten, Sark can thank Mario Cristobal.
I can offer some expertise about what it’s like to live inside the Texas bubble of eternal hope. Texas fans have a mix of major pride, happy memories, and disarming helplessness. After winning at Alabama, they allowed themselves to believe the team had finally figured it out: how to recruit great quarterbacks, how to build SEC-style lines, how to coach its way out of problems instead of into them.
It’s a small consolation that Saturday’s edition of Texas-OU was an old-style Mack Brown kind of loss, where a bunch of very good players brought less than their best selves to Dallas. See how that tastes on your Fletcher’s Corny Dog.
If you’ve never been to Texas-OU, it’s hard to describe how amazing it is to hold a football game inside a rusting state fair. Here’s what’s amazing about it: the midway, the way the corn dog vendor winks when she hands you your order, the Cotton Bowl, the stands that are split down the middle, the early kickoff, the press box royalty like Kirk Bohls and Berry Tramel, the “Texas sucks” chant, the “OU sucks” chant, the jean skirts, the boots, and the sorority buttons that say things like “Kiss a Theta.”
Texas-OU is probably the most unregulated major sporting event in America. Before Saturday’s game, I was caught in a mass of hundreds of people—yes, hundreds—all pushing their way toward the mouth of the Cotton Bowl. It was a scene similar to what you see on CNN after something berserk happens in the world. As I was being carried forward, a voice behind me—a fellow traveler in the same blob of humanity—said, “This is fucking great, man.” Who’d say that about a crowd other than someone at a music festival or outside a college football game?
These are the odd things about college football that we hope won’t be spoiled by the round of realignment that will move Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC. Here’s the thing: Texas-OU isn’t just a stubborn holdout in an age of change. It’s also a symptom of it.
In a period of less than 30 years, Texas and OU will have used this game as a bargaining chip to move between a collective total of four different conferences. For years, Texas-OU was a Southwest Conference vs. Big Eight game. Then it was a Big 12 game. During a forgotten period of near realignment a decade ago, it almost became a Pac-12 game. Next year, it will be an SEC game. On Saturday, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was dining on Rudy’s barbecue in the press box.
Texas and Oklahoma have done a commendable job of protecting the game, refusing offers to move it to AT&T Stadium and away from the state fair. But when it comes to rivalries with the Big 12 teams they’ve been playing for the past quarter century—well, their view of commitment is like James Harden’s. This is what’s funny about college football. The coolest, most untamed thing might also be, exactly at the same time, “all about the money.”
College football fans have dug their way through mounds of cognitive dissonance before (see: recorded history before NIL). I’d argue that your idea of “tradition” depends a lot on when you were born. In 1996, I don’t remember sitting in the Cotton Bowl at the first Big 12 Texas-OU game and saying, “It’s not the same unless we play Houston and Rice in conference.”
I remember a lot about that ’96 game—another Sooners upset, it turned out. The game tickets had a perforated outer section that was torn off as you entered the fair. The Cotton Bowl had a severe angle from the upper deck. For some reason, I remember walking through the parking lots afterward. On Saturday, when I walked through those same lots, a lonely SUV was blasting—and I mean really blasting—George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning.” How’s that for making memories? See you next year.
