On Tuesday, April 10th, the Texas Longhorns came to College Station to face the Texas A&M Aggies in a non-conference baseball game. The Horns were welcomed to a sell-out crowd at Blue Bell Park, where maroon and some occasional burnt-orange shirts piled to see the spectacle before them. I was among those maroon shirts, and throughout the evening I had some realizations about what was going on before me.
When the Aggies left the Big 12 in 2012 for the SEC, a lot of publications pinned it on the school wanting to leave because of the shadow Texas cast on A&M. Although the Aggies were under-performing in certain programs at the time and were not getting the same revenue as Texas, who had their own network on television, a majority of students and alumni never saw themselves in the shadow of any school, and they did not like the idea of not being able to play Texas anymore.
Even so, the SEC offered prestige, revenue, and fresh excitement for a fanbase eager to grow and be successful, and it may have been an opportunity the university couldn’t refuse.
Years after the power couple of Texas-based colleges split up, you would think that the passion of the rivalry would fizzle out. But I realized the night of the baseball game is that this is not the case at all with Texas and Texas A&M. No matter how popular the sport, when these two face off, the stakes are higher and the attendance is as well.
The sold-out baseball game had a Blue Bell Park record of 7,537 people in attendance, over 1,000 more than the LSU series the weekend before. LSU is considered a current in-conference rival for A&M, so it’s evident that the fanbase still cares about this Texas rivalry and they are willing to show up in huge numbers years after their breakup.
This attendance spike isn’t just in baseball games between the two schools. The volleyball programs battled it out a couple weeks earlier, and the attendance was over 50% higher than the average home attendance at Reed Arena for a volleyball game. This rivalry extends to all aspects of the universities, and the most dearly missed of these is the football programs duking it out on Thanksgiving Day.
The student body at Texas A&M is starting to get fed up with not having their football game versus Texas, so some students have taken it upon themselves to start a petition to add in Texas to the Aggies’ non-conference schedule. Fliers were being handed out at the baseball game, and one of the guys informed me that they are almost at 20,000 online signatures. Will it be enough to bring back the game? Probably not, but if there is still hope, why not try?
One thing about Texas and Texas A&M is certain: there will always be a star by their schedules when they play each other. The people love their rivalry, even if it isn’t quite the same as before. Hopefully, the heads of the universities can find some common ground and place some importance on this historic matchup, even if they aren’t in the same conference anymore. Whether you’re an Ag or a Horn, we love our rivalry, and we don’t see that love leaving us anytime soon.
