Wait so I see they put us in that ESPN award candidate list and I scroll through looking for who they picked from our team and it gets me thinking about what a real rivalry game used to mean aorund here. You look at that list and they are just naming names based on numbers from last season and transfer portal ratings and NIL valuations and none of it captures what made this program matter in the first place.
This reminds me of the old Southwest Conference days when we would go into Waco or Lubbock or Austin and it was a war. Those games against Baylor in the late 80s when Coach Sullivan had us running the veer and those Bears would stack the box and it was just pure football. No analytics. No portal defections. No kids sitting out the second half because they were worried about their draft stock. You lined up across from a guy who hated you and you hit him in the mouth for four quarters and then you shook hands and went to the bus.
The conference realignment killed all that. We traded the SWC rivalries that built this program for some made up matchup against a team from a thousand miles away that nobody in Fort Worth cares about. I remember the 1995 game against Rice when we were both still in the SWC and it mattered because every game in that league mattered. Now we are scheduling North Carolina on a Thursday night and ESPN calls it a rivalry and I am supposed to get excited about it.
Coach Patterson used to say that rivalries are not scheduled they are earned. You earn them by playing the same teams year after year and letting the hate build up naturally. You cannot manufacture that with a TV deal and a conference realignment committee. The kids in the portal today will never understand what it felt like to beat Texas in 1999 when we were still in the WAC and nobody gave us a chance. That was a rivalry because of history not because of a marketing department.
I just miss when the game meant something deeper than a recruiting class ranking or a portal grade.