Texas A&M still stuck in Texas' shadow after rivalry's SEC reunion. Can it escape?

New York Times

08-07-2025

Editor's note: All week, The Athletic is writing about college football rivalries at a moment of change in the sport. Read our ranking of the top 100 rivalries here and also vote for your favorites.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Across the street from the largest football stadium in the SEC on a warm spring day, students study, a couple of dudes with guitars jam and swans float on a pond. The scene is straight from a college brochure.
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On fall Saturdays here, the 20-acre green space comes alive with tailgaters, but for most of the year, it's an idyllic gathering spot at the heart of the Lone Star State's largest university by enrollment. Staring up at the soaring stands of Kyle Field, capacity 102,733, it is hard not to think: Texas A&M really does have everything.
Yet, still, when it comes to football — and athletics in general — the Aggies find themselves chasing Texas, their once-again conference rivals who walked into the SEC last season and headed straight for a seat at the head of the table.
The message from Texas A&M's relatively new leadership team is that while a rivalry can be a great motivator, any energy spent worrying about what's going on 87 miles southwest in Austin is wasted.
'I don't think it's problematic. I think it's real,' Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts said. 'Anytime you have an in-state rival, fans are going to compare, and that's part of what competition is rooted in: comparison. But from my perspective — and I've been a part of some pretty big (rivalries), Nebraska-Oklahoma, then Nebraska-Colorado — I'll tell you the best chance you have of being successful in those is to spend all your time focusing on yourself.'
Just one season into its renewal, the state of the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry — which dates to 1884, has been played 119 times and is No. 15 in Scott Dochterman's top 100 rivalries — is as spicy as ever. Maybe even more so.
'The rivalry has always been intense in my eyes, but I think the fire does burn a bit deeper now with Texas in the SEC and the absence of those two teams playing for so long and then the success that Texas had off the bat,' said David Nuno, an A&M alum and host of TexAgs Radio.
It was a tough year all around for the Aggies in the rivalry.
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In men's basketball, the Longhorns won two of three meetings, including the rubber match in the SEC tournament. In baseball, Texas lured coach Jim Schlossnagle away from A&M immediately after he took the Aggies to the College World Series final, then swept the Aggies this season, a low point for a team that had been preseason No. 1 and failed to make the NCAA tournament.
Only A&M softball struck back for the Aggies by eliminating Texas from the SEC tournament.
In the one that matters most? The Longhorns beat the Aggies 17-7 at Kyle Field in their first football meeting since 2011 on the way to appearances in the SEC championship and College Football Playoff.
Texas' first season playing SEC football could not have gone much better (13-3 and No. 4 in the final AP poll). Meanwhile, even with more than a decade's head start in the conference, Texas A&M is still looking for its first trip to Atlanta for the title game.
Mike Elko's debut season as the Aggies' head coach had a lot to like after the disheartening and costly Jimbo Fisher experiment in College Station. But Texas A&M stumbled to 8-5 after a 7-1 start, failing to reach double-digit wins for the 12th consecutive season since Johnny Manziel and the Aggies took the SEC by storm in 2012.
'I think when you look at last year, the big picture of it, you have to see success,' Elko said. 'I think we were competing on a stage that Texas A&M had not been on, really, since they joined the league; being in the race to be in the Playoff, being in the race to be in Atlanta all the way down to the end of the season. And so to me, when I look at it, I think we absolutely steadied the ship. I think we absolutely took a forward step.'
R.C. Slocum was part of 30 A&M-UT games as either an assistant or head coach of the Aggies, and he takes pride in having been on the winning side 16 times. Texas leads the all-time series 77-37-5, though Slocum notes: 'They like to count the times when our guys were all fighting the war, in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam.'
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Slocum, who grew up in Orange, Texas, on the Louisiana border, coached the Aggies to a school-record 123 victories over 14 years. His .721 winning percentage is best of any Texas A&M coach in the modern era, and his 1998 Big 12 championship team is the last Aggies squad to win a title.
Leaving the Big 12 — and Texas and its Longhorn Network — and joining the SEC in 2011 was an enormous point of pride for Texas A&M.
While many Aggies seethed when Texas was invited to the SEC in 2021, Slocum was all for it.
'Texas was gonna go somewhere. So would you rather them being in the Big Ten, down here in Texas recruiting all the time and telling kids that, 'Hey, you come here, we're gonna go to the West Coast? We're gonna go to the East Coast.' Let's have them here in this state. We're the two big dogs in this state, and we compete for these kids, and we play in the same league,' Slocum said.
During Texas and Texas A&M's estrangement, the Longhorns floundered. Texas ushered out Mack Brown in 2014, eight seasons after winning the school's last national title, only to continue sputtering through three seasons of Charlie Strong and four under Tom Herman.
The rivalry lived on through schadenfreude, with each side basking in the other's failures. It was a long-distance relationship based on the premise that misery loves company.
'It's really interesting with Texas,' Brown said. 'Texas Tech was a rival. Baylor was a rival. TCU was a rival. Everybody hated Texas, right? In fact, we had a little saying that everybody hates Texas more than they like themselves.'
While the A&M rivalry runs deep, the Oklahoma game typically defines a Texas season. Under Brown, the annual Red River game at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, with half the stadium clad in OU crimson and the other in UT burnt orange, often had national title implications.
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To many Texas fans, OU is a peer. A&M is a younger sibling.
'I think there's a level of arrogance with Texas fans that comes at A&M,' Nuno said.
The Longhorns are most definitely feeling themselves these days, and why not?
Under coach Steve Sarkisian, hired by AD Chris Del Conte in 2022, Texas is 25-5 over the past two seasons with two CFP semifinal appearances. This season, with Arch Manning set to take over at quarterback, the Longhorns could start as the No. 1 team in the country.
In College Station, there is also reason for optimism, though with more modest expectations. Elko's second team features one of the best offensive lines in the country, an intriguing dual-threat quarterback in Marcel Reed and a potential All-America linebacker in Taurean York. Still, it doesn't quite look like a roster ready to take a huge leap in the SEC.
To that end, Texas A&M boasts the No. 3 recruiting class for 2026 in the 247Sports Composite, with 21 of 24 commitments rated either a five- or four-star prospect.
Of course, Texas' success affects Texas A&M. The opposite would be true, too. That's the way rivalries work. Especially in-state rivalries.
'You're in the same recruiting footprint, stepping all over each other,' Elko said. 'You certainly would love to be the team that's doing amazing and the other team doing poor. But I don't know that it's an impactful feeling. I don't sit around rooting for them to do poorly.'
Elko is Texas A&M's fifth head coach since Slocum was pushed out after the 2002 season. Alberts is the fourth AD since the move to the SEC. Turnover at the top, including at the top of the university itself, is generally not a formula for success in college athletics.
'I think alignment matters,' said Elko, the former defensive coordinator under Fisher who went 16-9 in two seasons at Duke before being brought back to A&M to replace his former boss by then-AD Ross Bjork. 'Your alignment, from your president to your head coach to your AD, all of that really, really matters. There's been a lot of transition in all of those positions since we've joined the SEC.'
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The Aggies are hoping that in Elko and Alberts, the former Nebraska All-American linebacker and athletic director, they have found their version of Sarkisian and Del Conte, even if they'd prefer to forget the comparisons.
'There's this great picture of Michael Phelps swimming in the Olympics, and his chief rival is swimming next to him,' Alberts said. 'Phelps is looking straight ahead. His rival's looking at him. And it says, winners focus on winners. Losers focus on winners. So my point is, I have great relationships, I have respect, but I'm really not all that concerned with what's happening in Austin.
'We need to be the best version of Texas A&M, and we need to spend all of our energy and all of our focus on making sure that Texas A&M is as good as we can possibly be.'
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; photos: Todd Kirkland, Michael Chang, Alex Slitz / Getty Images)