Even when I was in second grade, all of my classmates identified as Longhorns or Aggies. Their allegiance usually bent toward which college their parents attended—the University of Texas at Austin or Texas A&M. My father was a proud Aggie who earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in College Station. So at recess, when I heard kids shouting “Longhorn or Aggie?” I knew my answer right away. When my school hosted “team spirit” days, I pulled a maroon Texas A&M T-shirt from my closet with no second thoughts. Aggies were good and Longhorns were bad—this I knew to be true.
I inherited the rivalry. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why years later, when I was headed for college, I decided to attend the University of Texas. “Be a light for Austin,” an Aggie mom said to me, likely worried that being surrounded by Longhorns might compromise my morals. “How did your dad take it?” my basketball coach asked. The seemingly casual questions and masked shock about my decision fueled my own flame for the rivalry. But when I finally arrived on campus in Austin, my interest in backing either side dimmed. After all, we didn’t even play them anymore.
An entire generation of Texans raised on the rivalry between Longhorns and Aggies were left out to dry when, in 2011, Texas A&M announced it was leaving the Big 12 to join the SEC. The news came after more than a century of annual showdowns between the two football programs; the first such grudge match was held in 1894. After that, the tradition survived two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War—and then it was over.
After more than a decade without a rivalry game, the Texas Longhorns officially joined the SEC in July and will play the Aggies once again on November 30, with the state’s two flagship universities facing off at Kyle Field, in College Station. For those of us who attended college between 2012 and 2024, this will be the first time in our adult lives that we get to witness the rivalry on the football field. Until this year, the best we could do was experience it through nostalgia and family storytelling.
When November 30 rolls around, some Longhorn fans will be spending the evening as far away from College Station as possible, intent on watching the game from a safe space. Meanwhile, most Aggies can’t imagine being anywhere but Kyle Field.
Memo Salinas, however, is the rare Aggie who wouldn’t give an arm and a leg to be at the game. After much deliberation with his fiancée, he decided it was best to avoid the stadium—and any college football–related tomfoolery—on game day. Salinas is the first Hispanic yell leader—one of the five A&M upperclassmen responsible for leading crowd chants at football games—in Aggie history. In 2020 he spent his junior year in College Station on the sidelines of Kyle Field, wearing the bright white yell-leader jumpsuit. Standing beside the other four, he led the student body in the Aggie War Hymn, with anti-UT lyrics such as “goodbye to texas university” and the chant “Saw Varsity’s horns off.” (Before UT claimed the Longhorn as its mascot around the turn of the twentieth century, the school’s football team was known as Texas Varsity.) As a senior, Salinas was appointed the Aggies’ head yell leader. During one midnight yell practice, he chastised the student body for an inappropriate chant: “If you want to do that, go to Austin.”
But long before that, Salinas was planted in front of the TV at his home in Laredo, sitting with his father and two brothers, all decked out in maroon. His dad, Danny (whom Salinas affectionately calls a “cultie”), was a former member of the Aggie Corps of Cadets and taught his three sons that “longhorn” was a bad word. “I’m not joking,” Salinas says. “I would not say the word.” And no matter how the season went, the matchup against the Longhorns, which was historically held on Thanksgiving Day, mattered more than any other. “You could lose every game,” he says, “but if you won that one, the season was solid.”
The kickoff between the two teams was a moment of anticipation, excitement, and fear in countless Texas households. “It was almost like Thanksgiving was just a larger game day,” Salinas recalls. After Thanksgiving dinner at his grandparents’ house, his dad would throw a watch party complete with a fried turkey.
When Salinas was a kid, he says, Aggie fans were in the minority—at least among Laredo seven-year-olds. In those days, when Coach Mack Brown’s Longhorns were competing at the highest level of college football, fellow Aggies seemed few and far between. “This is before Johnny [Manziel], before A&M being relevant,” he says. “You guys won the ‘natty’ in the 2005 season, so it was popular and easy to be a Texas fan. It was not popular to be an A&M fan in my childhood.” Some Aggies say the Longhorns have a bandwagon fan base; they accuse Texans who didn’t attend either school of choosing Texas over A&M.
A little more than a hundred miles from Kyle Field, Isa Garcia wore a burnt orange cheerleader uniform and carried pom-poms on the sidelines of Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium between 2014 and 2018. She lives in Los Angeles now, but she’ll be flying home to San Antonio this Thanksgiving, where a true “house divided” awaits her. Neither she nor her two Aggie brothers got a chance to see Texas and Texas A&M play during their college careers, but her family group chat remains ablaze with “horns down” attacks from her twentysomething siblings.
“My personal experience at UT was we didn’t really talk about A&M,” Garcia says. “I don’t feel super attached to [the rivalry] because I didn’t feel like I got to experience it. . . . I don’t have the hatred toward Aggies that [my brothers] seem to have toward Longhorns.”
Until this season, UT student culture seemed to have moved on from its longtime rivalry with A&M. Maybe Longhorns were distracted by downtown Austin and job opportunities in the state capital, but the animosity between the schools didn’t permeate every layer of the university like it once had. UT students still had their annual showdown against Oklahoma, and that felt like enough.
But the animosity never stopped pumping through the veins of Texas A&M students and fan culture, even during the rivalry’s long football drought. The phenomenon of the “horns down” hand signal swept the nation, a trend led by Texas A&M students as they flashed upside-down “hook ’em” signs during nationally televised football games. It’s common to spot the “horns down” pose on Aggie Instagram accounts, even when the posts have nothing to do with football or the Texas Longhorns.
Garcia had initially planned to watch this year’s UT–A&M game from her brother’s home in College Station, but she decided to stay with their parents in San Antonio when her brother told her that his house will be full of his fraternity brothers. She’s apprehensive about the game after all the years when Texas was supposedly back but ended its season in disappointment. “I don’t know if I have the energy for my brothers to just berate me all the time,” she laughs. “It would just be ‘chef’s kiss’ to beat them the first game back.”
Although he decided to steer clear of Kyle Field when the Longhorns visit College Station, Salinas says he worries that fans on both sides could lose sight of what Aggies and Longhorns have in common as Texans. “Yes, it’s going to get ugly—it’s a rivalry,” he says. “But there’s more to it. There’s a heart to it that is hard to understand.” The return of the UT–A&M game will redeem the generation of yell leaders, cheerleaders, players, and fans who inherited the rivalry but never experienced it on the football field. Salinas compares his emotions toward the Longhorns to the way he felt toward his brothers when they were growing up together.
“We’re family,” he says. “I really hate you right now, and I really want to beat you more than anything in the world because it ignites every fire in me. But at the same time, we’re both trying to do and be the best for the betterment of our home.”
