Everyone knows that the annual meeting of the Aggies and the Longhorns went on hiatus after 2011. But we’d like to presuppose this: What if it didn’t? Peering through the multiverse like Marvel’s Doctor Strange, we’ve found a timeline in which, while the Aggies still joined the SEC in 2012, a state law in the 2011 legislative session mandated that Texas and Texas A&M keep their football rivalry alive by playing a head-to-head grudge match every season, no matter how impractical their annual meetings become. Here are some of the rivalry’s memorable installments from the alternate universe where the Longhorns and Aggies never stopped playing each other.
2012: Texas A&M 70–Texas 17
Aggie fans can still close their eyes and see freshman phenom Johnny Manziel slip out of the grasp of UT defensive end Jackson Jeffcoat on a fourth-and-37 play at the end of the first half. His seventeen-second scramble led to a touchdown for the Aggies, who had been scoreless up until then, and cut the Longhorn lead to a manageable 17–7 at halftime. On the play, Johnny Football found receiver Uzoma Nwachukwu in the end zone after surveying, resurveying, resurveying, and once more surveying the field while eluding Longhorns defenders. The play proved so dispiriting for Mack Brown’s Texas squad that the Horns surrendered 63 unanswered points in the second half, resulting in the most lopsided result in the rivalry’s history.
2016: Texas 6–Texas A&M 0
The 2016 college football season was an ignoble one for both the Longhorns and the Aggies. Texas entered the game on a losing streak, having just dropped their first game to the Kansas Jayhawks since deodorant had been invented. The Aggies, meanwhile, were at the tail end of season that got off to a promising start but then cratered. After reaching number four in the Associated Press poll that September, A&M had done enough losing to fall out of the rankings altogether before entering the matchup against Texas unranked. The daunting affair resulted in a scoreless game throughout all four quarters of regulation time, followed by sixteen subsequent scoreless overtimes, before Longhorns running back D’Onta Foreman stumbled into the end zone on an off-balance, 25-yard run that saw the ball carrier nearly trip over six exhausted Aggie defenders.
“We passed a law to mandate this?” A&M graduate and GOP Representative Brooks Landgraf tweeted during the seventh overtime, a sentiment retweeted by fellow Aggie and Democratic Representative Gene Wu. The rare show of comity between opposing legislators created a hopeful moment during an otherwise divisive year.
2020: Texas A&M 34–Texas 33
The COVID-shortened 2020 season provided fans with some much-needed distraction during a difficult time. A&M Head Coach Jimbo Fisher and the Aggies rose to the occasion, entering the rivalry game with an 8–1 record in the shortened season. Meanwhile, UT Coach Tom Herman and the Longhorns limped into the game unranked in what would prove to be the coach’s final season in Austin. Still, the rivalry delivered, as quarterback Sam Ehlinger led a feisty Longhorns effort up to a failed two-point conversion that would have upset the Aggies on the game’s final play. For a moment, fans across the Lone Star State forgot that they were stuck at home during a pandemic.
