Missing ingredient: Horns and Aggies renew history and bitter rivalry after more than a decade

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) – Ricky Williams won the Heisman Trophy and set the NCAA’s all-time rushing record during an illustrious career with the Texas Longhorns.

Another highlight? Getting three wins over Texas A&M in four seasons.

“It’s been a missing ingredient for Texas for a long time,” Williams told The Associated Press this week. “Part of what, at least in my time at Texas, made Texas great was beating the Aggies.”

And he’s thrilled that the rivalry — one of college football’s greatest — has been reborn.

Split for more than a decade as the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC, Texas-Texas A&M returns on Saturday, bringing back a brother-against-brother grudge match dating back to the 1890s.

From “Hook’em” to “Gig’em,” Heisman Trophy winners, legendary coaches and mascots, and the Aggie bonfire tragedy that united the two programs in grief, the game has finally and thankfully returned.

“It’s one of those deals when you grow up in Texas and my whole life, that’s all you know, it’s A&M and Texas on Thanksgiving weekend,” Dat Nguyen, an All-American linebacker, said. who played for the Aggies from 1995-98. “And it was a shame that it’s gone. It’s been absent for a little while, but I’m so grateful that it’s back.”

The return of the rivalry and the efforts of it – the winner earns a trip to the SEC title game — has driven ticket prices through the roof. TickPick, an online ticket retailer, broadcast on X that Saturday’s game is the most expensive regular season football ticket, NFL or college, ever with an average price of $1,079.

The desire to win this series is so strong that losses can sting for years — or in Williams’ case — decades. He ran for 750 yards and six touchdowns in four games against the Aggies, but instead of dwelling on that success, he dwells on the game he lost.

Playing with a high ankle sprain for most of the second half, Williams finished with 183 yards and two touchdowns in a 27-16 A&M victory in 1997.

“We should have been 4-0 … because if I was healthy, there were a couple of runs where I know I would have had well over 200 yards,” he said. “So that one still haunts me.”

The origin

Texas leads the annual rivalry 76-37-5 and got it started by whipping the Aggies 38-0 in 1894. According to a newspaper account of the first game, A&M was thoroughly outclassed in defeat.

“Every time the Varsity boys made a catch-as-catch-can play, the A&M College boys went to the dust as so many tenpins were knocked down,” wrote the Austin Statesman.

The Aggies first beat Texas in 1902. The rivalry inspired Texas A&M’s first pregame bonfire in 1909, which became an annual tradition until wooden stack collapsed in 1999killed 12 people and injured dozens.

Crow and Campbell

Williams was the last Heisman winner to play in that streak, which has included three.

The first was Texas A&M’s John David Crow, a running back who won the trophy in 1957. A year earlier, he scored a touchdown as coach Paul “Bear” Bryant led A&M to its first victory at Texas’ Memorial Stadium in 1956.

The next year, first-year Texas coach Darrell Royal led the Longhorns to a victory in College Station. The Longhorns’ home stadium now bears his name.

Crow is the only Texas A&M Heisman winner to play in the series. Johnny Manziel missed the rivalry with the Aggies, who said “farewell to the University of Texas,” as the Aggie War Hymn says, to move to the SEC in 2012 and end the rivalry.

Earl Campbell, who became Texas’ first Heisman winner in 1977, had the best game of his career, rushing for 222 yards and three touchdowns and catching his only career touchdown pass in a 57-28 victory in 1977.

History of the series

Texas owned the rivalry from 1940-1974, going 31-3-1. It has been much more competitive since then, with A&M holding a 19-18 edge in the last 37 years of the rivalry. The Aggies’ longest streak came when they won 10 of 11 from 1984-94.

It was Williams who turned the series back in favor of the Longhorns. He was an 18-year-old running back when he first visited Texas A&M in 1995.

Texas A&M’s “Wrecking Crew” defense was ranked No. 1 in the nation, and big stories told on campus led Williams, a San Diego native, to believe the Aggies were all “6-foot-5 and they all ran 4.2s. (40-yard dash.)”

“I was scared,” Williams said. “I thought it was going to be a bloodbath and we were going to be on the losing end of it.”

Instead, Williams had his coming out party in front of a national television audience, rushing for a season-high 163 yards and two touchdowns to lead Texas to a 16-6 victory.

“When I saw the reaction after that game, it really hit me how big the rivalry was,” Williams said.

Dan Neil, an All-American offensive lineman who played at Texas from 1993-96, helped block for Williams that day.

“Watching them lose their minds when we beat them was something I treasure,” Neil said.

RC Slocum spent years as an assistant with the Aggies and was their head coach from 1989-2002. Now 80, he is so happy that the game is back.

“I grew up watching this fight as a youngster in Texas and then coached it 30 times,” he said. “And it’s a great rivalry. We’re … two great schools in a great state that love football. And that’s the way it should be.”

Triumph and tragedy

The 1990s saw two of the most exciting and emotionally draining games in the rivalry’s history.

In 1998, Williams broke the NCAA major college career record in Texas’ 26-24 upset of No. 6 Aggies.

Williams outscored Pittsburgh’s Tony Dorsett with a 60-yard touchdown run in the first quarter, plowing over an Aggies defender at the goal line. But he fumbled twice after that run, and the Longhorns needed a field goal in the final seconds to win.

“It was wonderful that I broke the record and I got all the fame,” Williams said. “But I almost lost the game … so what I remember most about my last collegiate game against the Aggies was that it was the epitome of a team win. And I think when you go into these big rivalry games, is what it comes down to.”

Even in the loss, the Aggies helped celebrate Williams’ Heisman-clinching game with Crow joining Dorsett and Campbell to present him with a game ball.

Tragedy struck College Station in 1999 when the 40-foot tall log tower assembled for the annual bonfire collapsed eight days before the game. Dozens of Aggies players rushed to the scene to help rescuers remove the heavy logs, and Longhorns players held blood drives for the injured.

Some questioned whether the match should be called off, but in the end it was played as planned. Slocum said the game, which the Aggies won 20-16, was his most meaningful.

“We had gone through so much here with the terrible tragedy and that game was one I felt more pressure than any other game I’ve ever coached that we really needed to win that game,” he said. “I didn’t tell the players, but I felt it myself.”

Slocum said Texas was very sensitive about the situation and that then-Texas coach Mack Brown called him several times that week to discuss it. The Texas band played “Amazing Grace” at halftime.

“It was a good ballgame, but it turned out to be necessary for our sake,” Slocum said.

Bitter enemies

Although the teams and their fans united after this tragedy, the fabric of this rivalry is in the disdain Texas and Texas A&M have held for each other for more than a century.

The Aggie fight song calls “so the Varsity’s horn off,” and for decades the Longhorns held a pregame candlelight “Hex Rally” as one of the more unique ways to gain the upper hand.

Texas has had bragging rights for the past 13 years after knocking off the Aggies 27-25 on a last-second field goal at Kyle Field in the last meeting.

“When I first came to A&M, you obviously grow more hate or hatred toward Texas, especially that day or leading up to that week,” Nguyen said. “And I have tons of friends that went to Texas and I don’t hate anybody, it’s just about that one game.”

Neil believes nothing matters more to Texas A&M than this game.

“They live to beat Texas. To an Aggie, that game is everything,” Neil said.

And if Texas wins Saturday?

“It’s going to drive the Aggies crazy. They could implode. They’re about as hot as you can imagine for this one.”

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