Jump to content

Tell Me About Texas a&m

MrPhlegm

By MrPhlegm
in Football

 Share

Recommended Posts

DFW Horn

DFW Horn 6123

Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

I'm not sure which is more overrated in the eyes of aggy: their football team or their band.

Both suck.  aggy believes both to be awesome. 

I think I see a pattern of behavior.

You just don't understand how difficult it is for aggy to march back & forth in straight lines and don't appreciate the legendary "tuba turn". Whooooooooop!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Replies 79.5k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • Longboard Horn

    2173

  • Randolph Duke

    2141

  • Deej

    2076

  • Cairn Horn88

    1613

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

MachoMan
MachoMan
Mittens
Mittens
TexLonghorn
TexLonghorn

Posted Images

Randolph Duke

Randolph Duke 4034

Posted
Posted
48 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

I'm not sure which is more overrated in the eyes of aggy: their football team or their band.

Both suck.  aggy believes both to be awesome. 

I think I see a pattern of behavior.

Nothing about Texas A&M is even remotely “awesome.” 

I saw a quote recently where someone stated when you increase your knowledge a small amount you are impressed with how much you have learned, and when you increase your knowledge substantially you realize how little you initially knew. 

That pretty much sums up the difference between aggy and UT cultures. 

Mom glad we are done with in the conference and I can’t wait to end our association with them in matters associated with the state legislature. I have to believe it will happen. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Horn Dog

Horn Dog 9818

Posted
Posted
On 7/22/2019 at 11:42 AM, UcancallmeSurly said:

 

 

On 7/22/2019 at 12:30 PM, sdm said:

No truer words were ever spoken - 

"The culture there is off" - Colin Cowherd

At  1:26 -

"The culture there is weird.  I have never figured it out"  -  Colin Cowherd

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
sdm

sdm 847

Posted
Posted
16 minutes ago, Horn Dog said:

 

At  1:26 -

"The culture there is weird.  I have never figured it out"  -  Colin Cowherd

Everyone says aggy is weird, that's why I prefer his quote at :52, saying "the culture there is off" implies to me it's something more disturbing than just being weird.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
GringoSalado

GringoSalado 1651

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, DFW Horn said:

You just don't understand how difficult it is for aggy to march back & forth in straight lines and don't appreciate the legendary "tuba turn". Whooooooooop!

I sat next to an tOSU "alum" at the 2006 game at DKR.

trashy jorts chick: *15 minutes of bragging about their band and dotting the i and how awesome this is*
tOSU tuba player does his thing, visitors section goes nuts. trashy jorts chick beams at me through layers of makeup.
me: staring at tjc, "Well. I will say that was better than aggy's band."
tjc: "What? Who the fuck is aggy?"
me: 

/csb

Edited by GringoSalado
whoop
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Vic Mackey

Vic Mackey 47019

Posted
Posted

Hey look someone old enough to have seen Aggy win a national title in football.

"Your birthday cards are putting a big smile on the face of the oldest living Aggie, Ike Morris '33 - he turns 109 on Aug. 1! Thank you, Ags - you've sent at least 195 cards so far and we're sure more are coming in now!"

67462146_10156845571729753_6869355592117

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Randolph Duke

Randolph Duke 4034

Posted
Posted (edited)

https://texags.com/forums/5/topics/3047246/last#last

It's stunning to me really, that so many of you wish to do away with time honored traditions; little things that some, if not most, might seem weird or strange or just plain embarrassing.  

What troubles me is that as you slowly eat away at these traditions that make Texas A&M the unique, special university you chose to attend, it will eventually transform it into the very plain template of the dime a dozen big state university that you all passed over in favor of being a Texas Aggie.

Change CAN BE good. . . but change for the sake of change is never good. 

Be careful of erasing your past.  

And why are so many of you so concerned and worried about what those that did not have the vision, privilege and honor of attending this great institution thinks about it, or you?

Don't be afraid of being different, even a little strange. Maybe that's what brought you here in the fist place.

Embrace your Texas Aggie heritage; and before you tear it down, please pause . . . and think long and hard.

Edited by Randolph Duke
Link to comment
Share on other sites
SydneyCarton

SydneyCarton 48075

Posted
Posted (edited)

 

“big state university that you all passed over in favor of being a Texas Aggie.”

Looool. In the words of the esteemed Big Ern McCracken, Nice Flip Flop, Aggy. Way to go. 

Also, in bonus lolz:

“Don't be afraid of being different, even a little strange. Maybe that's what brought you here in the fist place”

Don’t think thats something they have to lose sleep worrying about. 

Edited by SydneyCarton
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Randolph Duke

Randolph Duke 4034

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Looool. In the words of the esteemed Big Ern McCracken, Nice Flip Flop, Aggy. Way to go. 

The things they “honor” aren’t traditions. They are bizarre rituals of a backwater culture. 

Using an outhouse instead of using indoor plumbing is not “honoring a tradition.”

Squeezing your testicles is not “honoring a tradition.” It is a bizarre ritual. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
bigcigar

bigcigar 1164

Posted
Posted
39 minutes ago, Randolph Duke said:

Don't be afraid of being different, even a little strange. Maybe that's what brought you here in the fist place.

That’s a surprising amount of self awareness from aggy. I don’t think it qualifies as just a little strange, but whatever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
SydneyCarton

SydneyCarton 48075

Posted
Posted

Looks like the partnership with The Athletic has begun. Say it ain't so, Andy Staples:

https://theathletic.com/1091572/2019/07/24/lucky-no-13-how-texas-am-stepped-out-of-the-longhorns-shadow-and-became-the-lone-star-states-sec-program/?source=dailyemail

Quote

Bowen Loftin remains certain Bill Powers meant no ill will. Loftin has no doubt Powers had only the best intentions during that moment in February 2010 when he said exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Loftin, then the president of Texas A&M, had driven to Austin with one of his vice presidents to meet with Powers, then the president at Texas, to discuss strategy for the upcoming legislative session. After their business concluded, Loftin asked to speak to Powers alone. When the vice presidents left the room, Loftin had a question. He’d heard some rumors about Texas talking to representatives of the Pac-10 conference. Powers said he couldn’t reveal any information regarding those rumors. Then he offered a statement that meant one thing to him and meant something completely different to Loftin, an Aggie ring-wearing, Howdy-greeting member of the Texas A&M class of 1970.

Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.

“I’m sure he thought he was saying something nice to me, that he was being reassuring,” says Loftin, who served as Texas A&M’s president from 2009-13 and Missouri’s chancellor from 2014-15. “And it speaks to the arrogance that that institution has often had toward Texas A&M.”

Loftin bit his tongue and got out of Austin, but he seethed at the notion that Texas A&M needed anything from its rival. Maybe when A&M was an all-male, military-focused institution in the 1950s it needed cachet conferred by its relationship with the school in Austin. But by 2010, Texas A&M had grown into a cosmopolitan, coed campus with more than 49,000 students. Like Texas, Texas A&M was the flagship of its own system of campuses. Like Texas, Texas A&M belonged to the Association of American Universities, an exclusive group made up of the nation’s most prestigious research institutions. In Loftin’s mind, no one needed to take care of his alma mater. It could take care of itself.

The two schools’ athletic departments also belonged to the Big 12, but given that Powers had just implicitly confirmed those rumors Loftin had heard, how long they would remain in that conference was anyone’s guess.

Over the next 19 months, a 16-team superconference would almost form. The Big 12 would almost implode — twice. Texas would push to make the best deal for itself, not realizing Texas A&M had become attractive enough to make its own great deal. When the dust finally settled, Texas would remain in its place bossing around the rest of the Big 12 — in the boardroom; not on the football field. Texas A&M, meanwhile, would forge a new athletic identity in a new league where everyone shared the loot evenly, no one made little brother jokes and all of the other schools appreciated the opportunity to make gobs of money off Texas television sets and recruit in one of the nation’s best football states.

Culturally, Texas A&M probably belonged in the Southeastern Conference all along. All it took to get there was a whole lot of backroom maneuvering, the formation of two ESPN networks, a threatened lawsuit from Baylor and a dash of good, old-fashioned Longhorn arrogance.

Texas A&M officials had researched the idea of moving to the SEC in the 1990s as the Southwest Conference began to fall apart. Once Arkansas left for the SEC, the league didn’t stretch outside the Lone Star State’s borders. That became problematic as leagues, taking advantage of the 1984 Supreme Court decision that wrestled control of college football’s television rights from the NCAA and handed it to the schools, began to sell their rights individually instead of as a collective called the College Football Association. The CFA fell apart after the SEC and the Big East made their own deals in the early ’90s, and the SWC was on borrowed time as it tried to compete against leagues with much bigger population footprints on the open market. The SEC added Arkansas and South Carolina and stopped at 12. The SWC disbanded, and four members of the league (Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech) arranged a shotgun marriage with the members of the Big 8.

The Big 12 began playing football in 1996, but the internal strife began before the first kickoff. Nebraska coach Tom Osborne used the occasion of his team’s 62-24 win against Florida in the Fiesta Bowl following the 1995 season to complain about a recently passed Big 12 rule that would severely limit the number of academic non-qualifiers and partial qualifiers that a conference school could take. Texas led the charge for that rule with support from the other SWC refugees.

It made sense that a league that was born in strife never truly came together. When former Women’s Tennis Association commissioner Larry Scott was hired in 2009 to run the Pac-10, he sensed an opportunity. The Big 12’s hold on its membership seemed tenuous at best. The Pac-10’s antiquated television deal was about to come up for renewal. Scott knew the lineup he had could make a lot more than it made in the existing TV deal, but he dreamed much bigger. How much might ESPN or Fox or NBC — or some combination of those networks — pay for the rights to a 16-school league that stretched across three timezones and covered nearly half the nation’s population? And then what if such a league started its own television network? How much would it command per cable subscriber, times 12 months a year? Meanwhile, the Big Ten had announced late in 2009 that it also had begun exploring expansion. If Scott wanted to create his 16-school dream conference, he’d have to move fast.

Loftin and Powers had met one more time — with Loftin asking the same question he had before and with Powers responding in a similar fashion — before Loftin got a call from Scott. Scott wanted to come to College Station to discuss a proposal with Loftin. Scott arrived armed with a PowerPoint presentation that explained exactly how a 16-team league would work. The Pac-10 would add Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado. Scott explained how the league would be split into north and south divisions in football. He would place the former Big 12 schools in a division with Arizona and Arizona State to cut down on travel distance, and he had schedules already made that stretched from 2012 to 2019.

AM_Realignment_Loftin_Slive-1024x639.jpg
 
Loftin (right) and late SEC commissioner Mike Slive were frequent and friendly collaborators before and after the Aggies joined the SEC. (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)

Loftin and Texas A&M athletic director Bill Byrne, fearing their volleyball team flying home from Corvallis on a random Tuesday night, asked how the move would affect travel for their other teams. Scott had an answer. Because Colorado didn’t play baseball and Oklahoma State didn’t play volleyball, those sports would be split into three geographically based pods of five teams each. Most importantly, the Pac-16 would split conference revenue evenly among all its members. Scott knew this was critical to Texas A&M. The Big 12 split its revenue unevenly, with the most money going to the schools that were selected by television partners to play on their networks. This naturally favored Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Scott also mentioned that he had already been in discussions with Powers at Texas. “The amount of planning they had done was so extensive that the rumors I had heard must have been true,” Loftin says. “There must have been months of conversations between Texas and the Pac.” A day after Scott met with Loftin in College Station, Loftin got a call from Powers at Texas. Powers told Loftin to expect a call from Larry Scott.

“There wasn’t perfect communication on their side, either,” Loftin says, laughing.

Loftin informed his board of regents, and that group was split. Some liked the idea of the Pac-16. Some wanted to work to keep the Big 12 together. All agreed Texas A&M needed to have a plan in case the Big 12 did disintegrate. One regent in particular knew another option to explore. “That gave us an opportunity to talk to the SEC,” says Jim Wilson, the Houston-area private equity CEO who served as vice chair of Texas A&M’s board at that time.

According to Loftin’s book The 100-Year Decision: Texas A&M And The SEC, he asked Byrne to contact his son Greg — who served as Mississippi State’s athletic director at the time — to get SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s the phone number. Loftin made the call, and soon after Loftin met with Slive, associate commissioner Greg Sankey (now the SEC’s commissioner) and associate commissioner Charlie Hussey at a private airport in the Houston suburb of Tomball. Instead of a PowerPoint presentation, the SEC officials had an iPad — then a brand new piece of technology — loaded with information about how Texas A&M might fit in the SEC.

Two years earlier, the SEC had made television deals with CBS and ESPN. Although the deals were considered good at the time, Slive and company knew they could make a lot more if they created a network similar to the one the Big Ten launched in 2007. Bernie Machen, Florida’s president at the time, says the league would have gone ahead with the creation of a network even if it had remained at 12 schools. But the addition of the state of Texas — with 25.1 million residents and 12 million cable subscribers — to the league’s footprint would make that network more lucrative and easier to get distributed.

Loftin, Wilson and several other regents relished the idea of going it alone to the SEC. But there were two other factions on the board and throughout Texas A&M’s leadership. One group wanted to look west with the other five Big 12 schools. A larger group wanted to keep the Big 12 together and maintain connections that stretched back a century. Loftin made a spreadsheet examining the pros and cons of each conference. Out of 20 categories, he assigned the SEC an advantage in 12. He assigned the Big 12 the advantage in only one category (recruiting capability), while the Big 12 and Pac-10 split the advantage in three other categories. He assigned the Pac-10 the advantage in four categories.

Bowen_Loftin_Chart.jpg
 
A matrix of the traits, pros and cons of the Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC for Texas A&M. (Courtesy Bowen Loftin)

The negotiations between the schools and the Pac-10, which had been relegated to message board rumor, exploded into public view on June 3 when Chip Brown of Orangebloods.com published a story about the Pac-10’s plan. At the time, the Big 12 meetings were taking place at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kansas City. The next day, Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe asked each school for a commitment to the Big 12. Loftin said Texas A&M was committed to the league “as it is today,” which gave the Aggies an out if anyone left. Missouri and Nebraska made no commitment whatsoever. Beebe then set a deadline of June 11 — one week later — for all of the schools to commit to the Big 12.

The Pac-10 invited Colorado on June 9, and the Buffaloes accepted the next day. On June 10, Texas A&M officials met with Texas officials. Loftin believes the Texas officials thought the Aggies had come to agree to a move to the Pac-10, but Loftin and company used the meeting to inform the Longhorns that Texas A&M also was considering joining the SEC. Texas and Texas Tech already had scheduled meetings of their boards for June 15 to approve the move to the Pac-10. A state law that required advance notice to schedule such a meeting allowed Texas A&M to buy time. It also bought time for Beebe, who by that point knew he was losing Colorado and Nebraska (to the Big Ten) and hoped to convince Fox and ESPN to pay the same amount for 10 schools that they had paid for 12.

Scott visited Norman and Stillwater on June 12 and visited Lubbock, College Station and Austin on June 13. Wilson recalls the Pac-10 contingent bringing paperwork to the meeting with Texas A&M officials at Easterwood Airport, but no one at Texas A&M was ready to make a decision. Before Scott and company left for Austin, Texas A&M regent Wilson asked the commissioner a question: What are you going to do when they tell you they want the network?

Wilson’s recollection of Scott’s response? That’s not going to happen.

Except that’s exactly what happened.

Beebe had succeeded in securing the same rights fees for 10 schools. This made plenty of sense for ESPN and Fox, which would have had to pay a lot more for rights to the Pac-16. The Big 12 also secured guarantees that Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma would receive at least $20 million from the Big 12 annually going forward. Meanwhile, schools would remain free to sell their Tier 3 media rights as they wished. Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma had examined the idea of their own cable networks, but the Longhorns were much further down the road than the other two. Scott’s plan for the Pac-16 would require all the schools to sign over their Tier 3 rights to the league to create the Pac-16 cable channel. There simply wasn’t a way to allow one school to create its own network.

AM_Realignment_3-1024x682.jpg
 
From a passion and pageantry standpoint, the Aggies have been a great fit in the SEC. (Daniel Dunn / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

According to a high-ranking Pac-10 source I spoke to while working on a story for Sports Illustrated on the night of June 14, 2010, Texas officials asked at the 11th hour if they would be able to form their own TV network. That wasn’t part of the plan Scott had spent months developing with Texas, and the entire deal fell apart. The Pac-16 dream evaporated, and the Big 12 rose from the dead.

Earlier on June 14, after Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech declared their intentions to remain in the Big 12, Loftin ducked into a quiet corner of the boardroom and dialed Slive’s number. The Aggies would be staying put, Loftin said. But would the door to the SEC remain open if the situation changed? Slive assured Loftin it would.

The Longhorn Network, which didn’t officially exist yet, had been the bargaining chip that sunk the Pac-16 and saved the Big 12 in 2010. But as the network came closer to fruition, it threatened to shatter the uneasy peace the schools had made. “UT did us a big favor,” Loftin says. “The Longhorn Network made all the difference.”

Texas and ESPN wouldn’t officially announce their partnership to create the network until Jan. 18, 2011, but the rest of the Big 12 was already worried. When Texas A&M played LSU in the Cotton Bowl following the 2010 season, Loftin bumped into Slive on the field before the game. Loftin wanted to talk, but Slive suggested they meet in Slive’s suite during the game. There, Loftin again asked if the SEC would still be interested if the situation in the Big 12 changed. Slive said his league would be.

In June 2011, Texas A&M leaders sounded the alarm when then-ESPN executive Dave Brown went on an Austin radio station and laid out plans for the Longhorn Network to broadcast the high school games of Texas recruiting targets. “Obviously, a kid like Jonathan Gray from Aledo. I know people are going to want to see Jonathan Gray,” Brown told KZNX, referring to the tailback who had committed to the Longhorns for the class of 2012. “I can’t wait to see Jonathan Gray. The feedback we got from our audience is they just want to see Jonathan Gray run. Whether it’s 45-0 or not, they want to see more Jonathan Gray. So we’re going to do our best to accommodate them and follow the kids that are being recruited by a lot of the Division I schools — certainly some of the kids Texas has recruited, is recruiting and everyone else in the Big 12 is recruiting.” Brown went on to mention Arizona high schooler Connor Brewer, a quarterback who had committed to the Longhorns in the class of 2012.

That bothered the Aggies, but they figured they could appeal to the NCAA to keep those games off the air. What finally sent the Texas A&M leadership over the edge was the attempt by ESPN to convince Texas Tech to allow its 2011 game against Texas to be broadcast on the Longhorn Network. This, to Texas A&M officials and leaders at other Big 12 schools, was beyond the pale. They all were allowed to sell one non-conference game. There had been no discussion about conference games on an institutional network. The Big 12 member schools had given an inch, yet the conference office was willing to let Texas and ESPN take a mile.

On July 19, 2011, the Texas A&M Board of Regents added an executive session to the regularly scheduled board meeting for July 21. In that session, Loftin pitched the executive committee on exploring membership in the SEC. As the regents gathered for the public portion of the meeting, Loftin stood on a patio and dialed Slive’s number. Slive was on his back porch in Birmingham smoking a cigar (and possibly drinking a tumbler of Blanton’s bourbon) with his top consigliere, television consultant Chuck Gerber. As Slive had promised, the SEC remained interested.

At this point, Loftin and company were determined to leave the Big 12 for the SEC. Whereas Loftin’s e-mail and phone calls had run about 50-50 between the SEC and Big 12 and/or Pac-10 a year earlier, he estimates those e-mails and calls ran 95 percent in favor of the SEC in 2011. The tricky part was getting out of the Big 12 without getting sued.

The SEC presidents insisted that the league couldn’t be seen as trying to blow up the Big 12. Besides, the group was skittish in general at the time. Former Florida president Machen, who served as the chair of the SEC’s board at the time, said that when SEC leaders began discussing adding schools, some members assumed the worst. “Mississippi and Mississippi State were afraid we were going to kick them out,” Machen says. That required a “come to Jesus” meeting in which leaders of both schools were assured they weren’t going anywhere. “The reality was we weren’t going to do anything to undermine the traditional rivalries with the core SEC schools,” Machen says.

By adding Texas A&M (and later Missouri), the SEC could expand its conference footprint. That way, when it launched its network on ESPN (which finally happened in 2014), the league would have millions more cable subscribers (hopefully) paying $1.50 or more per month. The Aggies would pay for themselves and help everyone else get richer. The SEC wanted Texas A&M and Texas A&M wanted the SEC, so why did it take months to get the happy couple down the aisle?

Because neither wanted to get sued by Baylor.

“You have to ask us,” Machen says of the SEC’s stance. “We’re not going to ask you. That was a stumbling point for a few weeks. They wanted us to ask them, and we wanted them to ask us.”

Baylor’s president was former federal prosecutor Ken Starr. The school had crowbarred its way into the Big 12 in the 1990s with help from then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards (a Baylor alumna), and the leadership in Waco had no qualms about fighting bare-knuckled to keep the Big 12 together. Had the league collapsed, Baylor would have been deciding between the Mountain West and Conference USA. The Bears were not about to make it easy for anyone to leave the Big 12.

Late in the summer of 2011, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State leaders had hinted that they might seek membership in the new Pac-12. Combined with Texas A&M’s obvious desire to go to the SEC and Missouri’s general unhappiness with the Big 12, this understandably freaked out the leaders at Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas and Kansas State. Those schools likely would have been left without power conference homes.

On Aug. 14, Loftin and his inner circle gathered in a conference room and waited for a phone call that never came. The SEC’s presidents were meeting, and the Texas A&M group thought the presidents would vote to extend an offer to the Aggies. Instead they released a statement attributed to Machen. “The SEC Presidents and Chancellors met today and reaffirmed our satisfaction with the present 12 institutional alignment. We recognize, however, that future conditions may make it advantageous to expand the number of institutions in the league. We discussed criteria and process associated with expansion. No action was taken with respect to any institution including Texas A&M.”

Plenty of people incorrectly reported that the SEC had passed on Texas A&M. But it was just as Machen had said. The statement was a lawyered-up way of saying you have to ask us.

At a board of regents meeting the next day, Loftin was authorized to take action regarding the Aggies’ conference alignment. On Aug. 25, Texas A&M officials sent a letter to the Big 12’s Beebe that the school might withdraw from the conference. Six days later, Loftin wrote another letter to Beebe saying Texas A&M would withdraw from the Big 12. On Sept. 6, SEC presidents voted unanimously to admit Texas A&M as the league’s 13th member — with a caveat.

The Aggies would be welcome if there were no legal hangups. The potential hangup? Baylor president Starr had left voicemails with two different SEC officials claiming the league would be sued for tortious interference if it accepted Texas A&M. The Big 12 had previously said there would be no legal challenge to Texas A&M’s exit, but Starr had reconsidered his stance. When Loftin spoke with Starr and Beebe on a conference call shortly after that, Loftin blew his stack. “We ran into the buzzsaw of Baylor,” Loftin says. “I was pretty upset.”

AM_Realignment_4-1024x683.jpg
 
Now firmly entrenched in the SEC, Aggie fans are counting on Jimbo Fisher to get them firmly atop the SEC. (Adam Hagy / USA TODAY Sports)

Only after it was obvious that the Oklahoma schools weren’t leaving — pending Beebe’s removal as commissioner — and that ESPN and Fox wouldn’t reduce the Big 12’s payout did Starr finally stand down and the SEC get comfortable enough to finally admit Texas A&M. But Loftin wasn’t done dealing with Starr. Later, when Texas A&M and Missouri went through mediation to determine exit fees, the three representatives of the Big 12 were Starr and the presidents of Kansas and Kansas State. “You walk into a mediation and who do they send? Not Texas or Oklahoma or one of those schools that have a lot of security,” Loftin says. “They sent the most insecure people there.”

By that point, it didn’t matter. The long-awaited call from Slive to Loftin finally came on Sept. 25. Two days later, Texas A&M officials presented Loftin and Machen with custom Lucchese boots. Machen’s are made of alligator skin and currently reside in his trophy case. Meanwhile, Loftin was presented with a new circular SEC logo — featuring 13 teams. Because Missouri joined less than two months later and started play at the same time, Loftin is fairly certain his is the only 13-school SEC logo. “I have the only living version,” he says.

If you’ve noticed that there has been little discussion of whether Texas A&M would have been competitive in the SEC, that’s because it rarely came up among Loftin and the regents. People like soon-to-be-former football coach Mike Sherman were deeply concerned, but the leaders of the school were more concerned with rebranding the athletic program and, by extension, the school. “It really was a brand move,” says Jason Cook, who served as Loftin’s communications director and who now holds a similar role at Baylor. “It was a point in the maturation of the university where Texas A&M could stand on its own. We were able to erase all the Aggie jokes.”

Johnny Manziel helped ease Texas A&M’s transition into the SEC by winning the Heisman Trophy and leading the Aggies to an 11-2 record in their first season in the league, but the move probably still would have reframed the way others view the Aggies and the way the Aggies view themselves even if that season hadn’t been so memorable. “We probably didn’t have the vision that it would expand the brand of the university as much as it ultimately has,” says Wilson, the A&M regent. “But we sure thought it would make a difference athletically — especially in football. It would give us a different story to tell.”

It also showed the nation what the Aggies already knew: They didn’t need anyone else to take care of them. “It’s hard for me to say they’re more proud of (Texas A&M), because they’re pretty proud,” Wilson says. “But I think it proved some things to people. I never bought into the big brother syndrome stuff, but some people did. It proved to Aggies and the outside world that we could do our own thing and didn’t have to follow anybody.”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
satyanash

satyanash 14481

Posted
Posted
15 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Looks like the partnership with The Athletic has begun. Say it ain't so, Andy Staples:

https://theathletic.com/1091572/2019/07/24/lucky-no-13-how-texas-am-stepped-out-of-the-longhorns-shadow-and-became-the-lone-star-states-sec-program/?source=dailyemail

The article is getting savaged in the RedditCFB thread: 

Also, the writer is Andy Staples. He's more of a generic SEC homer than a TexAgs guy. His article prior to this one was about how the SEC was CFB's most undervalued and under-appreciated conference.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...