Although a moribund (by Augie's high standards) Texas baseball team suffered an uncharacteristic series loss to the Aggies last weekend (I believe we had won 137 straight games against them previously - I didn't verify that statistic) our softball team won their series and our lady golfers plied their nine irons like warrior poets in capri pants.
That puts the Longhorns up 11-6 with superfluous men and women's outdoor track competitions left to complete.
GTFO tour is now over. Buy the t-shirt. It won't be back anytime soon.
Truthfully, The Lone Star Showdown never really resonated with Longhorn fans.
Perhaps because it suggested that A&M was a measuring stick for us and we don't like that; the Aggies use Texas as their metric, Texas fans prefer to use the region or nation. They pursue, we ignore. That's how it works. They come into our room and taunt us, we ignore them, eventually we get irritated and chase them down the hall and beat their ass before they can make it to sanctuary with Mom.
Perhaps it didn't resonate because of the 19 points awarded, only 3 of them were in men's football, basketball, and baseball. No sensible Longhorn or Aggie weighs it like that, outside of Bill Byrne. That's 16% of the value equation when my own personal calculus has those sports at 99% (let's say football 65, basketball 30, baseball 4). Yet, track accounts for 6 of the 19 points available. Please.
No, the Lone Star Showdown's value is what any comparison's value is between Texas and A&M: its ability to torture Aggies, build on their insecurity complex, and force them into irrational and hilarious behaviors on the internet and at Thanksgiving dinner. It's not about elevating us so much as picking on them and sending them off into careening paroxysms of inadequacy. The Lone Star Showdown is compelling to us to the extent to which it needles our Aggie neighbors, co-workers, and may-God-help-you: relatives.
Does that make us shallow opportunists? Sure!
And right now, given the charred landscape of goodwill between Longhorns and Aggies during their SEC departure tour, and the sweet amusement of their expectational comeuppances on the national stage (which have happened in profoundly Aggie-like ways), Longhorn fans find themselves with renewed interest in any ammunition they can use to heap humiliation on the Aggie's departure.
Who doesn't want to squirt a little kerosene to keep a car-fire going?
Here's my stream of accelerant:
If the Lone Star Showdown was meant to be an overall referendum on head-to-head overall athletic health between two rival schools, Bill Byrne's massive, debt-inducing expenditures on secondary and tertiary revenue draining sports didn't pay off. The final result of the 9 year contest stands at 7-2, Longhorns. And the actual W-L record (the previous season's winner retains in case of tie) had the Aggies only winning one year outright, with two ties. A 1-6-2 record won't get you into even A&M's typical bowl game.
Oddly, this was during a time period in which the Longhorns found themselves massively underperforming in a number of sports in which we're traditionally strong (Plonsky's AD buffoonery + two year football meltdown) while A&M was at its peak - at least in the non-revenue stuff no one watches.
But despite all of that, the final results were still heavily in favor of Texas.
The cosmic punchline never changes.
It's just another goodbye to A&M.