A few years ago, my alma mater, former employer and preferred college sports program - the University of Texas - announced that they were leaving the Big 12 Conference for the SEC. I hated this decision then, and I hate it now. In fact, it's fair to say the past fifteen years have seen me come to really dislike the "business" of college football, including NIL deals and the way the tail is now wagging the dog on college campuses - even as I totally get that there are people who will genuinely believe universities only exist so we can have football.*
My beef with the move to the SEC stemmed from my belief this was shortsighted and only benefited one of the many NCAA sports in which the university competes, while also punishing the athletes, who now had to travel across the continent every time the Longhorns had a match, meet or game. Which is fine if you only play on Saturdays in the Fall semester, but sports like Volleyball, Soccer, Tennis, Swimming, etc... would have to *also* travel like this, and be in their Econ 302 class by 10:00 AM the following day. Despite whatever money Quinn Ewers made this year from Dr. Pepper, these athletes are still students.
For die-hard football nerds who sit and watch ESPN shouting match shows, this was great stuff. For the rest of us, we were wondering "how is this better that we're now playing teams I don't care about or follow?" In comic nerd terms, it was like the editors of Batman deciding the rest of the DCU wasn't cool enough, and now Batman would be appearing in Marvel Comics and fight Dr. Octopus, because that seemed neat to people who really like Dr. Octopus, but didn't think Deadshot was a neat enough villain. But I don't want to see Batman fight Dr. Octopus. It's weird and dumb and only exciting to a particular kind of nerd.
I'd also argue that getting older, watching the dissolution of the Southwest Conference in my adulthood for the Establishment of the Big 12, the near heat death of the PAC-12, the expansion of the SEC... I know that this, too, shall pass. It's almost like the SEC has grown too large and with the addition of another two teams should split in two... into, say, a South East Conference and a South West Conference.
Hard stare.
All that said - I still like college football. I might even be thawing my feelings about the concussion factory that is the NFL (go, Lions). But I've also now got Cubs Baseball (a post for another day about teams making terrible decisions for business reasons), Austin FC soccer, USWNT soccer, volleyball, and kind of whatever feels right for a game that day or night.
The funniest part of the University of Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC, which maybe made it all worth it, was that Texas A&M fled the Big 12 for the SEC more than a decade ago to prove they were a big boy now and didn't need the University of Texas to play sports. A&M's weird obsession with UT has always been kind of something they live with that makes them weird and can maybe best be summed up thusly:
But I'm glad they've reinstated their pagan ritual on campus where they (checks notes) spend thousands of hours in effort and planning to build a giant tower which they then burn UT in effigy while their fans circle around in awe.
y'all okay, Aggies?
Anyway, now we're playing them again, and we beat them and OU, so it did feel like old times. Not that OU or A&M had banner seasons.
But we did! It was a great season. Frankly, I did not expect it to be a great season. It didn't hurt that the SEC seems to be on a bit of a decline in comparison to recent years, and we'll now see A Very Midwestern NCAA Football Championship as Notre Dame defeated Penn State and (sob) Ohio State beat Texas to make it into the final game of the playoffs. I expected Georgia might go the distance, but... not this year.
Every week, I would wrongly predict "this could be the week we lose" - my prophecy only coming true when we played Georgia and lost to them. Twice. Once in regular season play and then we lost in the SEC Championship to the Bulldogs. Somehow we were still allowed to play in the Play-Offs, and while the new system took criticism, it's so much less stupid than the 00's-era "let's let a mysterious council of football elders vote on this" methodology for determining which game was the championship and who would play in it.
It was a fortunate bit we played at Jerry World up in Dallas. Not that UT doesn't travel well, but Ohio State's fans will charter buses to the moon if that's where they're playing.
I would be remiss in not mentioning UT got where it did thanks to a stellar defense that performed some minor miracles, including in our January 1 game against Arizona State, where they held an aggressive Sun Devils team, and our game with Clemson (who I always think is in the SEC, but is not, somehow). I'll also name my favorite players on offense in Blue, Golden, Wisner and Helm. I won't get into our QB situation, but Ewers was good. I would have liked to have seen Arch Manning play a lot more, but I know UT has its reasons.
It's disappointing we won't go to the National Championship game, but... I also didn't think we'd be in the playoffs at all this season. Or, we'd lose to Clemson and that would be that. But we played all the way to the Semi-Finals, and played well until we didn't.
A lot of credit has to go to Coach Steve Sarkisian for recruiting and building the team we have. I really didn't expect more out of him when he showed up than any of our other experiments, and it sure felt like Texas on a "well, we're going to just hire and fire 'em every three years" pattern that was brutal. But Sark sure seems like he brought in a good staff - proof is in the pudding.
Anyway, that's that for 2024 into 2025. We'll see what next year brings, but I am more than satisfied with our season as the longest-lasting SEC team, the second best in the SEC (we did lose to Georgia!), and for generally being fun to watch most of the time.
But, yes, the last four minutes of that game were @#$%ing rough to watch.
*we call these people "morons"
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