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Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff Writer
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Last time Brandon Grant set foot in Kyle Field, he was tasked with preserving a piece of sacred history.
Grant was part of the Texas equipment staff during the Longhorns’ 2011 victory over Texas A&M, the last game before the rivalry was shelved when the Aggies departed for the SEC. Late in the fourth quarter, his boss called the staff over before Justin Tucker lined up to attempt a field goal on the game’s final play with Texas trailing 25-24.
“Get down there under the goalpost,” Grant recalled him saying. “If that ball goes through and y’all don’t come back with it, you’re walking back to Austin.”
Tucker’s 40-yard kick sailed through the uprights, giving the Longhorns the win and the “eternal scoreboard,” as coach Mack Brown called it. Meanwhile, Grant and his crew barreled up the steps, elbowing their way through a sea of Aggies before spotting a maroon-clad fan who had a football-shaped bulge under his jersey. The stadium police helped Grant’s colleague, Trent Norwood, get the ball from the fan. Norwood tossed it to Grant, who immediately threw it down to another staffer on the field, who locked it away in a trunk for safekeeping on its way out of College Station.
On Saturday night, Grant was back at Kyle Field for the first time since that night. After a decade as an assistant football coach at high schools in the Austin area, Grant, now 34, was happy to watch as a civilian as the Aggies and the Longhorns resumed one of the greatest rivalries in college football, with his Longhorns pulling out a 17-7 win.
“I’m just glad the rivalry is back,” Grant said. “I was glad to be able to have a chance to be on the bookend experience of both. It’s still passionate and bitter, but it’s not angry and hateful, at least from what I saw. The fans were cordial.”
After 118 years, the will-they-or-won’t-they game, known as the Lone Star Showdown, returned as an SEC matchup. And with national implications: a spot in the SEC championship was at stake.
“This game represents the state of Texas from almost the beginning,” singer Lyle Lovett, Texas A&M Class of 1979, said at the game. “Texas A&M and the University of Texas were both created at the same time by the same legislative act. It’s been a sibling rivalry since the very beginning. The rivalry continued even without the game. The game just makes it that more special. It really is one of the great traditions in our state.”
ON FRIDAY, THE Aggies moved their traditional Midnight Yell Practice, which started before the 1931 Texas game for students to gather at Kyle Field the night before home games to rehearse yells, to 5:30 p.m. so that coach Mike Elko and the entire Texas A&M team could make an appearance. Fans filled up one side of the stadium, wrapping around into the end zones.
Matt Krehbiel, a 2023 Texas grad, was the rare Longhorns fan to be at Yell Practice, a guest of the family of his fiancée, Abby Dean, a 2021 Aggies graduate. He said he’s the only Longhorn in the family.
“Her brothers, her parents, grandparents, all of them are Aggies,” he said. But he still stood his ground, throwing the Horns up on the track at Kyle Field as an entire fan base stared at him, and he was met with a traditional A&M greeting: The Aggies don’t boo, they hiss.
“I survived the onslaught of hisses,” Krehbiel said. “I think it was worse on [my fiancée] than me. Her face was beet red. I totally respect what they got going on there, but definitely prefer the ways of the burnt orange, that’s for dang sure.”
These lines blur all across the state.
“The thing about Aggies and Longhorns, believe it or not, they marry each other,” said former Texas A&M women’s basketball coach Gary Blair, who won a national championship for the Aggies alongside assistant Vic Schaefer, an Aggie who’s now the women’s head coach at Texas. “I’m not sure Auburn and Alabama do that.”
Sam Torn understands the complication of family dynamics. In 1969, he was the head Yell Leader at A&M, and went on a blind date with a Texas student. After four dates, he had fallen for her, but he got a letter from her saying she had a boyfriend at Texas and had just been seeing Torn to make him mad. It worked.
“When I got selected head Yell Leader, I said, we’re going to create a new yell,” he said. The result is the Aggies’ iconic “Beat The Hell out of t.u.” yell (the Aggies refer to Texas as lowercase texas university, rather than the University of Texas), and the hand sign to communicate it to the student body, which is akin to an “up yours” gesture, where you put your arm in your elbow and bend it upwards.
At the first Yell Practice since its hiatus, Torn was on the very front lines, watching his yell echo through Kyle Field over and over.
“It was the biggest rivalry, the biggest two schools, the biggest state, and it meant a lot to a lot of people,” Torn said on the field. “It’s very emotional for me for it to return. I don’t like them, they don’t like me, but there’s a part of me that’s just very joyful.”
The Texas student who dumped him has been Torn’s wife for 54 years now. He and Susan have three children who are Aggies, and his two sons, Scott and Chris, were both Yell Leaders.
Some people were even conflicted, just among themselves. Eryn Lyle wore a sweatshirt she sewed together that was half maroon and half burnt orange.
“I was a Texas A&M undergraduate, then I betrayed my family, betrayed A&M and went off to UT to go to law school. So I am a person divided,” she said. “I am so excited. I didn’t get to see it while I was in school because the Aggies hadn’t played against Texas in several years. I don’t know who to cheer for. I think I’ll be rooting for the offense.”
The anticipation for the game made it the most expensive ticket in regular-season college football or NFL history, according to Forbes. Vivid Seats said resale tickets averaged $1,025. Despite the massive investment, Texas fans Ryan and Ingrid Crow couldn’t resist. They kept waiting and waiting, hoping prices would go down, but finally pulled the trigger this week, at the low, low cost of $4,200 for two tickets on the third row at the 45-yard line. And still found it worth it.
“We won!” Ingrid said.
“After 13 years, how can you not go to a game like this?” her husband added. “We could not miss this game.”
Being at the game is a family tradition for Tim Wiley of Austin, who hasn’t missed an A&M-Texas game since 1957, when the game was played, per tradition, on Thanksgiving. His dad, who died while the rivalry was on hiatus, had been at every once since 1944.
“I didn’t know what Thanksgiving was,” Wiley said. “It wasn’t eating turkey, it was usually eating a pimento cheese sandwich, tailgating when my mother made them.”
Grant and his father, Mike, in their orange, were guests of the maroon-clad Wileys at their family tailgate. Underneath the tent, they talked about their mutual appreciation for being back together.
“[This] is an iconic rivalry because most families have both schools in their family,” Wiley said. “I’m just glad that most families have an Aggie in there so there’s some formal education in their family.”
A lot has changed in College Station since the last time the Longhorns visited. Kyle Field underwent a $484 million renovation that brought capacity to more than 102,000 and opened in 2015. Aggie Park, a $36 million, 22-acre privately funded project across the street from Kyle Field, is the new tailgating epicenter, and also the site of “College GameDay” which made a visit during the big rivalry weekend.
The park was bursting at the seams on Saturday. Aggies linebacker Taurean York said there were “probably 300,000 people here in the vicinity of Kyle Field,” adding that it was “the biggest game of a lot of people’s lives.”
THERE WERE SIDESHOWS everywhere. On Saturday evening, before kickoff, the Texas A&M Police account tweeted that “a man & his dog were riding a longhorn” around campus.
University Rules Violation – PA 68. A man was riding a horse and another man & his dog were riding a longhorn. Agreed to leave campus. #BTHOtu
– Texas A&M Police (@TAMUPolice) November 30, 2024
That’d be Moe Taylor, of Elgin, Texas, who brings his longhorn, Ben, to Texas sporting events along with his dog, Damit.
“We were on campus for probably an hour before they found us,” Taylor said, incredulous that of all places, you can’t ride a steer in College Station. “But we can’t argue. We don’t wanna get in no trouble. We went down to the Dixie Chicken.”
For those wondering …. Here he is!
��: Evin McGinley https://t.co/058ZfdIiGR pic.twitter.com/YuXm3gcBPC
– �� Rusty Surette (@KBTXRusty) December 1, 2024
At the Dixie Chicken, the legendary bar in Texas A&M’s Northgate district, Ben took photos with fans.
“We had a blast. The fans were all hyped up,” Taylor said. “Ben really enjoyed it. He doesn’t get mad or anything, he just lets people get on and off. He takes it well.”
Back in Aggie Park, former Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum, who attended his first A&M-Texas game in 1959 and coached in 30 rivalry games between the Aggies and Longhorns — he likes to note that he came out the winner in 16 of them — made his way through the packed park. He welcomed every Longhorns fan he saw back to College Station while absorbing attaboys at every turn from Aggies who were thrilled to see the winningest coach in A&M history mingling with the common folk.
“I’m glad that Texas is in the SEC,” Slocum said. “All Aggies don’t feel like that. Maybe all Texas fans don’t feel like that, but to me, this big state to have two SEC teams … makes sense to me. And it adds, really, to both of our values.”
Still, he did his part to rally the faithful before they played the Longhorns. The “Aggie War Hymn” implores listeners to “saw Varsity’s horns off,” and Slocum did just that.
Slocum’s friend, John Jones, decided to cook some “Texas-raised beef” in Aggie Park to serve to tailgaters. Instead of steaks or hamburgers, he opted for a bigger statement.
“I thought it’d be just a great thing to do since we’ve had such an extended stay between our rivalries to actually cook something that is great food and sort of resembles a mascot of another team,” Jones said.
So he roasted an entire Longhorn, horns and all. And along came Slocum to fulfill his destiny, sawing the horns off the thing with a miniature chainsaw as a crowd of Aggies cheered.
As Slocum waited for his turn, he waved over some Aggies fans he noticed in the crowd. So along came Drew Brees with his sons, Baylen, Bowen and Callen, all wearing maroon.
Brees, an Austin native, is the nephew of Marty Akins, an All-American quarterback for the Longhorns in the 1980s. But his parents are both Aggies — his father, Eugene “Chip” Brees, played basketball at A&M — and he was captured on video on Saturday night telling Johnny Manziel on the sideline that he “always wanted to be an Aggie.” But he wasn’t recruited by the Aggies or Longhorns, so he went to Purdue and threw for more than 10,000 yards over his four years with the Boilermakers.
Slocum posed for photos with the Brees boys and turned to an assembled crowd and announced that when anyone asks his biggest recruiting regrets, Brees is always the big one that got away.
“This is one of the greatest rivalries in all college football,” Brees said. “You don’t understand how upset I was when this thing went away. It was the dumbest thing ever for the state of Texas. This rivalry always needs to exist. I don’t care what conference these teams are in or I don’t care where the egos are. They always need to play this game for the fans.”
They played the game, and Horns stayed intact. The Texas defense held the Aggies’ offense scoreless, and the Longhorns ran the ball for 240 yards to control the game from start to finish for a 17-7 win, a bitter disappointment to the partisan crowd of 109,028, the third largest ever to watch a game at Kyle Field.
Kevin Eltife, the chairman of the UT System, expressed his relief on the field afterward that the first game of the revival is over and the Longhorns came away with another win.
“This is as sweet as it gets. They said we couldn’t compete in the SEC, and look baby, we’re heading to the SEC championship,” Eltife said. “Hats off to the Aggies. We have nothing but respect for Texas A&M. They’re a phenomenal school and football program, and for us to leave here with a victory is huge. I’ve been a nervous wreck the whole week. I couldn’t eat Thanksgiving, so now I’m going to go home and have a real damn Thanksgiving.”
The scoreboard may not be eternal this time, but the Aggies will have to wait until next year’s game in Austin, where they won in 2010, to get their next shot.
Slocum, 80, is a cancer survivor and was thankful to be back at Kyle Field for the game amid the pageantry and is looking forward to a holiday tradition returning.
“I walked in with their band,” he said. “For most of my life, this weekend has been a special weekend.”
Grant didn’t have to harangue any Aggies to retrieve any keepsakes this time, and came away thrilled with the experience.
“The atmosphere there was a lot better than I remember,” he said. “I think the new stadium has a pretty big impact on the level they can get that place. I couldn’t imagine sitting where we sat and having the same experience with OU or Texas Tech. It was still that brotherly rivalry where you hate but you love ’em at the same time, or you love the people that are there.”
And after years he lost in the rivalry’s absence, he’s excited to make new memories like the ones he made with his father, who went to Texas to play baseball in the 1970s. Grant’s son Gray is 3, and he said he wakes up from naps singing the Texas fight song.
“I look forward to my son growing up the same way I grew up, down the street from one of his best friends that is an Aggie and going back and forth,” he said. “Yeah, I’m glad it’s back for sure.”
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