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Football players for Texas and Texas A&M haven’t crouched face mask–to–face mask across the line of scrimmage since Thanksgiving 2011, when Longhorns placekicker Justin Tucker lofted a forty-yard field goal on the game’s final play to seal a 27–25 UT victory before A&M set off to join the Southeastern Conference. Over the past dozen years, the in-state rivals haven’t met on the gridiron.
With Texas playing its first season in the SEC this year, the series will resume—with a trip to the conference championship game on the line, no less. After a chaotic college football weekend in which many SEC teams suffered upsets, it would appear UT is likely to play in the twelve-team College Football Playoff, no matter whether the Longhorns win or lose this week. Meanwhile, Texas A&M will need a win to keep its playoff hopes alive.
But instead of this storied rivalry being held on its traditional date of Thanksgiving, the Longhorns and Aggies will clash on the following Saturday. It remains to be seen whether the onetime Turkey Day staple will return to the holiday in the future.
“I don’t have a strong feeling about Thanksgiving Day or Friday or even Saturday,” said A&M athletic director Trev Alberts. His counterpart in Austin, Chris Del Conte, voiced a similar sentiment: “The most important thing is we’re playing the game.”
The Aggies and the Longhorns have played each other on Thanksgiving 69 times throughout the football rivalry’s history. That makes the matchup unofficially the most frequent Thanksgiving kickoff of any college football series. (Who’s second? It appears to be Ole Miss–Mississippi State in what’s known as the Egg Bowl; the two schools disagree on the number of Thanksgiving appearances, but at most, it’s around thirty.)
Alberts and Del Conte each said the changing television landscape, with increasing competition from NFL games on Thanksgiving, makes it less likely that the Lone Star Showdown will take place on the holiday in years to come. In 2006, the pro league expanded its Thanksgiving slate from the traditional two NFL games to three.
The third game was originally shown in prime time on the NFL Network. That was the case during the last four UT-A&M meetings, from 2008 through 2011, when the game kicked off in Austin or College Station at 7 p.m. Now the NFL prime time game is available to a wider audience on NBC. “You want to maximize the exposure for both institutions,” said Del Conte, who became Texas’s athletic director in 2017. “I would love for the game to be played on Thanksgiving. But when you start looking back to yesteryear, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle when other forces have to come in.”
College football has gone up against the NFL’s prime time Thanksgiving telecast in recent years with the aforementioned Egg Bowl. But the ABC network has moved that rivalry to Friday this year, where it will compete with yet another NFL telecast that will air on Prime Video. Earlier this year, Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter bluntly explained the move away from Thanksgiving to an alumni group: “We get paid a lot of money to play at whatever time [the networks] say.”
With Texas and A&M tied atop the SEC standings with two league games to play, their meeting earned Thanksgiving weekend’s coveted Saturday prime time slot on ABC. The scheduling of the resumption of the Texas–Texas A&M series was part of an unusual one-off schedule for the entire SEC. “We actually got some communication from the SEC that there was interest this year in moving the Texas–Texas A&M game off Saturday [and] onto the Friday slate,” Alberts said. “We [A&M] just couldn’t move it because of all the campus stuff that had already been planned that would have been in direct competition with the game itself. The league and the network were responsive and understood our challenge.
“I anticipate there being some reevaluation of what’s the best [broadcast] window, and I can see the game moving,” Alberts said. “I think Friday makes some sense, especially if we can get that sort of exclusive window on linear television in prime time. That would be special, but we’re still working through all of that.”
Del Conte also supported the idea of future Black Friday matchups. “The game on Friday would be great,” he said.
This year, however, that Friday-night slot will go to Georgia hosting Georgia Tech.
The football teams from Texas A&M and Texas met for a Thanksgiving game for the first time in 1900, on a muddy field in Austin, with UT winning 11–0. According to The Aggies and the ’Horns, a 1981 history of the rivalry by author John D. Forsyth, “one onlooker from College Station got a little overzealous in his cheering, and a Texas player took after him. The cadet was removed from the scene after a brief fight.”
The first ten Thanksgiving games were played at Texas, with the home team winning eight before Turkey Day play made its College Station debut, in 1919, resulting in a 7–0 victory for the A&M players (who at the time were known as the Farmers, not the Aggies).
After both schools joined the Big 12 conference, in 1996, the series was played on Black Friday for twelve years. (Who liked those 10 a.m. kickoffs?) Those games included the Aggies’ emotional 20–16 win at home in 1999 after the collapse of the school’s traditional pregame bonfire left 12 people dead and 27 injured.
After A&M left for the SEC during the summer of 2012, there was precedent for the series to continue as non-conference opponents. Georgia and Georgia Tech and South Carolina and Clemson have followed that formula for decades. Instead, Texas displayed its preference for continuing to play on Thanksgiving, even without its longtime rival. The Longhorns scheduled home games on the holiday for the next four seasons (2012–2015), alternating between opponents TCU and Texas Tech.
The game has been shown on national television 37 times, beginning in 1955. That includes every year from 1983 through the 2011 “finale” except for 1994, when NCAA sanctions barred A&M from appearing on television.
How do Aggies feel about playing on Thanksgiving? “It depends on how old that Aggie you’re talking to is,” said Olin Buchanan, a reporter for the A&M website TexAgs. “The older you are, the more traditional you are. You felt like it just should be on Thanksgiving because it almost always was. I think the over-forty or even over-thirty Aggies, that’s the sense I get. Others? [They say], ‘I don’t care. Just play.’ ”
Kirk Bohls, who covered UT athletics for decades at the Austin American-Statesman before joining the Houston Chronicle as a columnist this year, said some Texas fans aren’t terribly interested in keeping the rivalry alive. “A lot of old-timers look at it like, ‘We’ve already separated from them, and they left us,’ ” he said, referring to A&M’s 2012 move to the SEC.
Even though both schools are now back in the same conference, there’s no guarantee that Texas A&M and Texas will continue playing each other in years to come. After next season, the SEC has plans to implement a new, long-term schedule that is expected to follow one of two potential formats. In one possible outcome, league teams will continue playing eight conference games per season, with one annual fixed opponent per team and the other opponents rotating. The other version would expand to nine conference games—similar to the Big 12 and Big Ten schedules—with three fixed opponents. If the conference adopts the former model, Texas would presumably choose between A&M and Oklahoma for its permanent opponent. (In that case, the rivalry with the Sooners might be more likely to survive, because Texas and Oklahoma have a contract to play at the Cotton Bowl stadium through 2036.)
But even if that occurs and Texas chooses Oklahoma as its forever rival, Alberts said the Aggies and Longhorns could still play every year. “There are ways of protecting other games if things like that happen,” he said. Alberts pointed to scheduling arrangements in the Big Ten during his time as athletic director at Nebraska (where he played football in the early nineties). “I think the University of Iowa had three protected games,” he said. “[Other] teams had two.”
SEC teams’ conference schedules in 2025 will include the same eight opponents as this season, with 2024 home games becoming away contests and vice versa. That means for at least one more year, fans in Texas can count on seeing the two Lone Star rivals meet on the gridiron.
“When I got to the University of Texas, my mindset was to figure out a way for us to play this game,” Del Conte said. “The most important thing is getting back to establishing rivalries that matter so much.”
“It’s necessary for the good of [college football],” Bohls said. “Without rivalries, we don’t have anything.”
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