COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — Ricky Williams won the Heisman Trophy and set the NCAA’s all-time rushing record during an illustrious career with the Texas Longhorns.
Another highlight? Getting three wins over Texas A&M in four seasons.
“It’s been a missing ingredient for Texas for a long time,” Williams told The Associated Press this week. “Part of what, at least in my time at Texas, what made Texas great was beating the Aggies.”
And he’s thrilled that the rivalry — one of college football’s greatest — has been reborn.
Split for more than a decade when the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC, Texas-Texas A&M returns Saturday, bringing a back a brother-against-brother grudge match that stretches back to the 1890s.
From “Hook’em” to “Gig’em,” Heisman Trophy winners, legendary coaches and mascots, and the Aggie bonfire tragedy that unified the two programs in grieving, the game has finally and thankfully returned.
“It’s one of those deals when you grew up in Texas and all my life that’s all you know, it’s A&M and Texas during Thanksgiving weekend,” said Dat Nguyen, an All-American linebacker who played for the Aggies from 1995-98. “And it was unfortunate that it’s been gone. It’s been absent for a little bit but I’m so thankful that it’s back.”
The return of the rivalry and the stakes of it — the winner earns a trip to the SEC title game — has driven ticket prices through the roof. TickPick, an online ticket reseller, posted on X that Saturday’s game is the most expensive regular season football ticket, NFL or college, on record with an average price of $1,079.
The desire to prevail in this series is so strong that losing can sting for years — or in the case of Williams — decades. He ran for 750 yards and six touchdowns in four games against the Aggies, but instead of thinking about that success he dwells on the game he lost.
Playing with a high ankle sprain for most of the second half, Williams finished with 183 yards and two touchdowns in a 27-16 A&M win in 1997.
“We should have been 4-0 … because if I was healthy there were a couple of runs where I know I would have had way over 200 yards,” he said. “So that one still haunts me.”
The Origins
Texas leads the annual rivalry 76-37-5 and got it started by whipping the Aggies 38-0 in 1894. According to a newspaper account of the first game, A&M was thoroughly outclassed in defeat.
“Every time the Varsity boys made a catch-as-catch-can play, the A&M College boys went to the dust like so many tenpins being knocked down,” the Austin Statesman wrote.
The Aggies didn’t beat Texas until 1902. The rivalry inspired Texas A&M’s first pregame bonfire in 1909, which became an annual tradition until the log stack collapsed in 1999, killing 12 people and injuring dozens.
Crow and Campbell
Williams was the last Heisman winner to play in this series that has featured three.
The first was Texas A&M’s John David Crow, a running back who won the trophy in 1957. A year earlier he scored a touchdown as coach Paul “Bear” Bryant led A&M to its first win at Texas’ Memorial Stadium in 1956.
The next year, first-year Texas coach Darrell Royal led the Longhorns to a win in College Station. The Longhorns’ home stadium now bears his name.
Crow is the only Texas A&M Heisman winner to play in the series. Johnny Manziel missed out on the rivalry with the Aggies saying, “goodbye to Texas University,” as the Aggie War Hymn says, to move to the SEC in 2012 and halt the rivalry.
Earl Campbell, who became the first Heisman winner at Texas in 1977, had the best game of his career by rushing for 222 yards and three touchdowns, and catching the only touchdown pass of his career, in a 57-28 win in 1977.
Series History
Texas owned the rivalry from 1940-1974, going 31-3-1. It’s been much more competitive since then, with A&M holding a 19-18 edge in the last 37 years of the rivalry. The Aggies’ longest run of dominance came when they won 10 of 11 from 1984-94.
It was Williams who turned the series back in favor of the Longhorns. He was an 18-year-old fullback when he first visited Texas A&M in 1995.
Texas A&M’s “Wrecking Crew” defense was ranked first in the nation and tall tales told on campus made Williams, a native of San Diego, think the Aggies were all “6-foot-5 and they all ran 4.2s. (40-yard dashes.)”
“I was afraid,” Williams said. “I thought it was going to be a bloodbath and we were going be on the losing end of it.”
Instead, Williams had his coming out party in front of a national television audience, running for a season-high 163 yards and two touchdowns to lead Texas to the 16-6 victory.
“Seeing the reaction after that game, that’s when it really hit me how big the rivalry was,” Williams said.
Dan Neil, an All-American offensive lineman who played at Texas from 1993-96, helped block for Williams that day.
“Watching them lose their mind when we beat them was something I cherish,” Neil said.
R.C. Slocum spent years as an assistant with the Aggies and was their head coach from 1989-2002. Now 80, he’s so glad the game is back.
“I grew up watching this game as a youngster in Texas and then coached in it 30 times,” he said. “And it’s a great rivalry. We’re … two big schools in a big state that loves football. And so, it’s the way it should be.”
Triumph & Tragedy
The 1990s saw two of the most thrilling and emotionally wrenching games in the rivalry’s history.
In 1998, Williams broke the NCAA major college career rushing record in Texas’ 26-24 upset of the No. 6 Aggies.
Williams surpassed Pittsburgh’s Tony Dorsett with a 60-yard touchdown run in the first quarter, plowing over an Aggies defender at the goal line. But he fumbled twice after that run and the Longhorns needed a field goal in the final seconds to get the win.
“It was wonderful that I broke the record and I got all the fame,” Williams said. “But I almost lost the game … so, what I remember most about my last collegiate regular season game against the Aggies was, it was the epitome of a team victory. And I think when you go into these big rivalry games, that’s what it comes down to.”
Even in the loss, the Aggies helped celebrate Williams’ Heisman-clinching game with Crow joining Dorsett and Campbell to present him with a game ball.
Tragedy struck College Station in 1999 when the 40-foot tower of timber being assembled for the annual bonfire collapsed eight days before the game. Dozens of Aggies players rushed to the scene to help rescuers remove the heavy logs and Longhorns players held blood drives for the injured.
Some questioned whether the game should be canceled, but in the end, it was played as scheduled. Slocum said that game, which the Aggies won 20-16, was his most meaningful.
“We’d gone through so much here with that horrible tragedy and that game was one I felt more pressure than any game I ever coached that we really needed to win that game,” he said. “I didn’t tell the players that, but I felt it myself.”
Slocum said Texas was very sensitive to the situation and that then-Texas coach Mack Brown called him several time that week to discuss it. The Texas band played “Amazing Grace” at halftime.
“It was a good ball game, but it turned out like it needed to for our sake,” Slocum said.
Bitter Foes
Though the teams and their fans united after that tragedy, the fabric of this rivalry is in the disdain Texas and Texas A&M have had for each other for more than a century.
The Aggie fight song calls to “saw Varsity’s horns off” and the Longhorns for decades held a pregame candlelight “Hex Rally” as one of the more unique ways of gaining an upper hand.
Texas has had bragging rights for the last 13 years after knocking off the Aggies 27-25 on a last-second field goal at Kyle Field in the last meeting.
“When I first got to A&M you obviously grow more hate or hatred against Texas, especially on that day or leading up to that week,” Nguyen said. “And I have tons of friends that went to Texas and I don’t hate anybody, it’s just about that one game.”
Neil believes nothing matters more to Texas A&M than this game.
“They live to beat Texas. For an Aggie, that game is everything,” Neil said.
And if Texas wins Saturday?
“That will drive Aggies insane. They may implode. They are about as hot as you can imagine for this one.”
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