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The pits are lit, the speakers have been turned up to 11, and there’s a buzz across the Forty Acres. The Longhorn-Aggie Lone Star Showdown returns to Royal-Memorial Stadium today, and this season hasn’t gone as some Texas fans might’ve expected. Could a win over undefeated Texas A&M be enough to chalk the year up as a W?
It’s been 15 years since the Longhorns and Aggies played in Austin. Is the rivalry between the state’s biggest schools still all it’s cracked up to be? A look at the tension that’s been dividing houses for generations.
The full transcript of this episode of Austin Signal is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:09] The pits are lit, the speakers have been turned up to 11, and there’s a buzz across the 40 acres today. We’re inching closer to the return of the Longhorn Aggie Lone Star Football Showdown to the UT campus. Now the season hasn’t gone as some Texas fans might have expected, but could a win over the undefeated Aggies be enough to chalk up the year as a W? We’re going to talk about the season so far and what the Longhorns will need to do to come away with a victory.
KUT Announcer: Laurie Gallardo [00:00:48] The Austin Signal is a production of KUT news hosted by Jerry Quijano.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:50] Plus it’s been 15 years since the Longhorns and Aggies played here in Austin. Is the rivalry between the state’s biggest schools still all it’s cracked up to be? Reheat those leftovers, pull up a seat. A special episode of Austin Signal is kicking off, and that’s coming up. Next. Howdy out there, thank you for being with us today. This is Austin Signal. I’m your host, Jerry E. Connell. It is Friday, November 28th, 2025, which means we are more than 131 years on from the first meeting between the football teams representing the University of Texas and Texas AM University. The Longhorns won eight of the first 10 matchups between the two teams, and they’ve been victorious in their last pair of meetings in 2024 and back in 2011 when the teams were still competing in the Big 12 Conference. After more than a decade without facing each other, the schools are now both members of the Southeastern Conference, and the rivalry is positioned to continue many years into the future. Tonight’s matchup is going to be the 120th in series history. And though the Longhorns will be hosting senior night for the final home game of the regular season, it’s the undefeated Aggies who go into tonight’s game as a slight favorite for the victory. Texas will not be making their third consecutive college football playoff appearance this year, but they do have an opportunity to blemish their in state rivals’ attempt at a perfect season. Kickoff is coming up at 6 30, and here to get us ready for the game is Danny Davis. He is the University of Texas beat writer for the Austin American Statesman. Danny, thanks for being with us today.
Danny Davis [00:02:26] Thanks for having me. Hope hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.
Jerry Quijano [00:02:28] Oh, I am feeling full, Danny. I’m just getting over that. So let me let me start really simply with a two part question. One or two words, the twenty twenty five Texas football season has been what?
Danny Davis [00:02:42] Disappointing.
Jerry Quijano [00:02:43] And is that how you would have anticipated describing this season about three months ago?
Danny Davis [00:02:48] No, I mean I think you could maybe could have quibbled ahead of the season whether or not Texas should have been the number one team in all the polls with, you know, some of the turnover and stuff they had on their team. But this clearly was a team that had national championship aspirations, was a playoff team the last two years. And to add insult to injury, A and M’s going to the playoffs. Texas Texas probably going to the playoffs. North Texas may be going to the playoffs. And so SMU may be going to the playoffs. So a lot of people in the state has have kinda like passed Texas by this season. This was a team that many thought was going to win a national title this year.
Jerry Quijano [00:03:16] Yeah, it’s definitely a a rough year to be a Texas football team that isn’t going to the college football playoff, it seems like everyone else is. And as you said, you know, I think a lot of fans would describe the season as being disappointing so far. Although they’re they have gotten on track a little bit the last few weeks. What do you think the team has been doing well well enough in in the last month or so?
Danny Davis [00:03:37] Their offenses looked a lot better since that Kentucky game where they only scored thirteen points in overtime and kind of sweated out on the long night in Lexington. Their offenses look good. Their defense on the other hand has struggled. It they just haven’t really been able to get on the same page when their defenses look great. The offense has struggled and the offenses look good. The defense has struggled. But over the past month it’s been the offense and Archimanian that have been carrying this team and looking like a lot of people expected them to look when the season started.
Jerry Quijano [00:04:02] Yeah, well speaking of Arch, you know, as you mentioned, the number one spot to start the year in the A P college football poll to start the year, and a lot of expectations on the team as well as on Arch. From your coverage of the team this season, how have you seen him adjust to the starting spot warts and all?
Danny Davis [00:04:19] Yeah, he’s had his struggles. I mean he’s I think beginning of the season was not living up to the hype, had some pretty whore games against you know, UTEP was a was a bad game and you know didn’t look great against Ohio State and wasn’t really the Heisman trophy contender a lot of people expected him to. But he’s as time has gone by, which I think sometimes people forget these are twenty, twenty one year old kids and this is his first year as a starter and maybe things just the lights not gonna instantly go on. As he’s gotten more reps, he’s look he’s looked a lot better in this past month and is beginning to look like the person who was really hyped at the beginning of the season just took a little while longer than some Texas fans and pundits expected.
Jerry Quijano [00:04:55] Well, rivalry games give fans basically every opportunity to talk smack and you know, Longhorn fans I’m sure might be saying that A and M really hasn’t played some of the SEC’s toughest opponents on their schedule this year. How for real is this Aggies team that’s coming to Austin?
Danny Davis [00:05:12] I mean, I think this Aggies team is eleven and oh is eleven and no. I mean this is still the SEC. Texas fans can quibble and complain about the Aggies schedule, but Texas barely beat Arkansas. They barely beat Mississippi State. They barely beat Kentucky. So the SEC is not an easy conference. AM’s done what it’s needed to do. It had, you know, a really impressive rally against South Carolina and had that game in Notre Dame and Notre Dame’s the other playoff game, beat them at the at the Buzzers. I mean, they’ve done what they needed to do. Maybe their strength of schedule isn’t exactly what some other teams are, but eleven and oh in the SEC is eleven and oh in the SEC and I’m not gonna take anything away from Texas A and M and the way they’ve played this season.
Jerry Quijano [00:05:50] Okay, so let’s talk about the game. If Texas does end up victorious tonight and blemishing the Aggies a perfect record so far this season, what what are gonna be the reasons why they are victorious?
Danny Davis [00:06:03] It’s probably gonna be, you know, playing well on offense like they have this season. Their defense is gonna need to make another stop because this AM team is really talented on offense too. So they, you know, they can definitely get into a shootout. So, I mean, last year was a seventeen to seven game in College Station. I don’t expect it to be as that low scoring. This year I expect more points to be to be scored. But Texas if the Texas defense can make a couple stops, the offense can keep humming. I think Texas definitely has a shot to win this week.
Jerry Quijano [00:06:29] Yeah, it’s hard to tell. You know, the the forecasts are always changing. It looks like we might be getting some rain on Friday night. I’m wondering how that might you know, affect the scoring of the game, but I agree that I would anticipate a little bit higher scoring on a fair this time around. So let’s talk about the flip side. A loss tonight would mark the third three loss season of Steve Sarkeesian’s five year tenure here at the University of Texas. And there’s been a lot of turnover among college football coaches and programs this season. With everything going on right now, do you anticipate that Sark will still be leading this team next season, win or lose tonight, or do you think that tonight’s outcome might have a little bit of an effect on that?
Danny Davis [00:07:08] I mean i i I would be stunned if Steve got fired by Texas. I mean, he just made the playoffs each of the last two years. This isn’t a Penn State situation where and James Franklin have been there for a while. They’ve just been kind of looking for a change. They just extended him. I think his contract goes through twenty thirty-one and it pays him a lot of money. So unless like there’s some things going on behind the scenes and a lot of you know drama behind behind the scenes that we don’t know about, I can’t see them separating. I can’t see Steve moving on and other than some rumors and reports about him maybe I in the NFL. I don’t think his resume looks good enough for that to happen right now. So I think these I think it’s you know, damn years happen. An eight and three an eight and four or a nine and three season’s not the end of the world. It’s not what Texas Texas expected. But, you know, you give him a a year that this is still kind of rebuilding the year if Arch comes back, that’s a that’s a very good starting point. And you see what they do next year. But I I would be stunned if Steve is not the coach of this team in twenty twenty six. But college football’s weird, so who knows?
Jerry Quijano [00:08:02] That is for sure the only truth that we can depend on. Okay, so let me ask you about tonight. You know, I think a lot has been made about Texas showing up for the big games, and maybe not showing up when the opponent i isn’t the big name or not a ranked opponent. Do you think that Texas has enough to come out victorious tonight?
Danny Davis [00:08:22] I mean I’d argue that Texas didn’t show up against Georgia and that was a pretty big point.
Jerry Quijano [00:08:26] That’s a good point. That’s a fair point.
Danny Davis [00:08:29] Yeah, it’d I it’d be pretty stunning stunning if Texas didn’t show up tonight. I mean this is, you know, the game of the year in the state. These are a lot of these kids are Texas kids and they know all about what Texas in Texas AM is, even though those two teams didn’t play for a while. They know what this tonight is. They I’m sure there’s lots of people that they’d love to spoil the Aggies tonight, but also, you know, they know that they still have an outside shot at the playoff berth, and that’s not gonna happen if they don’t win win tonight and win convincingly. And, you know, even if they don’t win, even if they don’t get in the playoffs, I think you’d like to head into the postseason, head into the bowl season for some of these people, you know, end your careers or head into the off season with with some positive momentum. So I would be stunned if this Texas team laid down and we know that the Aggies are gonna give it all that they can ’cause they definitely wanna keep that perfect record intact and secure a spot in the SEC championship game.
Jerry Quijano [00:09:15] All right, we’ll see what plays out tonight. We’ve been speaking with Danny Davis. He is the University of Texas beat writer for the Austin American Statesman. Danny, thank you for your time.
Danny Davis [00:09:23] Thanks for having me.
Jerry Quijano [00:09:34] This is Austin’s Signal. Thanks for being here. For the Texas Longhorns and their fans, Bevo is more than just a mascot. At just over two thousand pounds, Bevo takes center stage before every game, hyping up fans with his tunnel entrance onto the field and then trotting around the sidelines. But many years ago, before there was a Longhorn named Bevo, there was another mascot, Pig. Well, a dog named Pig, actually. Chris Wimmer told Texas Standard all about it.
Chris Wimmer [00:10:07] I assume like most people that Bevo was the first mascot of the University of Texas football team. It turns out he was a little dog that was owned by the first Texas University of Texas Athletic Director. He would just roam around, he would go to different classrooms and check in on students. He started attending sporting events. He became kind of the unofficial mascot of the what they called the varsity football team at that time. Of course it didn’t have a mascot. We didn’t they weren’t called the Longhorns then. So Pig started traveling to all the different games and it was at one of those games where he was standing next to a football player who had the nickname Pig. The name Pig was then given to the dog itself. Yeah, unfortunately, he ran into a lot of a problem that a lot of pets run into. He was hit by a car in nineteen twenty three, right there close to campus. It was thought at the beginning after his injury that he was actually gonna survive. Everyone thought he was probably all right. It turned out that his injuries were more internal, and a few days after he was hit by a car, he passed away. There was a huge funeral for him. I think it said something like, a thousand people turned up and and then of course the student body of the University of Texas honored him with a funeral procession and buried him on campus, a place that you can kind of still visit today. It’s a little bit difficult to discern exactly where his burial spot is, but it is still on campus today. I think that this is just one of the earliest concepts that we can see where a mascot has become not only associated with the team, but almost critical to to the team’s function. The he went everywhere with the team. The students loved him, the players loved him. He really ingrained himself into the society. My name is Chris Wimmer. I’m from Des Moines, Iowa originally. I live in Brenham, Texas now. And I’m a full time podcast producer and host.
Jerry Quijano [00:12:34] Alright, we’ve got more about the Texas-Texas AM rivalry coming up in just one moment. This is Austin Signal. We’ll be back after the break. You are tuned in to Austin Signal. Thanks for being here today. When it comes to college football, the school’s marching band is a key component of game day, and the rivalries between schools can extend to the bands as well. Richard Hay is a former member of the Aggie Marching Band. For the Texas Standard, he recalls the day AM and UT almost came to blows in front of then Governor Ann Richards.
Richard Hay [00:13:25] Howdy howdy, my name is Richard Hay, and I am a half Chilean Texan Google engineer, former member of the Fighting Techgy Band, and I’m here to talk about some stories of the past. My freshman year, we marched out in the shape of a longhorn head on Kyle Field. Of course, you know, there’s a part of the song where they sing about sawing varsity’s horns off, and so we countermarched the horns and the head kept going, so sawed the horn on the field, right? And I was in the left horn, so it was nice to, you know, when I s made that step into the counter march, and then the crowd goes wild. When I was a senior, Ann Richards was elected governor, she decided that she wanted to have a kumbaya moment and that both bands would play Texas R Texas at halftime. So of course this this didn’t really go the way that she had anticipated. Right at the end of the halftime, the the the the football teams were coming back out on the field, and about twenty members of the Texas football team and the flag guy start making a beeline, like instead of just funneling right out onto their onto their sideline, they were they were heading right for the Aggie band. So I think the flag guy gets to the perimeter and like one of the Susaphones kind of rolls around the Susan phone, knocks him out. So flagging you know goes down. You can see on the video. And then some of the football players they they actually start hitting people that are in the Aggie band. So this was not a pretty incident at all. But the good news is John Makovic, who was the coach at Texas at the time. He he saw these guys, so he started immediately running to intersect them before they actually hit the Aggie band. Didn’t quite make it. But he did get there within like literally seconds of this of the of the confrontation, and then he started yelling at his players saying that they would be kicked off the Texas football team. And then he apologized. He pretty much diffused the situation before it became a much bigger thirty years later ESPN 30 for 30 thing, where it’s just like this big fight in the field and it’s like half an hour of futin around and whatever. So fortunately it didn’t evolve. But of course this is what came of Ann Richards’ desire for Raposhmo and because, you know, that’s how it goes. My name is Richard Hay, and I am a former member of the Fight in Texas Aggie Band.
Jerry Quijano [00:15:57] It’s been fifteen years since the University of Texas football team last played Texas AM here in Austin. Tonight that drought comes to an end. Kickoff for this season’s Lone Star Showdown is set for six thirty at DKR Texas Memorial Stadium, and to prepare us for the event, KUT’s Kailey Hunt caught up with both Longhorns and Aggies to discuss why the rivalry is so important to them.
Kailey Hunt [00:16:23] Tonight’s game will mark the 120th matchup between the UT football team and A & M. And for many Texans, including myself, the matchup is more than just a game. It’s somewhat of a family and Thanksgiving tradition. That’s why I had to give my Aggie cousin Case Harper a call.
Case Harper [00:16:40] Are you
Kailey Hunt [00:16:40] Every year we’d sit on the floor in front of a television, me and Burnt Orange and Case and Maroon, cheering on our teams and making jokes about the other. Looking back, it’s funny, Case says, because
Case Harper [00:16:53] You go from being grateful for one another to you’re wanting another one to be sad for an entire year.
Kailey Hunt [00:16:58] That’s right. Whoever’s team won got bragging rights for a whole year. I pointed out to case that I seem to remember having more bragging rights as a kid.
Case Harper [00:17:07] I mean, you did have more bragging rights in the Mac Brown era, but even then I remember watching, you know, five and seven A and M teams win that game. It’s just you can throw the record and the stats and everything out the window. These two teams don’t like each other. Literally anything can happen.
Kailey Hunt [00:17:22] To help understand this intensity level, I enlisted the help of Tolga Ozerchu, an associate professor of instruction and UT’s Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, or as he describes himself as, a professor of sports.
Tolga Ozerchu [00:17:38] The classic kind of analysis of rivalries is that they trigger this sort of primal, almost like evolutionary in group, out group sort of stuff within us.
Kailey Hunt [00:17:49] Nobody, I learned, embodies this concept more than college freshmen. I was able to track down a couple last weekend at the Texas versus Arkansas football game. Their names are Hansi Collum and Catherine Doe.
Hansi Collum & Catherine Doe [00:18:02] And like everyone that goes to A & M is like Texas CAP. Yeah, I know. Yeah Sounds you didn’t get it to UT
Kailey Hunt [00:18:11] By Texas CAP, they mean UT’s Coordinated Admission Program. It’s the enrollment pathway for high school seniors that don’t gain automatic admission to the university.
Hansi Collum & Catherine Doe [00:18:21] Yeah, at the end of the day it’s just school. Yeah. Like we’re all we’re all like going for the same reason, so just some of us got it and some of us didn’t.
Kailey Hunt [00:18:28] All of this, Tolga Ozerchu says, is ironic, because at the end of the day, it’s something that we humans have made up ourselves.
Tolga Ozerchu [00:18:36] Just twenty two guys chasing a ball around and depending on what color they wear, we care deeply one way or the other. But our ability to kind of like grow that identity around these things and and care so deeply, I think that’s very fascinating.
Kailey Hunt [00:18:49] We also can’t talk about the UT and Texas AM football rivalry without understanding a bit of its history. To get a better sense of the historical importance of the matchup, I talked to Kyle R. M., a curator at UT Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports. RM recently put together an exhibit called Longhorns vs. Aggies. Both schools, he says, seem to have been at odds with each other since the onset.
Kyle R.M [00:19:15] One school represents one side of a Texan identity and being centered in Austin and the capital in what’s now a big city, focusing on liberal arts and humanities, the other being rurally based and focusing on agricultural studies, engineering and veterinary sciences, things like this.
Kailey Hunt [00:19:36] Longhorns call Aggies farmers, Aggies call Longhorns tea sips. Both schools’ fight songs bid the other farewell. The Texas fight song says goodbye to AM. And the Aggie War hymn says so long to Texas University. At the Arkansas game, there was also Connor Kalman and Sahit Tuma. Kalman went to UT and Tuma went to Texas AM. Both say they are excited about the rivalry coming back to their hometown of Austin.
Connor Kalman [00:20:17] I think that the the old old animosities are coming back, playful animosities, but animosities nonetheless. So yeah, I think it was kind of just lying dormant for a while and now it’s fully inflamed again.
Sahit Tuma [00:20:30] Yeah, I mean this guy says playful animosity. It’s not. It’s real animosity, okay? I I I d do not I’m joking. Yeah.
Kailey Hunt [00:20:37] I mean it’s a good idea. As my cousin Case and I have gotten older, the matchup has also evolved. In some ways, it’s a reminder of the simpler, happier times of childhood, and spending time with family who are no longer with us.
Case Harper [00:20:50] It’s kind of cool to think back on it now and be appreciative of the wins and the losses really. I mean, just being around people that you care about.
Kailey Hunt [00:20:58] But in other ways, the rivalry is still just as strong and intense as ever. Kickoff for tonight’s game is set for 6 30 p.m. At DKR Memorial Stadium. Until then, hook ’em. I’m Kailey Hunt and Austin.
Jerry Quijano [00:21:35] And that’s it for this week here on Austin Signal. Kristen Cabrera is our managing producer. Rayna Sevilla is our technical director, and Jimmy Maas is our showrunner. Special thanks to KUT’s Williamson County reporter, Kailey Hunt, for adding some work onto her plate for today’s story. Kailey, we appreciate you. And thanks to Danny Davis from the Austin American Statesman for talking Texas football with us today. And thanks to you for tuning in and supporting Austin Signal. There’s more about us at KUT.org slash signal. I’m your host, Jerry Quijano. We’ll be back to chat with you on Monday. Talk to you then. Have a great weekend.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
