By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer
The Southwest Conference is never coming back.
It’s a harsh reality. The original Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas state triad was among the greatest collaborations in history, rivaling Outkast and the original 13 colonies. But as another classic band of philosophers once observed, Cash Rules Everything Around Me. And so the Southwest Conference, with all its traditions and history, faded into the history books.
Five years after Arkansas left for the SEC in 1991, the SWC officially disbanded, with Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech jumping ship to merge with the former Big 8 Conference. Every round of realignment since has ripped away more and more traditional regional rivalries, as the Big 12 has swapped out Oklahoma and Texas for schools stretching from Orlando to Cincinnati and Tucson, Ariz. to Salt Lake City.
Inherently, all sports are built on imaginary circumstances. Sure, there’s a full industry built on top of those circumstances – media members, television contracts, massive stadiums, coaching staffs, all of which face real-life consequences for on-field failure. But the purest form of football, soccer, or basketball, can be found every Saturday afternoon in backyards and parks around the country.
Our engagement with sports has become so tinted by money that we’ve forgotten the whole point of the game. After fees, buying two tickets to the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry game will cost fans four figures. The Copa America featured $200 tickets and mediocre attendance. A family of four Golden State fans would have to shell out over $320 to watch the Warriors host the lowly Detroit Pistons.
And it isn’t just in-person tickets. USC and UCLA blew up the Pac-12 to make between $65-$75 million per year in media rights revenue – in a conference whose nearest school was 1,501 miles away. Oregon and Washington accepted comparatively paltry sums – around half – to make the same move, again with monetary motivations. Cash rules everything around me, but what happens when there’s nothing left around to rule?
It is often said that the joy of sport is found in triumph. Triumph over the odds, triumph over rivals, triumph over what everyone else said was impossible. But the unglamorous reality is much simpler than the greatest tales of human achievement. If you can’t be the best, really the best, the next-best thing is beating your friends.
No one invites friends over to play Madden because of the scintillating nature of a video game that often amounts to a re-skinned roster update. The game itself isn’t the prize; it’s everything surrounding the game. The rivalry, the contention, the stack of flapjacks wagered on the outcome. The chance the loser might unplug the Xbox with 30 seconds left, just to avoid seeing the final score graphic. The prize isn’t the game; it’s all of the context lying just out of view.
And yet, the world of college sports has forgotten that. Texas and Texas A&M were petty enough to spend a decade pretending they were too good for “little brother,” leaving two passionate fanbases slowly withering from lack of exposure. They didn’t need Vitamin D, they needed football. And sometimes the money accidentally gives the people what they want.
But more often than not, it does just the opposite. Baylor and Texas played their last conference volleyball series in Austin last year, which featured a raucous crowd and nearly a historic upset, before the Longhorns turned on the jets for a reverse sweep. The fired-up crowd left that week to the knowledge that the matchup may never be played again.
Closer to home: Baylor and Texas Tech have played countless exhilarating football games, earning the endearing moniker of the BUTT Bowl (hearkening back to the unforgettable scoreboard shorthand of BU-TT), but the yearly matchup is soon coming to a close. The teams will miss each other in 2025 for the first time since 2005, as the Big 12 eliminates all but four yearly rivalry games across the conference.
“Farmageddon,” Kansas State and Iowa State’s yearly matchup, will go dark in 2027 for the first time since 1917. In 2026, the Cyclones will miss a chance to play Kansas for the 106th time since 1898. For the first time, for the first time, for the first time. Regional rivalries are being ripped apart in the name of money and recruiting, and the biggest victim isn’t just the fans. It’s everyone involved.
Every native Texan who grew up in a major city has been asked the question: Texas or Texas A&M, who do you root for? Texas Tech fans drink in jeans; Texas State fans drink in shorts. The weird private school fans (hi, Baylor and TCU!) get cordoned off to their own little youth groups until their wins grow too loud to ignore. I don’t know of any Rice fans from my high school, though I probably just wasn’t smart enough to talk to them. I don’t know of any Houston fans at all.
And as valid or fraudulent as these stereotypes may be, they all strike a chord. Because regional rivalries matter. The average Wacoan doesn’t live near any UCF grads, but they sure as sunshine have some strong opinions about Lubbock. It’s much harder to muster strong feelings about Utah than that purple school 90 miles up the road. Because sports are local; rivalries are regional.
The greatest competitors of all time have hooped on double rims and asphalt, because as much as the television broadcasts and the lights and the talking heads might act like they are, sports aren’t actually about what’s happening on the field. It’s everything happening around it.
Sports are the beautiful story of friends becoming temporary enemies, all over a roundish ball and the people we pay to run with it. They’re the story of triumphs, yes, but also failures, and the thousands of hours that somehow lead to a hitting slump. It’s why we’re more enthralled by the yips than a ground ball single, why we can’t seem to shake the feeling that something is missing in the offseason even when highlights are just a click away.
Because the magic of sports isn’t found in the wallets of major TV networks or even in the arches of the grandest arenas. It’s found in the ripped-up clay of the baseball diamond, the scattered seeds at the players’ feet. In the water bottle smashed into the chain-link fence. In the little league brawls that spin out of simple misunderstandings between crosstown rivals. Our love for the game is built on a love for people, and places, and moments that touch on our lives. The more we forget that, and the more we embrace a disembodied form of sport, the more corrupted and corporate our fandom will become. And that, more than any last-second touchdown or fourth-quarter meltdown, is heartbreaking.
