Texas Football: Legislators correct in pushing return of Longhorns-Aggies

In a weird week of headlines for the Texas football program, another signal of a potential return of the Lone Star Showdown rose from a state legislator.

It seems like we get hints at someone making a significant push to reignite the Lone Star Showdown between Texas football and the Texas A&M Aggies every year. That’s no different this fall, as Texas State Legislators pushed a bill requiring the Aggies to face Texas football annually again.

According to the Star Telegram, there was a bill that was pushed through to revoke state money for scholarships from players if Texas and Texas A&M didn’t play on one of a set of specified dates each fall. The very fact that this bill was generated by one of the state representatives in the first place shows the significance of this rivalry in the state of Texas.

What if the Lone Star Showdown actually took place this fall? Texas football and Texas A&M are both having better seasons than each program had in a while. Most of that is due to the progress that each head coach made with each respective program. Head Texas football coach Tom Herman is in year two of his rebuilding project on the Forty Acres, and he’s made a ton of progress. Texas A&M is in the first year under head coach Jimbo Fisher and is making some noise in the SEC West.

Texas football has two big rivals, and it only gets to face one of them annually. It used to be that the Horns had high stakes tilts against both Texas A&M and the Oklahoma Sooners in the Big 12 South each and every year. The Aggies splitting off to the SEC in 2012 broke the annual Lone Star Showdown. There’s also no significant rumors that the rivalry game returns any time soon.

At least the Horns get to face Oklahoma in the Red River Showdown twice in one year to deliver the fan base and just the general audience of college football fans a massive rivalry game again. It helps to replace some of the excitement that fans of both the Aggies and Horns would get from the Lone Star Showdown the past few years.

Since the end of the Lone Star Showdown, both Texas and Texas A&M tried to replace the rivalry game with its own in each conference. Texas A&M usually caps its regular season with a finale against the LSU Tigers. This year, the Texas A&M-LSU game provided an instant classic with a 74-72 overtime victory for the Aggies.

Texas capped the last two regular seasons against the Kansas Jayhawks, to deliver a finale that was less than exhilarating. Kansas played Texas close this year, but it doesn’t deliver the same entertainment value to anyone during Thanksgiving Week.

Moreover, it should be apparent to the college football world that bringing back the Lone Star Showdown is a good move. Whoever’s fault it is that the Horns and Aggies haven’t played each other since the Big 12 split up doesn’t matter if the game can move forward sometime within the next five years.