Texas Football: Ranking 8 most hated Longhorns rivals

A program that has as big of national brand and historic success as Texas football is going to rack up a lot of rivals along the way.

Whether it be due to the fan base, rivalry history, or the players and coaches themselves, the Texas football program found a lot of reasons throughout team history to develop heated rivalries. Texas developed a number of rivalries during their time in the Southwestern Conference and the Big 12.

Through the years, there’s well over a dozen teams that claimed that Texas was one of their most hated rivals. Certain fan bases just allowed Texas to get under their skin more than others. Success from a blue blood program and a large fan base with a national brand like Texas can do that in almost any sport.

In the case of Texas, college football fans generally rooted against them headed into the early 2010’s. Since Texas was coming off a BCS National Championship Game appearance against the Alabama Crimson Tide in 2009-10 and had a National Championship win over the USC Trojans from 2005-06, Texas was one of the most successful programs in the entire country heading into the 2010 season. That’s also where it all started to fall apart for former Texas head coach Mack Brown.

This decade was pretty rough for this program until current head Texas football coach Tom Herman took over for the departed Charlie Strong in 2017. Texas looks to be on the up and up now. Rivaled fan bases could continue to get more and more heated about the success of this program.

Here’s a look into the eight biggest rivals in the history of the Texas Longhorns football program.