Texas Football: Is Texas A&M the enemy in move to the SEC?

While it certainly seems like the Texas A&M Aggies were made out to be an athletic program kept in the dark while the Texas football program and Oklahoma Sooners were in conversation to join the SEC, the complete story gets interesting. It is clear that Texas A&M does not want Texas and Oklahoma in the SEC.

And what is also clear is that the Aggies definitely don’t want the Lone Star Showdown rival Longhorns leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. The comments from Texas A&M head football coach Jimbo Fisher on the matter of Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC when he “warned” them for the challenge ahead became somewhat of a meme among the Longhorns faithful.

Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork also made it clear that he wants his school to be the only one in the state of Texas in the SEC.

Ross Bjork and Texas A&M taken by surprise by this Texas football SEC move?

But neither of those comments will look to be too relevant when the time comes to officially get this deal done. With all that’s going down, Texas A&M seems to get pushed further and further back from the spotlight of Texas and Oklahoma making the move to the SEC.

It really looks like Texas and Oklahoma will join the SEC. A definitive report from Chip Brown of 247Sports on July 23 essentially said that Texas and Oklahoma are intending to leave the Big 12 for the SEC. And the momentum increasingly favors these two schools joining the SEC and the Big 12 essentially dissolving into thin air.

According to a report from ESPN this week, apparently, Bjork was unaware that Texas and Oklahoma were ever in conversation with the SEC to join the mix. Essentially the SEC went behind Texas A&M’s back to get this done with the two powers that were in the Big 12.

There are really two ways to look at this. One is that the Aggies are the one major hold-up among the schools in the SEC at the moment to try and prevent Texas and Oklahoma from joining the conference. But the other is that the SEC just went for the money and the legacy no matter how it got done.

You could spin Texas A&M here to be the enemy, without a doubt. But it is hard, even if it is fun for Longhorns fans to say, to realistically see the Aggies as an enemy logistically. What is true, though, is that the Aggies were a major hold-up because it is clear that the school never wanted to face the Longhorns in football ever again.

In terms of robbing college football fans of one of the best in-state rivalries in the entire country and trying to run away from what is starting to become reality, you can spin Texas A&M as the enemy in this particular conversation.

Texas and Texas A&M haven’t met on the gridiron since 2011, but it looks like it might not be all that long before it will happen again soon. Texas A&M can’t run from that fact forever.