Losing Our Religion: Texas’s College Football Identity Crisis

meangreen11 · August 19, 2021

Texas’s state bird is the mockingbird, its state food is chili, and its state religion is football. For more than a century, Texans have linked their sense of independence, ruggedness, and superiority to the gridiron. Generations of Texans have been raised with the belief that they came from the best football state in the country.

This tenet of state pride is now dead.

When the University of Texas asked out of the Big 12 (a move that, along with Oklahoma’s planned defection to the SEC, could kill the conference), it ended Texas’s claim as the football state. This isn’t the first time UT has tried to abandon its conference, but what’s different now is Texans’ identity crisis. With politicians willing to legislate who is a real Texan and how we should learn our history, what happens when the state loses its religion?

College football in the state traces its roots to the University of Texas playing the Dallas Football Club at Fair Park in 1893. The following season, the Longhorns introduced Texas A&M to the game by trouncing the Aggies 38–0. For the next twenty years, football grew on college campuses across the state. In 1914, L. Theo Bellmont, the athletic director at UT, rallied colleges in and around Texas to form the Southwest Conference. While Oklahoma and Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) were charter members, both left by 1925 to join the Big 8. From then on, it was a Texas football conference, comprising Baylor, Houston, Rice, SMU, UT, A&M, TCU, and Texas Tech, that allowed the University of Arkansas to join them.

read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/texas-college-football-religion/amp/