Brent Zwerneman had the scoop that would break college football as we knew it, and he couldn’t connect to the damn WiFi at the Wynfrey Hotel to post it.

He excused himself from the 2021 SEC Media Days and wandered a hundred yards in the 95-degree heat, laptop in one hand and phone in the other, until he could connect to his phone’s hotspot. Then, he hit send. When he returned to the hotel, shirt sticking to his back with sweat, he saw media members poking each other, looking at their phones. The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas and Oklahoma had contacted the SEC about joining the conference.

While Zwerneman searched outside for an internet connection, Texas A&M had ascended the stage for its media availability, unaware that the conference they’d found a home in was courting the program they’d finally escaped. 

“(Texas A&M athletic director) Ross Bjork’s eyes were as big as anyone’s in that building,” Zwerneman said.

Texas A&M eventually voted to allow Texas into the SEC, but only when it realized the move had too much momentum to stop. Bjork’s initial reaction was firm. Hard pass.

“We want to be the only SEC program in the state of Texas,” Bjork told reporters that day. “There’s a reason why Texas A&M left the Big 12 – to be stand-alone, to have our own identity.”

For 12 years, Texas A&M treated a badge - the state’s only program in the nation’s premier conference - as a trophy for outgrowing the space under T.U.’s thumb. As of July 1, 2024, those days are over. 

What did Texas A&M do with it?

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There have always been two programs in Texas. One wore a three-piece suit, the other overalls. One claimed the other was its little brother, and the other insisted it wasn’t. 

“You always say you’re not somebody’s stepchild, and by your saying it – you are,” Robert Cessna, the executive sports editor of the Bryan-College Station Eagle, said.

This dynamic defined Texas and Texas A&M’s relationship from their first meeting in 1894 to their joint move from the Southwest Conference to the Big 12. In the late 2000s, the Big 12 practiced an unequal revenue distribution. The schools shared half their television money equally with the 12 other schools. Then, the schools playing more televised games received a greater share of the other half. Inevitably, Texas was always at the top.

“We don’t keep up with the Joneses,” Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds once said. “We are the Joneses.”

This was the swaggering figure Joe Levin expected when he visited Dodds at his home for a Texas Monthly story about the history of the Longhorn Network. The 20-year, $300 million deal ESPN gave Texas for its third-tier television rights receives the most credit for setting off the 2011 realignment cycle when Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Texas A&M left the Big 12. 

"When the LHN was announced, that just galvanized our former and current students," then-Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin told ESPN’s Dave Wilson in 2021. "We went from 50-50 to 95-5 [in favor of the SEC] almost overnight."

But Dodds told Levin how he had initially approached then-Texas A&M AD Bill Byrne about a joint Aggies/Longhorns sports network, and Byrne told him it would never make any money.

“The image that you get of him, certainly with the Longhorn Network, is that it was basically a giant, ‘F you,’ to A&M,” Levin said. “The thing that was very clear from him talking to me – and he could have just been laying it on, but it didn’t seem like it – was that he legitimately thought it would’ve been much better with the Aggies.”

However, Texas A&M reporters interviewed for this story say the joint network did not have a 50/50 revenue split from the get-go. Whether the actual terms, if the two ADs even got this far, was 60/40 or 51/49, Texas was the majority stakeholder.

Texas A&M would not accept ‘little brother’ terms. So when the LHN formed as a Texas-centric broadcast and nuked any possibility of a Big 12 Sports Network, Texas A&M jumped for the SEC. Texas said that ended the game, the Aggies said it didn’t have to. 

“I assumed—and it was a rash assumption on my part—that our friends over in the state capital would want to continue playing us,” Byrne said. “It turns out they didn’t think we were as much of a rival as we thought of them.”

And that’s how the state’s longest rivalry turned into an internet war with hashtag battles. The programs and their fans celebrated recruiting wins instead of Thanksgiving games.

But why was a non-conference game never scheduled? Had anyone reached across the bow? Cessna, who’s covered the Aggies since 1975, had one word to describe why the rivalry stopped. 

Ego.

“One would say the olive branch – off the record – was offered; we weren’t going to take it,” Cessna said. “To me, I felt like I was covering "Liar’s Poker". What’s the real story?”

The real story is that neither side wanted to admit they were wrong or that they needed each other.

“They're the ones that decided not to play us," Dodds told the Daily Texan in March 2013. "We get to decide when we play again. I think that's fair. If you did a survey of our fans about playing A&M, they don't want to. It's overwhelming. I know. I hear it."

At the 2013 SEC Media Days, a reporter asked Texas A&M president Loftin to throw a one-liner at Texas. 

“I don’t have to make it anymore,” Loftin said as he walked away. “It’s not relevant to us anymore. That’s the whole point. It’s not an important issue.”

The administrations, and therefore fan bases, insisted their program didn’t care about the other. Texas A&M was still Texas’s little brother. Texas’s arrogance couldn’t hinder Texas A&M anymore now that they’d gone to the SEC.

For Travis L. Brown, a reporter at the Bryan-College Station Eagle since 2016, the attendance numbers when Texas and Texas A&M played each other in different sports spoke differently. Texas and Texas A&M's baseball teams faced each other at a school’s ballpark 13 times from 2012-2024. Ten of those times, the attendance outnumbered the stadium’s capacity - sometimes by 1,000.

“Both fan bases can say that the game doesn’t matter, the rivalry doesn’t matter,” Brown said. “But when there’s actually a game to be played, they show up in record numbers.”

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Texas A&M’s start in the SEC couldn’t have gone better; an 11–2 season led by electrifying quarterback Johnny Manziel, the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy.

Texas’s decade-long run in a Big 12 without Texas A&M is up for the worst era in program history. 

According to ESPN’s Dave Wilson, Texas A&M’s highest-ranked recruiting class in their final six seasons in the Big 12 was 16th. From 2013 to 2015, the Aggies finished eighth, fourth and 12th in the nation. Wilson also wrote that Texas A&M raised $740 million, the most ever by a Texas university, from Sept. 1, 2012, to Aug. 31, 2013. This allowed for a renovation of Kyle Field, making it the world’s sixth-largest stadium.

“Coming off of Johnny’s Heisman season, if you were going to say, ‘Which program in ten years is going to be in a better spot?’ Everybody would’ve taken the Aggies,” Joe Levin said.

Except they’re not. Texas enters the SEC off a College Football Playoff appearance, with a first round NFL prospect at quarterback, and is tied with Georgia for the highest preseason win total. Texas A&M had to pay Jimbo Fisher $76 million to leave because the program was stuck in neutral.

Texas A&M was the better football program in the 12 years the rivals spent apart, but that was Texas at its lowest. And the difference wasn't stark. Texas finished with a .592 winning percentage compared to Texas A&M’s .642. Texas played in two conference championship games, while Texas A&M, competing with powerhouses Alabama and LSU, never won its division. Since Johnny Football’s first year, the Aggies haven’t had a double-digit win season, while Texas has done so twice.

“They (Texas A&M) did not take as much advantage as they should have early on in terms of that success on the recruiting front and football,” Brent Zwerneman said.

As the old saying goes, Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Except in college football in the 2020s, there are multiple arenas you must win. The scoreboard is still the most important win, hence why Fisher is gone, but it’s far from the only one. There’s also recruiting and fundraising.

The rivalry returns in November, but the Texas A&M that steps on the field is different from the one that sulked off it after Justin Tucker’s game winning field goal. With a Cold War comes the Arms Race.

Texas A&M’s fall 2011 enrollment was 49,861. Its fall 2023 enrollment was 77,369. The Kyle Field Texas last visited held 82,589. George Strait set a record with 110,905 fans attending his concert there in June. According to ESPN’s Wilson, in the fiscal year that ended in August 2011, before the conference move, the 12th Man Foundation’s annual donations were $20.6 million. On April 25, 2022, the foundation launched the Centennial Campaign. In that fiscal year, 380 donors committed $122.9 million. The Aggies had a top-ten recruiting class from 2019-2023. 

“How are these two universities going to compete, and where are they in the money game?” Travis L. Brown said. “Where this is going – the biggest pocketbooks are going to win national championships.”

To be clear: Texas still has the biggest pocketbook. Its athletic department brought in an NCAA record $271 million in revenue in 2023. However, the once exorbitant gap narrowed after Johnny Football, Jimbo Fisher and A&M’s run alone in the SEC.

R. Bowen Loftin became Texas A&M's interim president in 2009 and visited Dallas that year for the Big 12's conference board. He told ESPN's Wilson that was the first moment he realized who the boss was in their league.

"It was pretty clear how things worked," Loftin said. "One school was pretty much in charge of how the conference was going to go. [Then-Big 12 commissioner Dan] Beebe was clearly beholden to that school. That gave me pause."

Texas A&M's gripe with the Big 12 was that it felt Texas controlled the conference and used that power to stiff-arm the Aggies' upward trajectory. For them, the SEC was, and hopefully still is, a democratic utopia. Texas will just be another school in a room with Alabama, LSU and Georgia. That's what Texas A&M truly desires - for Texas to just be another school. Not the shot caller.

"Vanderbilt's vote counts just as much as Alabama's vote," Robert Cessna said. "Now, Alabama is going to beat the crap out of them 99 out of 100 times. But Vanderbilt is still going to get the same paycheck Alabama does."

The legacy of Texas A&M's first 12 years in the SEC alone won't be fully known until seeing how it fares in the conference the next 12 years with Texas. But Texas A&M bet on itself and the SEC as opposed to fighting an uphill battle toward independence in the Big 12. In the end, the Aggies proved to be on the right side of history.

"The greatest accomplishment that Texas A&M has achieved is that they, in essence, forced Texas to follow them into the SEC," ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum said. "And that’s as convoluted as anything you've ever heard, but that’s really why Texas decided to make that move, because they saw how much money A&M was making. They saw, recruiting-wise, they were doing so much better."

So, now back to that famous quote from Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds. The one about not keeping up with the Joneses because Texas is the Joneses.

For once, the Joneses had to keep up with Texas A&M.