Rivalries

It’s not the best of years to be an Aggie football fan.  The season has begun to turn sour.  But age puts these things into perspective.  Seasons come and go just as chapters in our lives begin and end and what was a disappointment this year may turn to joy the next.  I rarely let it affect my mood as I once did.  Certainly I’ve lost the fiery passions of my youth with regards to the game over the last twenty years.

I think part of that has to do with the new league that we find ourselves in.  In 2012 we broke with the schools in the Big-12 conference and moved over into the SEC (southeastern conference).  Partly to forge an identity of our own but mostly we moved for monetary reasons.  the reasoning went that we would step out onto the national stage on our own and we would no longer be subjected to constant comparison with our sibling school down the road.

Gone were the old rivalries with Baylor, Tech, and of course texas.  Saturday afternoons in the Fall.  Traditions shared from generation to generation for a century were now gone with the stroke of a pen.

Now we’ve been assigned rivals.  Yes, assigned. The league office announced in 2013 that the University of South Carolina would henceforth be our rivals.  As if they were assigning dance partners for us at some elementary school cotillion.  I hardly know anything about them, certainly nothing that would lead me to believe that I want them to be our rivals.

I look across at the rest of the conference and I have to admit that I find it hard to work up any sort of antagonistic feelings against any of them.  Alabama is the big bully of the conference but I harbor no animosity towards them.  Perhaps it’s because we beat them in our first meeting against them or just simply that Alabama is a good team and I find it hard to find fault with them.  LSU?  We’ve had some run ins with them in the past but we don’t hold much contempt for them.  The rest we really don’t know.  I don’t mean the team statistics.  Any fool can look those up online.  What I mean is that we don’t have a shared history or experience with these schools.  Perhaps with decades to come some sort of rivalries will unfold and to new generations this will seem perfectly natural.

To me it won’t.  Rivalries, whether you perceive them to be good or bad are essentially relationships. Relationships can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be terminated so abruptly.  Bonds exist, bonds that have lasted decades and ought not to be ripped away for considerations such as money or TV ratings.

I still miss those gaudy burnt orange flags, that garish marching band, that ludicrous popgun cannon, that overgrown walking hamburger, and our yearly “family reunion” just after Thanksgiving.