Texas and Texas Tech will not play this fall for the first time since 1959, and it's safe to say distance will not make the heart grow fonder.
Asked by CBS Sports's Dennis Dodd what life will be like in the Big 12 without Texas and Oklahoma, Head Raider Joey McGuire said, "it's easy to say OU and Texas (were the face of the Big 12.) I would say OU without a doubt. Texas had a phenomenal year, last year."
Love @JoeyMcGuireTTU on this after I asked him who the new face of the Big 12 is: "It's easy to say OU and Texas [were the face of the Big 12]. I would say OU without a doubt. Texas had a phenomenal year, last year."
— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) August 9, 2024
McGuire is correct, at least in terms of football championships won. The Sooners lapped the conference with 14 championships, including six straight outright titles from 2015-20. Texas left the league a distant second with four football championships; the 2023 crown was its first since 2009. (Texas Tech and Kansas are the only original members yet to play for a Big 12 title.)
Friday was not the first time McGuire, a former Texas high school state-championship winning coach, poked the Longhorn. His speech after Texas Tech's comeback win over Texas in 2022 made the rounds in both Lubbock and Austin.
"I told you they were going to break and they did," McGuire said after his team rallied from a 24-14 halftime deficit to win 37-34 in overtime. "A reporter asked me after the game what it meant to beat Texas. I said it doesn't mean anything to beat Texas; we're 1-0 in the Big 12. That's what it means."
So, the Longhorns and Red Raiders will play their first season without crossing paths in 65 years with no scheduled plans to meet again. Even the divorce was contentions, with Texas Tech claiming Texas backed out of an agreement to "continue playing in all sports, especially football, for 20 to 25 years" after the Longhorns joined the SEC, while UT claimed no such agreement was ever in place.
"As I've talked to my counterpart at the University of Texas," Texas Tech AD Hocutt told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in 2022, "while all the right things have been communicated to me, it's concerning that in the last couple of weeks I've heard from individuals in Dallas, in Fort Worth and in Midland that there's different things being said from those folks representing the University of Texas and that a scheduling alliance against Texas Tech is not going to happen."
"From my perspective, playing Texas schools is something that we're keenly interested in," Texas AD Chris Del Conte said. "Moving forward, we've just got to know where we are with our conference. We have yet to know what the SEC schedule's going to look like for the future. So we're just focusing right now on the Big 12 for the next couple of years, and then we'll see where it lands moving forward."
It would be a surprise if Steve Sarkisian responded to McGuire's comment. The Texas head coach is likely comfortable with his team's parting shot, delivered on the field last November -- a 57-7 Horns win, the second-largest margin of victory in the 73-game history of the series.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.