There are many types of Longhorn football fans amongst us.
I have many Longhorn friends, some of them quite normal, but this is dedicated to a special breed. You know who they are. They are usually pimply college kids, comment board trolls or drunk Sixth Street chicks with too much makeup. They are not anchored in reality and instead possess an epistemic, orange-ether logic that confounds the lucid among us. The envy is obvious and drips like What-A-Burger grease from their pores.
You’ll run into plenty of these folks this weekend in Dallas. Best practice for Sooner football fans is to chuckle and move on. However, if you must go slumming, don’t go unarmed.
Despite petty, inconsequential criteria where the Sooner football program holds advantages, like, say, national championships, Big 12 championships, Heisman Trophy winners and consensus All-Americans, below are the most common arguments Longhorns like to make:
*We have more head-to-head wins.
This is the most common argument. It’s funny to note that the current difference in wins (18) can be solely attributed to a period when football resembled quidditch more than the game we enjoy today. Leather helmets were no longer used in collegiate football sometime in the 1940s.
OU’s head-to-head record through 1947: 11-29-2. Since then: 30-30-3. But, by all means, keep your poster of Bobby Layne on your wall.
*Well, we have more wins all-time.
That will usually be true when you’ve had more chances to win (played 40 more games). However, Texas has more losses than OU as well. At the start of this year, the all-time winning percentage of both teams was exactly tied at 0.717.
*Yeah, but you get all your players from Texas. You have to steal from us.
Only a Longhorn would think all players within the Texas border belong to Austin. There are eight other FBS teams in Texas, but somehow the Longhorns think they’re entitled to all high school athletes.
Most of OU’s elite players haven’t even been from Texas. Eighty percent of OU’s Heisman Trophy Winners were from Oklahoma. Half of the Longhorns’ winners were from Texas.
The OU roster last year had 50 percent Texans. Our record was 12-2. The Longhorns roster had 94 percent Texans. Your record was 5-7. You should probably recruit fewer Texans.
Your stadium is named after your greatest coach Darrell Royal, an Oklahoman. You’re welcome.
*Well, you’re just a bunch of cheaters and criminals anyway.
Here comes the anger. Unless you’re Stanford, Penn State, Boston College or Northwestern, your school has been on probation. Texas has been placed on probation three times (1965, 1982, 1987). The ‘Horns were down and dirty in the conference of cheaters, the SWC, before they got swept up by the Big 12.
Does Texas really want to discuss players’ skirmishes with the law?
*You ingrates just care about football. We have better overall athletics.
Once the questions start drifting away from football, you know they got nothing.
I laugh when I hear UT fans feign excitement about any other sport. Remember delusion is commonplace among this lot. Perhaps they judge greatness of a program by how much money it makes or by TV networks nobody watches.
Anyway, in the 2010 Director’s Cup rankings, which judge overall athletic team accomplishments, OU ranked 12th. Texas: 15th. Scoreboard.
*You just wish Toby Keith had pecs like Matthew McConaughey.
Wha-what?
*C’mon, you loves you some of that sexy Texas drawl.
Can we talk about something else?
*Screw you trailer trash!
Texas has the third-highest number of mobile homes in the nation, four times more than Oklahoma.
Class dismissed. Boomer Sooner!