Culture
During Texas–Texas A&M impasse, the trash talking and meltdowns lived online
If you log on to TexAgs.com, the popular Texas A&M fandom hub, and peruse the message boards, it won’t take long to find a mention of the Aggies’ most-hated rival: Texas.
On TexAgs’ premium board, where tens of thousands of paying subscribers congregate to discuss Aggies football, the longest message board thread with the most replies is entitled “Horn Meltdown Thread.” It’s 326 pages and as of Wednesday had more than 11,000 posts since the thread began in February. There’s been a Horn Meltdown Thread every year since 2014.
Type Orangebloods.com — a top destination for Longhorns fans since 2001 — into your web browser and mosey over to its subscription board. There’s a thread dedicated to discussing Texas A&M football news, where Longhorns rejoice whenever the Aggies stumble. The current one started in October 2022, is 871 pages and has more than 30,000 posts.
In the case of Texas and Texas A&M, their 13 years apart on the football field only fueled the hatred in their 118-year-old rivalry. Why? Because the rivalry lived online, through message boards and social media.
Now, with the Longhorns and Aggies set to meet Saturday night for the first time since 2011 — and with an SEC Championship Game berth at stake — the anticipation and intensity are at a fever pitch on Orangebloods, TexAgs and fans’ social media platforms of choice.
“The rivalry was just too big to go away,” said Robert Behrens, a Texas A&M graduate, managing editor of A&M fan website Good Bull Hunting and prolific poster of Aggies statistics. “People had to push their anger somewhere.”
Let’s start with one of the biggest reasons the rivalry simmered over the years in certain corners of the internet: proximity.
Texas and Texas A&M’s campuses are roughly 100 miles apart. They are the two largest universities in the state with the two biggest alumni bases. Their graduates share office space, fantasy football leagues and even dinner tables. The game might not have existed after Texas A&M left the Big 12 to join the SEC in 2012, but the trash talking never really stopped, online or off, in the decade-plus before Texas joined the Aggies in the SEC.
“You can’t expect there not to be Aggies and Longhorns in each other’s lives, every day, at Thanksgiving, in the families, in the workplace, friendships,” said Billy Liucci, the executive editor of TexAgs.com. “The game can go away, but there’s still Longhorns and Aggies who grew up liking each other or loving each other.”
But, Liucci said, “You’ve had two fan bases that, for 13 years, have been praying for the other one’s downfall.”
In 2019, Anwar Richardson, who covers Texas for Orangebloods, wrote a column advocating for the Aggies and Longhorns to resume their rivalry game. The reception from many of those who commented on the story was frosty.
“Like little kids, they picked up their ball and ran home. Screw them,” one poster said.
Said another: “No No No. Never Never Never. Drop it already, Texas should never play them again in any sport. They left, and talked s— on the way out.”
“There were 14 pages of commentary telling him, ‘You’re an idiot, stay in your lane, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” said Geoff Ketchum, the publisher and owner of Orangebloods.
Recruiting has also kept things spicy between the Aggies and Longhorns. Although they haven’t competed on the field, the schools have gone head-to-head for dozens of recruits. The state of Texas is one of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country, and Texas and Texas A&M usually pursue the state’s top prospects.
Message boards are prime real estate for rumors, especially in recruiting, where concrete information on the intentions of high school football stars can be elusive. Orangebloods and TexAgs are ground zero for keeping up with the comings and goings of Texas and Texas A&M recruiting, especially when the schools square off on the trail. And not just through message board rumors; both sites are fully staffed with reporters who cover the football teams and recruiting, dispersing real information to subscribers.
“That’s definitely kept the conversation going,” said Brandon Jones, president and CEO of TexAgs. “That’s where these small victories would take place: Who’s winning what recruits?”
The intensity of high-profile recruiting battles even once led to a public spat between Liucci and Ketchum. In January 2015, after longtime Texas A&M commit Kyler Murray visited Texas, the two got into a disagreement on what was then known as Twitter.
It started with Ketchum inviting Liucci onto his radio show (Liucci declined), then a debate on the chances that Murray would flip his commitment to Texas (he didn’t). Then it got personal, complete with name-calling, questions of professionalism and thinly veiled threats.
Liucci and Ketchum said they patched things up after that and get along fine. But it underscored how intense the rivalry could get online.
For those die-hards who aren’t paying a monthly fee to post or read content on Orangebloods ($9.99 a month) or TexAgs ($16.99), X has also been ripe for back-and-forth.
Kyle Umlang, a data analyst and podcast host, gained popularity in Texas social media circles for his #AggieFactThursday posts, which are random facts and statistics about Texas A&M’s futility or Texas’ superiority.
It’s been 30 years since Texas A&M had back-to-back 10-win seasons. #AggieFactThursday
— Kyle Umlang (@kyleumlang) November 21, 2024
10 Win Seasons | Since 2000
19 Oklahoma
11 Texas
1 Texas A&M#AggieFactThursday— Kyle Umlang (@kyleumlang) October 10, 2024
Umlang authored multiple books in this vein. The first was titled “101 Aggie Facts: Things Every Longhorn Should Know.” Three volumes were published. In August, Umlang announced his latest book, “The 2024 Aggie Fact Almanac,” which boasts more than 400 of Umlang’s Aggies facts.
Behrens, who began writing for Good Bull Hunting in 2013, has also gotten into the social media statistical sword fight. On Jan. 1, nearly two months after Texas A&M fired Jimbo Fisher but minutes after Washington defeated Texas in the College Football Playoff semifinals, Behrens posted a thinking emoji with a graphic comparing Fisher’s first three years at A&M to Texas coach Steve Sarkisian’s first three years at Texas.
— Robert Behrens (@rcb05) January 2, 2024
“I’ll throw out a completely factual statement that obviously implies an opinion or where I’m trying to lead you, but if someone tries to call me on it, I can just say, ‘Well, what did I say that was wrong?’” Behrens said. “I’m not going to say that I’m always objective, because I have a rooting interest and a bias. But I try to do it from a place that everybody can appreciate.”
Posts from Aggies or Longhorns about the other, however genuine or disingenuous, usually stir up a reaction. Because — even when they haven’t played — the rivalry still matters to both sides.
“Each side will tell you, ‘Oh, we’re in their head rent-free,’” said Amanda Atwell, a 2016 Texas graduate and former sports anchor who often posts about the Longhorns on X. “And they’re both renting out spaces in each other’s heads. I think we can just admit that at this point.”
Liucci, Jones said, “likes to mix it up on social media with Texas fans.” Ketchum doesn’t shy away from it either.
“I jokingly call myself Texas A&M’s No. 1 historian,” Ketchum said. “I’ve seen it all. It’s a different perspective of their history, but for the last 30 years, I know all the names, I know all the coaches, I’ve seen where all the bodies are buried. So it makes this weekend a lot of fun because I’ve missed it.
“I’ve missed Aggies. I’ve missed the rivalry and just being in each other’s lives, literally every day. Life’s better when these two have something cooking against each other.”
Liucci had mixed feelings about the rivalry returning before Texas moved into the SEC, but once the Longhorns did, the return of the game couldn’t get here fast enough, he said. He will relish the chance to claim superiority if the Aggies win on Saturday, but he also knows what’s waiting for him on social media if they lose.
“You talk it, you better be able to back it up,” he said. “On Twitter, the receipts are there for everyone to have on both sides.
“Everybody just wants bragging rights.”
(Photo of Texas A&M’s Ben Malena in 2011: Darren Carroll / Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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