Rivalry has escalated with Big 12 membership
More hardware at stake: It just keeps getting better

By Berry Tramel

Published: October 10, 2008

DALLAS — Bob Stoops has a simple pep talk before each OU-Texas game. Men, we’re playing for hardware.

Oh, I suppose Stoops has all kinds of other things to say. All the usual suspects of locker room speeches. Pride, guts, honor, concentration. That kind of stuff.

Some say it quick, like I assume Stoops does, and some probably filibuster.

Stoops’ message is clear. The Sooners are playing for a trophy. That goofy Golden Hat the players like to don upon their head after victory.

But Stoops and Mack Brown have additional ammunition for their orations. OU and Texas play for two trophies.

The Golden Hat and the Big 12 championship.

OU-Texas is the new OU-Nebraska, which for 20 years in the salad days of the ‘70s and ‘80s was the defacto Big Eight title game. The Sooners and Longhorns, most years, decide the Big 12 title in the Cotton Bowl. The league plays a December championship game in frozen Kansas City or one of the sub-Red River gothams. But the championship is most determined hard by the State Fair of Texas.

Six times in the Stoops-Mack Brown era, which began in 1999 (Mack arrived at UT a year earlier), either the Sooners or Longhorns have won the league. All nine times in the era, OU or Texas have won the league’s South Division.

Forget the Golden Hat. The real prize is the Big 12 hardware.

"It’s escalated, being in the same conference, the same division,” Stoops said of the rivalry. "Now the stakes are even higher than just bragging rights.”

OU-Texas is a unique rivalry in many ways. Here’s one more. Some rivalries are non-conference: USC-Notre Dame. Army-Navy. Some are conference: Michigan-Ohio State. Alabama-Auburn.

But OU-Texas has bridged both, befitting a rivalry that is all about crossing a river. The Sooners and Longhorns were non-conference enemies for 80 years, then became Big 12 brothers. And the rivalry was enhanced.

That’s unlike Miami-Florida State, which was a donnybrook for 20 years but has been a dud since 2004, when Miami joined the Seminoles in the ACC.

OU-Texas has gotten better since the Big 12’s 1996 formation. An old and glorious rivalry has gone new and improved.

"I remember when we got here, everybody said the luster was gone,” Brown said this week. "This game wasn’t important anymore and nobody really cared about it and it wasn’t even a national TV game and it was so sad that the Texas-OU game was unimportant.

"It was important to the players, it was important to the coaches, but it’s back now to where it has national implications, and that’s fun.”

Sometimes a progress is a good thing. The winners Saturday certainly can attest to that while they pass the hat.

Berry Tramel: 405-760-8080. Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1.

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