re: Texas A&M Fan Logic

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Y'all have a long way to go to win anything in Texas.

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You are missing the forest for the trees.

If you went back to say 2007-when we won the same amount of regular season games-we wouldn't even BE in the San Antonio paper. When we were a mediocre Big 12 team they would pretend we basically didn't exist outside of maybe one article per offseason. They wouldn't be thinking about us enough to be able to make fun of our struggles. We were the invisible team.

We have not won the hearts of Texans, I will admit. Texans like boasting so we won't do that until we do something fellow Texans can shove in the face of non-Texans. But we have won the minds, and that is huge for us.

And it is more than us- the SEC has a real presence in the state too. Back in 2007 except for the winning the title game no one Texan THOUGHT about the SEC. The SEC wasn't on the map. It was the Big 12 or nothing. That is all that dominated the conversation. Now the SEC is a force in the state that everyone talks about. The more powerful the SEC brand is, the more powerful our brand becomes.

Just look at the ratings. We KILLED it last year given our low level of success. Killed it. And not just on the early high points- more people watched the LSU game than the TCU-Texas game. That is freaking winning right there. Even if they are only tuning in to watch you lose that is still money in the bank compared to 2007 when they didn't even care we existed.

I am happy for TCU and Baylor, but the fact it they hit the glass ceiling hard last year. For all their actual success, they probably won't have a better recruiting class than us, or better ratings, or even some sort of merchandise windfall. We will beat them on every one of those metrics despite a so-so season. That is success for us. That shows our mindshare FLOOR is close to their ceiling, it shows that even at our worst a SEC-powered A&M is still revelant if only to be the whipping boy. That is more than the Big 12 A&M got. Big 12 A&M got confused with Texas Tech by anyone outside of Texas.

Brer, you have to measure us by our own ruler to get why we say these things. Sure compared to a LSU or a Bama who owns their state it looks like we are not succeeding. But by our our metrics we are doing better than we ever expected at this point.

A game of ours was a top 10 rated game last year:

LINK

Now you can say it is because of Auburn or whatever but that is not the point. The point is a regular season game of ours during a so-so season still got better ratings than ANY Big 12 affiliated game (including the TCU beatdown). Since we joined the SEC we have had a regular season game with higher ratings than the RRR every year. THAT is winning mindshare.

The hearts will come later. It takes time and success to build that up. We are working on it.