re: LOL why other schools and conferences will NEVER get it.

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am looking forward to them bitching about the SEC chant after A&M destroys them in the Cotton Bowl. (...And FYI aggies, you won't officially be an SEC team until you do that.)

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I understand what you are saying but honestly I felt like A&M justified its place in the SEC already by going 4-0 on the road and winning in Tuscaloosa. Sure there are more barriers to climb (the biggest 2 being to win the SEC and to win a Natty) but we have done our part. The entire attitude toward Aggies has changed here since we beat Bama. Obviously I expect us to win any bowl we get in to and understand that is what SEC teams do however.

As to the OP, this thread does describe some of the differences between the leagues and the sheer hatred that exists between Texas and A&M as well as some of the others. It isn't just about football, its in everything. I have tried to understand why and this is what I have discovered. The real reason is the SWC had 8 Texas teams.

With 8 teams from one state you inevitably had everyone fighting for the same resources (esp recruits but far beyond that). You also had a lot of choices for everyone in terms of schools. Add on top of that the Texas elitism attitude and the fact they never hesitated to cause real harm to other schools if they thought they could benefit (never with any regard to the conference) and you get some very dysfunctional behavior. Traditionally it was a lot more of a zero sum game in Texas and the SWC, if you were successful others could not be and vice versa. I remember when the Big 12 first formed that the old Big 8 folks were taken aback by it and any sense of "conference first" didn't last a year. For instance I rooted hard against Texas in both Nattys they were in in the '00s because I knew how much it would hurt A&M if Texas won and it was justified. There is only so many recruits and publicity to go around and with that Natty they sucked up all the oxygen for years and tried to rewrite history to act as though our dominance over them in the 80s and 90s never existed. It worked for the most part.

A&M always struggled with this more than the others because we are a team oriented school that loves tradition and a sense of belonging. That's why the SEC was a perfect fit. It hasn't taken long for Aggies to shift our attitudes and we love the concept of hating each other on the football field in conference but always rooting for the SEC outside of that. We also like the sense of brotherhood that seems to exist in the SEC and mutual respect in things other than football that really doesn't exist in the Big 12 for the most part.

Yea, um, I agree with gin actually.

Conference pride is retarded.

I'm an LSU fan. Not Auburn, Bama, UF, etc..

Why would I want to root for a team that is recruiting rivals with LSU?

If LSU were to move to the Big 12, should I then suddenly root for Texas and Oklahoma? No.

Actually, there's a difference between conference pride and wanting your conference to do well to strengthen your resume. I am in the latter category. I have no sense of pride in UF or LSU winning a championship, or Kentucky winning the tourney. I only want these to happen to the extent they help Bama. And to a small extent, I have some positive feelings about those teams.

What many of these clowns mistake for conference pride is the necessity to defend one another when we are constantly attacked with stereotypes, yet our football teams consistently beat the hell out of them. Right now, most Big Ten fans still believe that "real" football is played in the Big Ten, and SEC wins don't really count. It's pathetic.

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But the OP's link has a facebook status relating to Alabama winning another championship in order to "keep it in the SEC." Did you click the link?

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Yeah, I clicked the link. And I want to "keep it in the SEC" for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. Semantics.

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It amazes me the fact that no one ever mentions this. I have always thought/known that to be the case for why the Big 12 is the way the Big 12 is and why the SEC can be.. well 'SEC SEC SEC!'.

States with 1-2 schools in them compared to a state with 8 competing schools can create quite a divide in 'mutual respect'.

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Disagree. Texas has a population over 25 million. Alabama has 4.8 million. If anything, Texas has the advantage with your "8" schools argument. You have over 5 times as many people in the state.

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Add on top of that the Texas elitism attitude and the fact they never hesitated to cause real harm to other schools if they thought they could benefit

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Of course this is what we can expect from a school that has a left-coast liberal elitist mentality. (Why do you think they want to be in the PAC-12 so bad? They think it's home.)

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Disagree. Texas has a population over 25 million. Alabama has 4.8 million. If anything, Texas has the advantage with your "8" schools argument. You have over 5 times as many people in the state.

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I think what he meant by the 8 school v 2 school thing is that with 8 you get a lot of pure hatred in the sense that people who go to Tech hate TAMU and Texas because they more than likely couldn't get in and so forth. So it's a different kind of hate than TAMU and Texas have for each other which can best be described as somewhat being able to respect the other school as they both have good academics, are both the flagship institutions in Texas and so forth. I can see what he's saying.

This is a big 12 mentality at its finest. The 4 texas schools (us, tu, tard, and bibletard) all HATE each other. Like it goes past the bullshite on the rant and into everyday life and business world. We wouldnt root for each other even in our bowls. Our hate for one another was greater than our pride on our conference. Glad we dont have to put up with that anymore

Texas didn't always have 25 million people though. When I was in school Texas had 16 million. When my Dad was in school it was a fraction of that. Any way you slice it though you still had finite resources and Texas schools more than just about anywhere else have always recruited primarily in state.

The real key though was with 8 schools you had so many different choices with many different types of schools. What also made it worse over time was how the schools evolved.