Texas has a clear advantage as a program during my lifetime because of the Mack Brown era at Texas where pretty much all of their superlatives are. From 2001-2009 there was no question which program was better. There was no question which school the better players would choose.

However that has NOT existed uniformly throughout my lifetime once you get outside of that decade long bubble. To say that the superiority is universal outside of that period is simply not true.

When I was very young, A&M was a better a program. A&M for periods has been able to out recruit Texas or recruit against them on roughly equivalent terms. The same is true in the last decade or so also.

In my lifetime, Texas is 350-173-4 while A&M is 336-186-3 (From 2001-2009, Texas was 101-16 while A&M was 56-54, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about)

Texas won a national championship, played for another. There's really nothing that can be said about that. The results are what they are.

Like Texas A&M, Texas has yet to have any impact at all in the most modern era of college football (the playoff era), and in fact A&M has been closer to making the playoffs than Texas has, although that could change by the end of this season.

In the first era of television exposure and media decentralization of college football prior to the creation of the BCS in the mid-80s to mid-90s, Texas A&M as a program was pretty clearly superior to Texas.

Texas has had 10 losing seasons in my lifetime, while A&M has only had 6 of them, and on and on. There may be some states where college football is a #1 and #2 dichotomy, but that hasn't existed in Texas for a long time, and maybe not ever. I suspect the reason is that Texas and A&M have tended to have a larger pool of competition in the state. The rise and fall of programs like Houston, SMU, Tech, Baylor, and TCU will tend to shock the system more and lead to these periods where either Texas or A&M is further down the totem pole in the state than even #2 at a particular time, leaving the other one as a more clear top dog for significant periods.

This post was edited on 11/14/23 at 11:10 am