A little trip down memory lane.
In early June, when former Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s playing status was still up in the air, a group of key Red Raiders released a 21-minute video, explaining the school’s position in Sorsby’s fight to retain his eligibility and why they supported the quarterback in that battle.
The video elicited a wide range of responses, but this post from in-state rival TCU garnered the most attention.
— TCU Football (@TCUFootball) 9:35 PM – 11 June 2026
And the Horned Frogs weren’t the only ones to jab Texas Tech this offseason: Texas seemingly got in the mix in May when coach Steve Sarkisian, at a speaking engagement in Houston, alluded to “a team in our state in another conference with a schedule that I would argue, if I played with our twos and threes, we could go undefeated.”
These mostly harmless quips resemble the type of pettiness that once ran roughshod across the Lone Star State, back when eight Texas programs were members of the Southwest Conference. Many things make college football special, but talking trash with and beating your rivals and/or neighbors ranks near the top. Few leagues manifested that better than the SWC, which was once home to Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Rice, SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU and Texas Tech, before it fractured in the early 1990s and dissolved for good in 1996.
“In Dallas or Houston, graduates from all the schools would have lunch and argue (about each other’s schools),” retired Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds once told me. “It was personal. It wasn’t somebody from Nebraska or Missouri. It was your neighbor, with flags out in their front yard, next door to each other.”
Now 30 years removed from the SWC’s demise, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the league, its death, the legacy it left and how it foreshadowed and informed the changes in the sport we saw in the decades that followed, all the way through the present.
I think about it sometimes too. I don’t want to get all wrapped up in nostalgia, things change and we move on, but I don’t mind saying that in some basic ways, college football isn’t as fun or fan-friendly as it once was. I’ll crib my own comment about this article from the Let’s be honest: we can’t get a million fans for Rice University.
I didn’t grow up in Texas, so I don’t have the real old-time memories of the SWC, but it’s so clear that the demise of the SWC would foretell the ways in which college sports in general and football in particular are vastly different now.
It’s all the small ways that we all related to each other as conference mates and rivals that are just gone, for better and worse. One of my first thoughts in reading this story was how the Brandon Sorsby saga would have been such a golden opportunity for the MOB. And even if Texas Tech wasn’t a home game for us this year, it wouldn’t matter because we could include it in the show we did for UT, because they’d enjoy it as much as we did.
Sure, we can (and really should) do a Brandon Sorsby bit this year, but it will just be for us. And it’s not just that it won’t mean as much to our AAC colleagues, it won’t mean as much to us, because who even are Texas Tech and Brendan Sorsby to us nowadays? It’s losing the loving-but-dysfunctional family vibe of the SWC that diminishes it. I for one miss that, even as a non-native Texan.
It’s okay to miss things. I miss the old SWC. I’m sure I watch more college football now than I ever did then – there’s much more of it available to watch, if nothing else. As far as it matters to anyone who matters, that’s all that matters. We still lost something in the trade, and those of us who were there when it was different ought to remember that while we’re still here.
I also miss the SWC. I grew up in Houston.
8 of the nine schools were in Texas, the 9th was Arkansas.
This gave every game a high school rivalry feel to it.
UH (my family’s school) and Rice was a real rivalry.
It all lead up to the Aggie-Longhorn game at the end of the season.
Arkansas broke it up to chase the SEC TV dollar.
I’ve enjoyed watching them struggle.