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On Thanksgiving in 2011, we thought we saw the end of the TexasTexas A&M football rivalry.

When Texas senior, and future NFL great, Justin Tucker nailed a 40-yard, winning field goal, it gave the Longhorns a 27-25 win over their hated rivals and closed out a series that had been played since 1894.

“It was special,” Tucker said at the time. “This is what we play for in college football. … And being able to put a smile on every Longhorns [fan’s] face tonight was special to me.”

It was the end because conference realignment was splitting up the Aggies and Longhorns. Texas A&M was leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. It would take another titanic round of conference realignment for Texas to join the Aggies there.

And to get the rivalry back on the schedule.

Though, by Saturday, the Aggies and Longhorns won’t have met on a football field in 4,755 days, the hate went nowhere.

The teams have met in other sports. The Horns also swiped Texas A&M’s baseball coach, Jim Schlossnagle, in June. His hiring came a day after he said: “I took the job at Texas A&M to never take another job again.” But since that Thursday 13 years ago, the football rivalry has largely been reduced to political maneuvers, social media spats and rote answers from new coaches.

Here’s a look at the timeline of pettiness before the Longhorns and Aggies finally play again (Saturday, 7:30 p.m. ET on ABC/ESPN+):

2012

The SEC’s addition of Texas A&M and Missouri was the conference’s first movement outside its traditional footprint. The chance to add new TV markets and expand into new regions has been a factor in expansion ever since. But then-Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds didn’t think the SEC was getting much out of the deal.

One year after Tucker beat the Aggies, the teams were moving on. TCU replaced A&M as Texas’ Thanksgiving Day opponent in 2012 and the Aggies would play Missouri during the holiday weekend.

With the breakup still raw, Texas’ Alex Okafor felt pity for A&M’s players.

The Aggies, riding the mania around Johnny Manziel’s Heisman run, an upset of No. 1 Alabama, and an 11-2 season, might not have been too concerned about their holiday plans.


2013

Throughout this time without the rivalry, the Texas state government tried its hardest to enact laws to force the two teams to play each other.

The first came with HB 778, filed by state representative Ryan Guillen, a Texas A&M graduate. The bill, which never made it out of its legislative committee, did feature a penalty.

“Whichever institution refused to participate in the showdown would suffer restrictions on its athletic scholarships,” the Texas Tribune reported.

Another similar bill was filed by representative Lyle Larson in 2018. In 2019, the bill gained support from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Texas graduate. Abbott even called attention to the measure in his state of the state speech that year.

That measure also died in committee.


Though the legislature was trying to force the two sides back on the field in 2013, everyone from chancellors to athletic directors, coaches and players were trading shots at one another.

“They left,” Dodds said, sounding not at all like the scorned party, in March 2013. “They’re the ones that decided not to play us. We get to decide when we play again.”

At SEC meetings that year, then-Texas A&M chancellor R. Bowen Loftin was asked for a one-liner about his school’s former rival.

“I don’t have to make it anymore,” Loftin said. “[The rivalry is] not relevant to us anymore, that’s the whole point. It’s not an important issue.”

Being continually asked about it kind of makes it relevant but that shouldn’t get in the way of pettiness. But then the football season came around.

In the second week of the 2013 season, Texas was crushed by BYU 40-21, with Cougars QB Taysom Hill racking up 388 total yards and three scores. Aggies defensive back Toney Hurd Jr. made a bold declaration.

The tweet reached then-Texas coach Mack Brown, who bristled at the notion.

“We are the university of Texas in this state and will be, regardless of what some [Texas A&M] kid tweets,” Brown said.

The Aggies still had Manziel and were heading to a 9-4 season. The Longhorns would finish 8-4 that season, but Brown would announce his departure in December.

By November 2013, nearing two years since the last game, it was time again to ask people around the programs about whether they wanted to renew the game. Jason Cook, then an associate athletic director at A&M, took his turn in stating that no regular-season game was coming.

“We hope to play them again in a BCS bowl or playoff game at some point,” Cook told ESPN at the time.


2014

The end of 2013 saw huge changes at UT. Brown was gone and Dodds announced his retirement. Steve Patterson, a Texas alum, would take over as AD and Charlie Strong replaced Brown.

Though Strong was the first of many new coaches at the programs to generically endorse the rivalry’s return, saying “I’d love to play it,” his AD wasn’t feeling the same way.

“There’s a lot of great tradition with Texas A&M. At some point in time, does it make some business sense, some branding sense to play again? I don’t know,” Patterson said in early April. “It’s not at the top of my list.”

Later in the month, Patterson said more to SEC Network’s Paul Finebaum.

In May, the Horns and Aggies would meet again, but in an NCAA baseball regional. Aggies football coach Kevin Sumlin said, “Eventually, I think it will happen,” referring to renewing the rivalry.

Though the spring was busy, another football season went by without the teams meeting. Strong went 6-7 in his first season in charge of the Longhorns. The Aggies went 8-5 and Sumlin & Co. were rolling on the recruiting trail, signing a class that included five-stars Daylon Mack and QB Kyler Murray, who had teased the Longhorns about potentially coming there.

2015

Strong and Sumlin again said they’d like to see the rivalry return. Strong was more cautious about it this time.

“Let me win some games first,” he said. “Then I can push it. I don’t know if I want to go walking into College Station right now.”

The Aggies didn’t miss their chance to capitalize on the Texas coach capitulating to A&M.

Though the coaches were playing nice, administrators in College Station were ready to crank up the hating again.

Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp first said playing the Aggies meant getting on “real TV,” a veiled shot at UT’s Longhorn Network (which was run by ESPN).

Then, when Texas announced it would begin selling beer and wine at football games, Sharp came out firing.

“Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol,” Sharp said.


2017

By 2017, it had been more than five years without the rivalry. That didn’t lessen any of the bitterness from some of those involved. Bill Bryne, A&M’s AD from 2003 to 2012, looking back on his time, said he wanted the SEC to keep Thanksgiving weekend open to continue the rivalry but was thwarted by his counterpart in Austin.

“Their AD [DeLoss Dodds] at the time came out and said we will never play Texas A&M again, and they worked along with Baylor and the conference to have no one in the [Big 12] schedule us,” Bryne told AL.com a few years later. “There were other forces at work to make sure we didn’t play.”

Byrne would go on to say, “We don’t need them anymore.”

Despite his desire to see it happen, Strong’s tenure at Texas came and went without the rivalry. He was fired after the 2016 season. Soon after Byrne’s comments, new Texas coach Tom Herman echoed his predecessor’s desire to see the game return.


2018

Before the 2018 season, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas had tried to schedule a home-and-home series with Texas A&M for the 2022 and 2023 seasons. That would have given college football back the rivalry two years soon.

The Aggies said no.

“We were already booked,” Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward told the Chronicle. “We’re booked 10 years out. He had an opening at the time, and it suited him, but it didn’t suit us.”

Woodward also said that playing in the SEC West was all the Aggies needed.

“You have Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss and Mississippi State rolling in here every other year and Arkansas in Dallas every year. That’s a pretty darn good schedule,” Woodward said.

The Longhorns scheduled Alabama instead. Their win over the Tide in 2023 helped put them in the College Football Playoff. The Aggies would lose nonconference games to App State and Miami in those seasons.

The Aggies got a new coach in 2018 — Jimbo Fisher, who hired ace recruiter Tim Brewster, to his staff in College Station.

Brewster wasted little time getting caught up in the rivalry sniping by being subtweeted by then-Texas QB Sam Ehlinger who tagged then-Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa, who had just led the Tide to a national title.


2020

After years of administrators and politicians stating how much they wanted the game back, pushing for the game to come back or saying the game would come back at some point in the future, nothing much had changed.

Fans, too, called for the game to be back. Texas A&M AD Ross Bjork, who was hired in 2019, got back to one hopeful fan.


2021

A year after Bjork’s tweet, things were indeed moving forward, without A&M’s input. In July 2021, reports began circulating that Texas, along with Oklahoma, were in discussions to join the SEC.

The Austin American-Statesman reported at the time that the Big 12 believed talks between the SEC and the two schools had been going on for months, though Texas A&M had been left out of the discussions. An SEC source told ESPN’s Heather Dinich that it was inaccurate that A&M was left out of the conversation.

Bjork countered, saying he will be “diligent in our approach to protect Texas A&M.”

“We want to be the only SEC program in the state of Texas,” Bjork said. “There’s a reason why Texas A&M left the Big 12 — to be standalone, to have our own identity.”

Texas A&M’s board of regents even called a meeting for the “discussion and possible action on contractual and governance issues relating to Texas A&M University and the Southeastern Conference.”

Bjork said at the time that he didn’t believe there was anything in A&M’s affiliation with the SEC that prevented the league from pursuing other Texas schools.

Loftin, who had retired by this latest round of expansion, said he believed there was an unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” about inviting other teams from member states.

“There’s this understanding among the membership — at least it was 10 years ago — that you don’t admit a school from the same state as a member school unless that member school’s OK with it,” Loftin told ESPN’s Dave Wilson in 2021. “We talked about it from time to time among ourselves, that this was the way it was going to be, that if we had another school in Texas wanting to enter the SEC, Texas A&M would have veto power.”

That bluster was probably the perfect coda to this chapter of the rivalry — a lot of big talk that ultimately didn’t mean anything. Also like most of the games on the field in the history of the rivalry (Texas holds a 76-37-5 record), the Longhorns came out on top.

And when it was becoming clear the Aggies would no longer be the lone Lone Star State SEC school, Loftin couldn’t resist a shot at the Horns.

“They have a very high opinion of themselves — which is not surprising — but not always justified. And that drives a lot of thinking there,” Loftin said in 2021. “… But the fit, culturally, of A&M and the SEC is very good. The fit of Texas is not. That’s just plain and simple.”


2024

With the game finally about to return, the Longhorns and Aggies have each had three coaching changes since 2011. All of those new coaches said they wanted to resume the rivalry yet never got to see its return.

Each program had athletic directors say some spicy things. But Patterson was relieved of his duties in 2015 and Bjork left Aggieland for the AD job at Ohio State. Neither got to back up their words.

The coaches new to the rivalry, Texas’ Steve Sarkisian and Texas A&M’s Mike Elko, echoed, at least some of their predecessors, in respecting the history of the game and being glad it’s back.

“We should play them,” Elko said in May. “When you have two programs like that in same state two hours away, they should play every year and it should mean a lot.”

If the 13 previous years are any indication, Saturday’s game should mean quite a bit.

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O’s Henderson off IL; will make ’25 debut vs. KC

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O's Henderson off IL; will make '25 debut vs. KC

Baltimore Orioles All-Star shortstop Gunnar Henderson was activated from the 10-day injured list and will make his season debut Friday night against the Kansas City Royals.

Henderson has been sidelined with a right intercostal strain and missed the first seven games of the big league campaign.

The 23-year-old Henderson will lead off and play shortstop against the host Royals.

Henderson was injured during a spring training game Feb. 27. He was fourth in American League MVP voting last season when he batted .281 and racked up career bests of 37 homers and 92 RBIs.

Henderson completed a five-game rehab stint at Triple-A Norfolk on Wednesday. He batted .263 (5-for-19) with two homers and four RBIs and played four games at shortstop and one as the designated hitter. He did commit three errors.

“I think everybody’s looking forward to having Gunnar back on the team,” Baltimore manager Brandon Hyde said Thursday. “The rehab went really, really well. I talked to him a couple days ago, he feels great swinging the bat. The timing came, especially the last few days. He just had to get out there and get some reps defensively and get some games in, and it all went well.”

Baltimore optioned outfielder Dylan Carlson to Triple-A Norfolk to open up a roster spot. The 26-year-old was 0-for-4 with a run and RBI in two games this season.

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Life after OMG: Can 2025 Mets replicate their 2024 vibes?

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Life after OMG: Can 2025 Mets replicate their 2024 vibes?

When New York Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns attempted to assemble the best possible roster for the 2025 season this winter, the top priority was signing outfielder Juan Soto. Next was the need to replenish the starting rotation and bolster the bullpen. Then, days before pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, the lineup received one final significant reinforcement when first baseman Pete Alonso re-signed.

Acquiring a player with a singing career on the side didn’t make the cut.

“No, that is not on the list,” Stearns said with a smile.

Stearns’ decision not to re-sign Jose Iglesias, the infielder behind the mic for the viral 2024 Mets anthem “OMG,” was attributed to creating more roster flexibility. But it also hammered home a reality: The scrappy 2024 Mets, authors of a magical summer in Queens, are a thing of the past. The 2025 Mets, who will report to Citi Field for their home opener Friday, have much of the same core but also some prominent new faces — and the new, outsized expectations that come with falling two wins short of the World Series, then signing Soto to the richest contract in professional sports history.

But there’s a question surrounding this year’s team that you can’t put a price tag on: Can these Mets rekindle the magic — the vibes, the memes, the feel-good underdog story — that seemed to come out of nowhere to help carry them to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last season?

“Last year the culture was created,” Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “It’s a matter of continuing it.”

For all the success Stearns has engineered — his small-market Milwaukee Brewers teams reached the postseason five times in eight seasons after he became the youngest general manager in history in 2015 — the 40-year-old Harvard grad, like the rest of his front office peers knows there’s no precise recipe for clubhouse chemistry. There is no culture projection system. No Vibes Above Replacement.

“Culture is very important,” Stearns said last weekend in the visiting dugout at Daikin Park before his club completed an opening-weekend series against the Houston Astros. “Culture is also very difficult to predict.”

Still, it seems the Mets’ 2024 season will be all but impossible to recreate.

There was Grimace, the purple McDonald’s blob who spontaneously became the franchise’s unofficial mascot after throwing out a first pitch in June. “OMG,” performed under Iglesias’ stage name, Candelita, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Latin Digital Songs chart, before a remix featuring Pitbull was released in October. Citi Field became a karaoke bar whenever Lindor stepped into the batter’s box with The Temptations’ “My Girl” as his walk-up song. Alonso unveiled a lucky pumpkin in October. They were gimmicks that might have felt forced if they hadn’t felt so right.

“I don’t know if what we did last year could be replicated because it was such a chaos-filled group,” Mets reliever Ryne Stanek said. “I don’t know if that’s replicable because there’s just too many things going on. I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. But I think the expectation of winning is really important. I think establishing what we did last year and coming into this year where people are like, ‘Oh, no, that’s what we’re expecting to do,’ makes it different. It’s always a different vibe whenever you feel like you’re the hunter versus being the hunted.”

For the first two months last season, the Mets were terrible hunters. Lindor was relentlessly booed at Citi Field during another slow start. The bullpen got crushed. The losses piled up. The Mets began the season 0-5 and sunk to rock bottom on May 29 when reliever Jorge Lopez threw his glove into the stands during a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers that dropped the team to 22-33.

That night, the Mets held a players-only meeting. From there, perhaps coincidentally, everything changed. The Mets won the next day, and 67 of their final 107 games.

This year, to avoid an early malaise and to better incorporate new faces like Soto and Opening Day starter Clay Holmes, players made it a point to hold meetings during spring training to lay a strong foundation.

“At the end of the day, we know who we are and that’s the beauty of our club,” Alonso said. “Not just who we are talent-wise, but who each individual is as a man and a personality. For us, our major, major strength is our collective identity as a unit.”

Organizationally, the Mets are attempting a dual-track makeover: Becoming perennial World Series contenders while not taking themselves too seriously.

The commemorative purple Grimace seat installed at Citi Field in September — Section 302, Row 6, Seat 12 in right field — remains there as part of a two-year contract. Last week, the franchise announced it will feature a New York-city themed “Five Borough” race at every home game — with a different mascot competing to represent each borough. For a third straight season, USA Today readers voted Citi Field — home of the rainbow cookie egg roll, among many other innovative treats — as having the best ballpark food in baseball.

In the clubhouse, their identity is evolving.

“I’m very much in the camp that you can’t force things,” Mets starter Sean Manaea said. “I mean, you can, but you don’t really end up with good results. And if you wait for things to happen organically, then sometimes it can take too long. So, there’s like a nudging of sorts. It’s like, ‘Let’s kind of come up with something, but not force it.’ So there’s a fine balance there and you just got to wait and see what happens.”

Stearns believes it starts with what the Mets can control: bringing positive energy every day and fostering a family atmosphere. It’s hard to quantify, but vibes undoubtedly helped fuel the Mets’ 2024 success. It’ll be a tough act to follow.

“It’s fluid,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I like where guys are at as far as the team chemistry goes and things like that and the connections and the relationships. But it’ll continue to take some time. And winning helps, clearly.”

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Hunter marks quiet day at Colorado Showcase

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Hunter marks quiet day at Colorado Showcase

BOULDER, Colo. — A horde of NFL talent evaluators headed for the mountains Friday for the Colorado Showcase, where Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter was one of the big draws.

However, it was going to be a limited look at best as Hunter was not seen when players’ heights and weights were taken or for the jumps and 40-yard dash.

Hunter, who is expected to be a top-five selection in this year’s draft and is the No. 1 player on Mel Kiper Jr.’s Big Board, was initially not expected to participate in any on-field work, but Friday morning some scouts in attendance said they expected the two-way star to run routes as a receiver for quarterback Shedeur Sanders‘ throwing session.

Hunter did not work out at the scouting combine or Big 12 pro day but did meet with teams in Indianapolis. Sanders, one of the top quarterbacks on the board and Kiper’s No. 5 player overall, also did not work out at the combine.

Sanders’ brother, Colorado safety Shilo Sanders, measured in at 5-foot-11⅞, 196 pounds, but he did not participate in the jumps or bench press that opened the workout, citing a right shoulder injury.

The highly attended event — by scouts, coaches and personnel executives as well as fans packing small bleachers — had a festive atmosphere. Colorado coach Deion Sanders named it the “We Ain’t Hard 2 Find Showcase,” completed with a large lighted “showcase” sign next to the drills.

Hunter, who has said he wants to play offense and defense in the NFL, won the Chuck Bednarik (top defensive player) and Biletnikoff (top receiver) awards, in addition to the Heisman. He said whether he would primarily be a wide receiver or cornerback in the NFL “depended on the team that picks me.”

He had 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns as a receiver last season to go with 35 tackles, 11 pass breakups and four interceptions at cornerback. In the Buffaloes’ regular-season finale against Oklahoma State, he became the only FBS player in the past 25 years with three scrimmage touchdowns on offense and an interception in the same game, according to ESPN Research.

Hunter played 1,380 total snaps in Colorado’s 12 regular-season games: 670 on offense, 686 on defense and 24 on special teams. He played 1,007 total snaps in 2023.

With all NFL eyes on the Colorado campus to see Sanders throw, one player who made the most of it was wide receiver Will Sheppard, who was not invited to the combine. Sheppard, who measured in at 6-2¼, 196 pounds, ran his 40s in 4.56 and 4.54 to go with a 40½-inch vertical jump and a 10-foot-11 in the broad jump.

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