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Jackie Sherrill wants you to know he has many Texas friends, Longhorn legends Darrell Royal and Mack Brown among them. Perhaps the most colorful figure in Texas A&M history when it comes to the historic rivalry renewal with Texas this week wants that clear.
But Sherrill also can’t help being just a bit subversive. That’s part of who he is. Whether it was leading the Aggies or crossing swords with the NCAA, it was always something. Sherrill, who turned 81 on Thanksgiving, spent only seven years as A&M’s coach in the 1980s, but his spice looms over the restart of a powerful rivalry this week in the Lone Star State.
“Horn chips for ball markers,” Sherrill said in the lead-up to Saturday’s first Texas game in 13 years. “They were a big hit.”
He is referring to a recent golf tournament in Houston between 50 former Longhorns and 50 former Aggies. Sherrill knew a cattle rancher who would shave off bits of horn from his livestock. Those bits were refined into rivalry reminders to mark putts.
“Texas guys [would] ask what it is,” Sherrill said.
They didn’t wonder long.
When the group was told, the rivalry, once again, was on. These teams started playing in 1894. What began as a mighty state school vs. a small all-male military school has long since evolved into one of the most intense traditional games in the sport.
We just haven’t seen that tradition in 13 years. That adds to this perhaps being the biggest of all the 119 meetings.
“Yes,” Sherrill confirmed. “It’s important to both teams, but you can say the pressure is on Texas because of where they are.”
Saturday’s winner goes to the conference championship game. But it’s bigger than that. Both teams are also in playoff contention and richer than ever. Texas has been dominant in this series (76-37-5).
And Sherrill knows whether the Longhorns win or not, they will be taunted by a phrase so ingrained in this rivalry, it is included in the Aggie War Hymn.
Saw ‘Em Off.
That’s why Sherrill had those horn chips made, a nod to actually sawing off those Longhorns’, um, horns. There is a double meaning this week, then, whether you’re putting for par with Jackie and the boys or screaming at Texas’ Longhorn mascot.
“Jackie has never liked them. Never will and never has,” said Texas native Phil Silva, who was Sherrill’s equipment manager at Mississippi State from 1991 to 2003.
The same preparation and vibe will apply Saturday the same as it did 40 years ago when R.C. Slocum was Sherrill’s defensive coordinator.
“I used to tell my players — in the state of Texas and in the tallest buildings of Dallas and tall buildings in Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, and the deer blinds out in West Texas, this week the most talked-about topic in the state of Texas will be the A&M-Texas game,” said Slocum, who went on to become the winningest head coach in school history.
“You guys are getting to play in it, so you better be ready to play and you better play well because you’re going to have to live with the outcome for the rest of your life.”
A&M hired Sherrill, the former national championship fullback/linebacker under Bear Bryant, in 1982. Over the years, Sherrill has become sort of a lovable rogue, and not only for his time in College Station.
Mostly, he changed the way Aggies thought about themselves. The butt of all those Aggie jokes developed an attitude, one that would knock blocks off with the Wrecking Crew defense. One that would incorporate the all-student 12th Man to cover kickoffs.
When Sherrill put an ad in the school paper looking for volunteers, he got 252 responses. Two of them women.
“They just needed to learn how to win,” Sherrill told CBS Sports. “When they learned how to win, they could win.”
Before A&M, Sherrill won 50 games in five years at Pittsburgh, producing four top-eight finishes. Dan Marino was his quarterback. His assistants included future national champions themselves. Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstedt also became NFL head coaches.
Sherrill won with flair, to put it mildly. Joe Paterno was once asked about retirement in 1979 when Pitt and Penn State were at the top of their rivalry. Paterno said he would never leave the game to “the Jackie Sherrills and Barry Switzers.”
In his book, Paterno said he apologized to Switzer but added, “I don’t give a damn about what Sherrill felt.”
Jackie energized Pittsburgh the same way he would later energize A&M. When Sherrill arrived, Paterno had been 10-1 against the Panthers. Sherrill won two of the five meetings while he was in western Pennsylvania.
That was enough to upset the delicate balance of nature in those parts, at least for a while. The aftermath of Sherrill’s last Penn State game was relayed recently by sources: After a 34-point Penn State win over Pittsburgh in 1981, the mother of Paterno’s wife, Sue, took it upon herself to send Sherrill a birthday card that read, “48-14, happy birthday.”
It should be noted that later in their careers Sherrill and Paterno became close.
It took Sherrill until his third year to take an Aggie team that finished 6-5 to walk into Austin and win by 25 points. That marked A&M’s largest victory margin in the series in 59 years and kicked off a six-game winning streak against the Horns.
“What changed it was when we beat them in ’84,” Sherrill said. “They were a heavy favorite and we beat them 37-12. The next year, when we went to the Cotton Bowl, it was the first time that the Aggies could stick their chest out. They had been under Texas for so long.”
The turnaround was both athletic and cultural. From 1940 to 1975, Texas — the longtime dominant state school — lost only three times to Texas A&M.
In 1982, the new coach immediately said, “Get your licks because we’re going to be good.”
Sherrill backed it up, going 52-28-1 and winning three straight Southwest Conference titles in those seven seasons. He had come from back-to-back No. 2 finishes (coaches’ poll) at Pittsburgh. A&M reportedly made him the then-highest-paid coach in the country — $200,000 per year for six years.
“I just hope that our fans, as broad-minded as they are, don’t expect a poor, old $40,000-a-year coach like me to be able to beat a $2 million coach like Sherrill,” Arkansas coach Lou Holtz mused at the time.
Sherrill won those five Texas games in a row from 1984 to 1988. Slocum took over in 1989 and made it six in a row, part of a 10-of-11 streak that ran through 1994.
“Being the athletic director and head coach, I got to go to all the AD meetings and head coach meetings,” Sherrill said. “A&M had more knowledge than any other school.”
In that sense, the Aggies had finally arrived as equals. The school signaled its intentions when it admitted women for officer training in 1974, thus growing enrollment.
The Southwest Conference in the 1980s and 1990s was its most, uh, competitive in history. We know this because several schools were penalized by the NCAA. SMU got the death penalty in 1987. Sherrill left A&M a year later under an avalanche of NCAA accusations.
“I never had a major violation charged against me that was founded,” Sherrill says today. “Everybody can say what they want to.”
But Sherrill had given Aggies everywhere a sniff of success. Slocum took it a step further, winning 123 games in 14 years. There are now more than 400,000 living alumni. In 2014, the price of oil hit $100 a barrel. Combine that with Johnny Manziel winning the Heisman in 2012, and A&M was entering a new era.
By 2015, A&M had raised $485 million to renovate Kyle Field.
A crowd approaching the school-record 110,000 is expected to watch this week’s Texas game. There might be half that total outside tailgating, unable to get tickets.
There will be scores of friends mingling on both sides. When Mack Brown arrived at Texas in 1998, Sherrill had succinct advice.
“I said, ‘Get some boots, get some Levi’s, get a white shirt and go to the Texas high school coaches convention. Park your ass in the lobby and don’t leave.’ That’s what he did,” Sherrill recalled.
Brown himself — fired Tuesday — became the winningest coach at both Texas and North Carolina.
When Sherrill arrived at A&M, he asked Royal, that Texas legend, to speak to the Aggies. Royal agreed, but after a month or two it became obvious to Sherrill that the rivalry had intervened.
“Coach, you’re not coming, are you?” Sherrill asked.
“Jackie,” Royal responded, “I can’t come.”
Nothing else needed to be said.
Sherrill’s ability to tweak the Texas psyche seemed to have never waned. In 1992, he had a bull castrated in front of his Mississippi State squad as motivation before that week’s season opener against Texas.
“If that happened today I would have been fired in five minutes,” Sherrill said. “The president called me and asked me what the hell was I doing. It worked out.”
The Bulldogs won 28-10 but left a souvenir in the visitor’s locker room that day — the, uh, remains of the castration. Texas was not pleased.
“We got a big old gallon of formaldehyde,” Silva recalled. “We took the ‘mountain oysters’ and put them in a jar.”
Sherrill will not comment on whether he knew of that particular escalation in the hostilities.
In the all-male days, Slocum remembered A&M students driving the 80 miles to the Texas campus where there were actual women.
“They’d make that little trip over to Austin,” Slocum said. “A lot of them ended up marrying girls that went to Texas. Those kids had a dad who went to A&M and a mother who went to Texas. The fact that there is so much intermixing with the families makes it more special.”
What still exists is that constant comparison to the Longhorns down the road. The Aggies haven’t won a conference title since 1998. Their only national championship came in 1939.
The rivalry got to its current level because of the events of July 2021. Then-A&M AD Ross Bjork just happened to be the only athletic director at SEC Media Days when the news broke that Texas and Oklahoma were joining the league.
Bjork’s presence went from oddity to brand placement when he spoke out against Texas’ migration.
“We want to be the only SEC program in the state of Texas,” Bjork told reporters that day. “There’s a reason why Texas A&M left the Big 12, to be standalone, to have our own identity. And that’s our feeling.”
Back in 2012, A&M had gone to the SEC in large part to get away from Texas and carve out its own identity. Aggies preferred that instead of living in the Longhorns’ shadow. Recriminations were thrown back and forth.
It looked like the two schools would never play again.
“We were doing what we felt was best for A&M long term,” Slocum said. “I was very positive about that. You could see the landscape in college athletics was changing dramatically, but we were aligning ourselves with the key player in the whole thing.”
Slocum said at one time the Big Ten was looking into Texas to grab some schools. The Pac-12 came within minutes of grabbing Texas, Texas A&M, as well as four other Big 12 schools, to expand to 16 in 2010.
Emotions that flared 3 1/2 years ago will be reignited Saturday night.
Aggies and Longhorns can’t wait for the hate. Again.
Both schools have come through the food processor of realignment to get to this moment. In Texas’ first SEC season, it is poised to win the conference title. Unless A&M wins it. The winner Saturday will play Georgia a week from Saturday in Atlanta.
“The state of Texas deserves the game,” Sherrill said. “College football deserves the game.”
These days, Sherrill is a consultant for Celltex, an adult stem cell bank treating dementia and Parkinson’s disease, among others.
In that sense, a football game seems so trivial. Sherrill has not talked to first-year Aggies coach Mike Elko about Texas. Perhaps it’s not his place. Yet.
“I’ve stayed away,” Sherrill said. “I’m going to wait until this weekend is over with, then I’m going to visit with him.”
What are you going to say?
“I don’t know yet. Talk about the importance of the game. It’s not just another game.”
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