Auburn football fans are going to have to program their minds into seeing burnt orange shaded bull horns and adding “OU” to their lexicon of Crimson letters associated with the enemy.
It’s all but official that the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners are going to make their way to the SEC in the coming weeks in a move that will rock the college football world to its core…especially in the south.
The SEC has long been the most dominant conference in Division I FBS football but adding the 6x defending Big 12 champions (OU) and their biggest rival (some see the Red River Showdown as the sport’s most intense) is going to make it just about impossible for other conferences to compete.
With the addition of OU, the SEC now has over 1/3rds of the teams that have ever made it to the College Football Playoff. That sort of lack of parity is most certainly going to force the Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten, and ACC to (quickly) come up with a plan to stay relevant.
But enough about the rest of the country. College football is almost exclusively centered around Auburn football’s conference, and there could be two major additions to the SEC West (assuming there isn’t any radical realignment) that could give the Tigers massive annual marquee matchups with two of college football’s most notable names.
Fly War Eagle has decided to look into Auburn football’s history with the two programs and explore head-to-head records against their two newest interconference rivals:
Auburn football head-to-head record against Texas Longhorns: 3-5
Anyone that has ever been on the Plains can tell you that there are more Texas license plates here than any other state (besides Alabama, of course) so it’s strange that there hasn’t been more of an effort towards getting these two schools together on the schedule.
Obviously, the Tigers have their hands full year in and year out with another Lone Star State team in Texas A&M since the Aggies joined the SEC themselves in 2012. That said, few would argue that the burnt orange and orange and blue don’t belong opposite each other on a college football gameday showcase.
The last time these two teams played was almost 30 years ago on September 21st, 1991. Pat Dye’s Tigers–who finished the season with a 5-6 record after starting off ranked the first six weeks of the season–ended up on the right side of a 14-10 defensive battle against a David McWilliams coached Longhorns squad that finished the season with the same record in the now defunct Southwest Conference.
Before that, the two teams met in 1987, where the Tigers blased Texas 31-3 at Jordan-Hare Stadium. That Dye-coached team lost just once that year (to Berryman’s 1987 national champion Florida State) and finished the season tying a then-dominant Syracuse Orange in the Sugar Bowl 16-16 as the #6th-ranked team.
UT took the pair’s home-and-home series in 1983-84, and the Tigers won their lone matchup in the 1970’s in Jacksonville, Florida in 1974. The Longhorns triumphed in their first three matchups from 1910-1925.
Auburn football head-to-head record against Oklahoma: 0-2
The Tigers’ have not had as fortunate of a time facing the other half of the Red River Showdown, with Oklahoma twice taking them down in neutral game sites down in the Big Easy.
The first contest was an 18-point route at the hands of OU in 1972 during that year’s Sugar Bowl at Tulane Stadium. Coming into the contest, the Sooners were the #3 team in the nation, with the Tigers trailing just two spots back at #5.
The second contest was less than five years ago. Baker Mayfield was under center for Oklahoma opposite Sean White, who suffered a broken forearm on the first drive of the game. AU suffered injury after injury, and the Sooner attack–led by Mayfield’s near 300-yard/two touchdown performance and a pair of scores from fellow future NFL-er Joe Mixon–proved to be too much for Kevin Steele’s defense.
The final was 35-19, an identical score to Steele’s lone Tigers head coaching loss with Auburn football earlier this year against Northwestern in the Citrus Bowl. White flamed out the next season, losing the starting job and getting kicked off the team.
Oklahoma making its way to the SEC may provide another Blue Blood blocking Auburn’s ability to collect SEC Championshop trophies. On the flipside, OU could just be another Goliath for a school that has fully embraced the David role.