Just play the damn game, Texas and A&M

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Just play the damn game.

Seriously, sack up and just play it, Texas and Texas A&M. A report surfaced from Fox Sports by way of HornsDigest.com savant Chip Brown this week that SEC officials would prefer Texas A&M and Texas … who could conceivably meet in a bowl game after swearing off one another like jilted lovers in 2011-2012 … not hold that meeting due to the fact that any such happening would provide too much to lose for the SEC’s Aggies.

Sometimes, nonfiction is more ridiculous than fiction.

Now, stop for just a second. We’ll never, ever know if that’s really the case or if it is, what kind of convoluted logic is behind that rationale, but I can’t imagine that the perception that the league is afraid a team has too much to lose against one from another conference has recruits dying to go to the alleged “worried” side.

On the other side, I suppose it speaks to the in-season turnaround by Charlie Strong in his first year that anyone, anywhere would be worried about playing Texas, long left for dead in the wake of BYU cleats on Sept. 6, 2014 in a 41-7 thrashing.

But seriously, adults, play the damn game. It’d be fantastic, must-see television and a once in a lifetime event for the players involved.

Anything less would be petty, like refusing to go to your kid’s graduation because your ex wife and the kid’s mom will be there and by no means do you want to see her. In that case, you act like a darned adult and you show up on time and act like an adult the whole way through.

In this, you let the players play. You think the players of TAMU or Texas are worried, feel as though they have nothing to gain, would rather not do it?

Please. If it’s about recruiting, both recruit well, and with TCU/Baylor making a playoff run, you need all the juice you can get these days in-state. How do you fill the glass with more of that juice? You beat your in-state rivals like they stole something on national television.

Texas – TAMU is one of a handful of great rivalries this time of year that have been neutered from the college landscape by a willing veterinarian with tin snips known as “Dr. Conference Realignment.” Gone are your Backyard Brawls or heated Nebraska – Colorado affairs. We’re left to pretend Nebraska and Iowa hate one another over the course of the decades in the “Battle of the worst states in the nation to drive through.”

Why the rivalry is dead depends on which side you’re on, like any acrimonious relationship ending between boy and girlfriend. It went through all the stages.

“I’m tired of his/her attitude. He/she never wants to go out and do anything anymore, and his/her friends or losers. I’m going to find new ones.”

Enter LSU and TCU.

“I’m taking my new flame to her favorite restaurant because I know she’ll be there with that putz she started dating after me and she’ll look and know instantly I upgraded.”

State law proposed to get the two back into a rivalry.

“Look, my dad and your mom ran into each other and said we should start talking again. What do you think?”

That didn’t work out. Mom and dad weren’t convincing enough.

“Absolutely NOT! I still hate you and I’m going to tell you that I’m better off than you whether I believe it or not!”

Enter this bowl opportunity, where both have a chance to patch some things up … say at a gathering they both probably should be at but one side can opt out of.

How great would it be for the players of both teams in this situation, coming to each school probably under the understanding that somehow, some way, they’d never play the biggest rival in their school’s history over some old folks’ pettiness?

Now that chance comes, and the players could say they were part of the game where Texas and Texas A&M resurrected their rivalry. That’s the sort of stuff you put your grand kids on your lap for and the entire nation stops to watch a mostly mediocre bowl game at least by team records involved standards.

So if you can’t do it for the players, do it for the money the interest in this game would generate. But either way, just like Indiana and Kentucky basketball and a host of other rivalries gone by the way side of adults being cantankerous and holding grudges like teenage girls, just play it.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “youth is wasted on the young.” When it comes to whoever is keeping this bowl game from happening, maybe it’s better that way. The old don’t seem interested in it either.

Get back together and go to Starbucks for a night. No one’s saying you have to move back into that one bedroom apartment together for crying out loud.

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