The Big 12 is losing its marquee matchup when the Red River Rivalry is played Saturday for the final time under the league's umbrella.
No. 3 Texas and No. 12 Oklahoma head to the Southeastern Conference in 2024, the same year the Big 12 expands to 16 schools in what the league hopes will be an exciting launch of a new era. But gone will be its most hyped regular-season game, along with the Sooners' annual Bedlam meeting with Oklahoma State in a league with no other rivalries on par with those two.
"The spotlight of college football" is on this game, said Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, who also had stops in the Pac-12 and in the SEC. He calls Texas-Oklahoma at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas "the best setting in college football" with the howling fans split between orange and crimson.
The storied series dates to 1900 and it will belong to the SEC soon enough. It's one that the Big 12 shouldn't rush to replace, said Vassilis Dalakas, a sports marketing researcher at San Diego State who specializes in rivalries.
For starters, big rivalries tend to be born out of promixity. Like other conferences being spread out under the latest wave of realignment, the Big 12 now spans three time zones. Proximity is more of a challenge.
"It's a lot easier to sell the heat and passion of the rivalry when the two rival teams are nearby," Dalakas said. The landscape starting in 2024 "is a weird situation in college sports in general. And I think it does makes sense to just figure it out first, see how things settle in the new reality."
Rivalries also thrive through longstanding traditions, bad blood, title implications and back-and-forth, nail-biting outcomes. TV viewership pushes interest well beyond state borders.
The Longhorns and Sooners check most of those boxes. Every October, they play before more than 92,000 fans in Dallas about three hours from their respective campuses. Except for last year's 49-0 win by Texas, the series was decided by eight points or less in the eight Red River meetings before that.