COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — Ricky Williams won the Heisman Trophy and set the all-time NCAA rushing record during his illustrious career with the Texas Longhorns.

Another highlight? Three wins against Texas A&M in four seasons.

“It’s been a missing ingredient for Texas for a long time,” Williams told The Associated Press this week. “At least when I was at Texas, part of what made Texas great was beating the Aggies.”

And he’s thrilled that the rivalry – one of the biggest in college football – has been revived.

After more than a decade apart when the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC, Texas-Texas A&M returns Saturday, bringing back a brother-on-brother grudge match that dates back to the 1890s.

From “Hook’em” to “Gig’em,” Heisman Trophy winners, legendary coaches and mascots, and the Aggie Campfire tragedy that united the two programs in grief, the game has finally and thankfully returned.

“It’s one of those deals when you grew up in Texas and your whole life you’ve only played A&M and Texas on Thanksgiving weekend,” said Dat Nguyen, an All-American linebacker who played for the Aggies from 1995-98. “And it was unfortunate that it was gone. It’s been gone for a while, but I’m so grateful it’s back.”

The return of the rivalry and the stakes that come with it — the winner gets a trip to the SEC title game — has driven up ticket prices. TickPick, an online ticket seller, published on

The desire to prevail in this series is so strong that defeat can hurt for years – or in Williams’ case – decades. He ran for 750 yards and six touchdowns in four games against the Aggies, but instead of reflecting on that accomplishment, he dwells on the game he lost.

Williams played most of the second half with a high ankle sprain and finished the 1997 game with 183 yards and two touchdowns in a 27-16 A&M win.

“We should have been 4-0 … because if I was healthy, I would have made a couple runs where I would have gotten well over 200 yards,” he said. “So that still haunts me.”

The origins

Texas leads the annual rivalry at 76-37-5 and started 1894 with a 38-0 win over the Aggies. According to a newspaper report on the first game, A&M was significantly outnumbered by the loss.

“Every time the Varsity boys made a catch-as-catch-can play, the A&M College boys fell into the dust like so many tenpins were knocked over,” wrote the Austin Statesman.

The Aggies did not beat Texas until 1902. The rivalry inspired Texas A&M’s first pregame bonfire in 1909, which became an annual tradition until the woodpile collapsed in 1999, killing 12 people and injuring dozens.

Crow and Campbell

Williams was the last Heisman winner to play with three players in this series.

The first was John David Crow of Texas A&M, a running back who won the trophy in 1957. A year earlier, he scored a touchdown when coach Paul “Bear” Bryant led A&M to its first win at Texas Memorial Stadium in 1956.

The next year, first-year Texas coach Darrell Royal led the Longhorns to a win in College Station. The Longhorns’ home stadium now bears his name.

Crow is the only Texas A&M Heisman winner to play in the series. Johnny Manziel missed the rivalry when the Aggies said “goodbye to Texas University,” as the Aggie War Hymn says, to move to the SEC in 2012 and end the rivalry.

Earl Campbell, who became the first Heisman winner at Texas in 1977, had the best game of his career, rushing for 222 yards and three touchdowns and catching the only touchdown pass of his career in a 57-28 win in 1977.

Series story

Texas was 31-3-1 from 1940 to 1974. Since then, the competition has gotten much tougher, with A&M having a 19-18 edge over the last 37 years of the rivalry. The Aggies’ longest period of dominance came when they won 10 of 11 games from 1984 to 1994.

It was Williams who turned the series in the Longhorns’ favor. He was an 18-year-old fullback when he first attended Texas A&M in 1995.

Texas A&M’s “Wrecking Crew” defense ranked first in the nation, and tall tales told on campus led Williams, a San Diego native, to believe the Aggies were all “6-foot-5” and all ran 4.2 seconds. (40 yard dashes.)”

“I was scared,” Williams said. “I thought there would be a bloodbath and we would be the losers.”

Instead, Williams celebrated his coming out party in front of a national television audience, running for a season-high 163 yards and two touchdowns to lead Texas to a 16-6 victory.

“When I saw the reaction after that game, I realized how big the rivalry was,” Williams said.

Dan Neil, an All-American offensive lineman who played at Texas from 1993 to 1996, helped block for Williams that day.

“Seeing them lose their minds when we beat them was something I appreciated,” Neil said.

RC Slocum was an assistant with the Aggies for years and was their head coach from 1989 to 2002. At 80, he’s so happy the game is back.

“I grew up watching this game in Texas and went on to coach 30 times,” he said. “And it’s a great rivalry. We are…two big schools in a big state that loves football. And that’s how it should be.”

Triumph and tragedy

The 1990s saw two of the most exciting and emotional games in the history of the rivalry.

In 1998, Williams broke the NCAA major college career rushing record in Texas’ 26-24 loss to the No. 6 Aggies.

Williams topped Pittsburgh’s Tony Dorsett with a 60-yard touchdown run in the first quarter, outrunning an Aggies defender at the goal line. But he fumbled twice after that run and the Longhorns needed a field goal in the final seconds to clinch the win.

“It was wonderful that I broke the record and got all the glory,” Williams said. “But I almost lost the game… What I remember most about my last college regular season game against the Aggies is that it was the epitome of a team victory. And I think when you go into these big rivalry games, that’s what matters.”

Even during the loss, the Aggies celebrated Williams’ decisive Heisman game with Crow joining Dorsett and Campbell in presenting him with a game ball.

Tragedy struck College Station in 1999 when the 40-foot wooden tower assembled for the annual bonfire collapsed eight days before the game. Dozens of Aggies players rushed to the scene to help rescuers remove the heavy logs, and Longhorns players led blood drives for the injured.

Some wondered if the game should be canceled, but in the end it was played as scheduled. Slocum said that game, which the Aggies won 20-16, was his most meaningful.

“We had been through so much here with this terrible tragedy and in this game I felt more pressure than any other game I have ever coached that we really had to win this game,” he said. “I didn’t tell the players that, but I felt it myself.”

Slocum said Texas was very sensitive to the situation and that then-Texas coach Mack Brown called him several times that week to discuss it. At halftime, the Texas band “Amazing Grace” played.

“It was a good ballgame, but it went the way we needed it to,” Slocum said.

Bitter enemies

Although the teams and their fans united after this tragedy, this rivalry is rooted in the contempt that Texas and Texas A&M have had for each other for more than a century.

The Aggie fight song calls for “taking the horns off Varsity,” and for decades the Longhorns held a candlelit “Hex Rally” before the game as one of the more unique ways to gain the upper hand.

Texas has had bragging rights for the past 13 years, defeating the Aggies 27-25 on a last-second field goal at Kyle Field in their last meeting.

“When I first got to A&M, there was obviously even more hate or hatred toward Texas developing, especially that day or leading up to that week,” Nguyen said. “And I have a lot of friends that went to Texas and I don’t hate anyone, it’s all about this one game.”

Neil believes nothing is more important to Texas A&M than this game.

“They live to beat Texas. For an Aggie, this game is everything,” Neil said.

What if Texas wins on Saturday?

“This is going to drive Aggies crazy. They could implode. They’re about as hot as you could imagine with this one.”

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