The Red River Rivalry has a way of humbling whoever shows up with the prettier ranking, and Texas is walking into the Cotton Bowl this week as the latest top-ranked team to find out if history still has teeth.
The Longhorns are 4-0 and favored by 8.5 points, but the setting is the same old pressure cooker: a 50/50 split crowd in the Cotton Bowl, Fletcher’s corny dogs drifting through Fair Park, and two teams entering through one tunnel in one of college football’s most recognizable scenes. Texas and Oklahoma first played in 1900, back when Oklahoma was still a U.S. territory, and the series has spent more than a century producing chaos, heartbreak and the kind of games that linger.
That danger is baked into the numbers. When one of these teams has come in ranked No. 1, it has happened 14 times.
Those teams have gone 11-2-1, with Texas going 5-0-1 and Oklahoma 6-2. So yes, the top ranking matters.
It just doesn’t guarantee much in this rivalry.
This year’s matchup has Texas looking the part of the favorite and Oklahoma trying to steady itself after a rough start. The Sooners are 2-2, have beaten only UTEP and New Mexico, and were blasted by Georgia, 41-13, last time out.
Texas has Heisman Trophy candidate Arch Manning. Oklahoma brings in quarterback John Mateer and his six turnovers over the last three games.
And because no Red River game is ever just the game in front of us, the history keeps crowding in. The list of memorable Texas-OU finishes reads like a highlight reel for survival, collapse and late-game madness.
The modern classics are impossible to ignore. In 2020, Oklahoma beat Texas 53-45 in four overtimes in what stands as the craziest game in Red River Rivalry history, a night that produced 98 points, 897 yards, 21 penalties and six turnovers. Spencer Rattler threw three touchdown passes, Tre Brown sealed it with a goal-line interception of Sam Ehlinger in the fourth overtime, and Ehlinger finished with six total touchdowns.
There was the 2021 thriller, when Oklahoma erased a 28-7 deficit and scored 25 fourth-quarter points to beat Texas 55-48. Xavier Worthy’s second touchdown catch with 1:23 left looked like it might force overtime, but Kennedy Brooks answered with a 33-yard direct-snap touchdown run and three seconds left on the clock.
Texas has had its own dramatic answers. In 2018, Sam Ehlinger and the Longhorns built a 45-24 lead before hanging on for a 48-45 win, capped by Cameron Dicker’s 40-yard field goal as time expired. In 1990, Peter Gardere found Keith Cash for the winning touchdown on fourth-and-13 from the Oklahoma 16 with 2:00 left, turning a six-point deficit into a 14-13 Texas victory.
The rivalry’s older chapters are just as fierce. In 1963, Texas beat Oklahoma 28-7 in the only matchup between No. 1 and No. 2 in the series, with the Longhorns rolling on their way to the national championship. In 1984, the weather took over as Texas and Oklahoma played to a 15-15 tie in a driving rainstorm, with Barry Switzer’s late intentional safety backfiring when Texas moved into range for Jeff Ward’s game-tying field goal.
There’s no shortage of defensive grit in the series either. In 2001, Roy Williams made one of the most memorable plays in the rivalry by turning Chris Simms into his personal Midway ride in Oklahoma’s 14-3 win. In 1994, Stonie Clark’s stop of James Allen at the 1-yard line as time expired preserved a 17-10 Texas win and gave the Longhorns one of their signature defensive moments.
The shootouts have mattered too. In 2008, Texas beat Oklahoma 45-35 behind Colt McCoy in a duel with Sam Bradford, even as Bradford piled up 387 passing yards and five touchdowns.
The Sooners left that day losing their No. 1 ranking. More recently, Oklahoma upset No.
3 Texas 34-30 in 2023 behind Dillon Gabriel, who threw for 285 yards, ran for another 114 and hit Nic Anderson for the winning touchdown with 15 seconds left.
That’s the backdrop for Saturday: a top-ranked Texas team, an unranked Oklahoma team, and a rivalry that has never cared much about the paper before kickoff.
In Other News...
Texas Fans Are Paying A Rivalry Price Oklahoma Cant Match
The Red River Rivalry always carries its own kind of pressure, but this year the market around the game is telling part of the story too. Tickets for the upcoming meeting between Oklahoma and Texas are going for a premium, and seats on the Texas side are generally more expensive than the ones available to Sooners fans. It is a reminder of how much the matchup has shifted in the eyes of buyers, with Texas riding the status of an undefeated, top-ranked team while Oklahoma has been fighting through a difficult season.
For Longhorns fans, the higher price tag is the cost of buying into a game with serious stakes and even more attention. The secondary market is still fluid, though, and those numbers can move as kickoff gets closer depending on how each team performs and how eager fans are to chase a seat. For now, though, the rivalry is asking Texas supporters to pay a little more to be in the building for one of the sports most watched annual showdowns. [Read more 🡒]
Texas Faces A Red River Pressure Test Bigger Than Oklahoma
Steve Sarkisian and Brent Venables spent the week talking like coaches who know the Red River rivalry has a way of exposing whatever weakness a team is trying to hide. Texas comes in unbeaten and ranked No. 1, but this trip to Dallas is still the kind of game that can shrink a season into one afternoon. For the Longhorns, the conversation starts where it often does in big rivalry games: run the ball well enough to stay on schedule, keep the offense balanced, and avoid giving Oklahoma extra chances.
Oklahomas recent offensive stretch has only sharpened the pressure around John Mateer and a unit that has been searching for stability. The Sooners have wanted cleaner quarterback play and more production on the ground, while Texas has heard plenty this week about the same two keys from its side of the field. It is the kind of matchup where the rankings matter less than the details, and whichever team handles the line of scrimmage and the turnovers better may end up controlling the whole story. [Read more 🡒]
Arch Manning Criticism Ignores What His Early Production Really Shows
Public debate around Arch Manning has only grown louder as the Texas quarterbacks early body of work comes under the microscope. Through 19 starts, Manning has thrown for 4,611 yards with 37 touchdowns and 12 interceptions while completing 62.6% of his passes, a profile that gives evaluators plenty to sort through as they argue over where his game is headed next.
What makes the conversation harder to settle is that the numbers do not line up neatly with the kind of instant, all-time great trajectory some fans expect. Mannings production has been sturdy enough to keep him in the center of the sports attention, but it has also invited the kind of criticism that comes with carrying a famous name and a sky-high standard, leaving the larger question of what those early returns ultimately mean still very much open. [Read more 🡒]