The 2026 Northwestern Bonus Essay, Featuring Frank Strong
Northwestern has a bye week this week, after their 34-18 victory over South Dakota State. Instead of an essay, I am going to include an interview I conducted over email with my friend Frank Strong. Frank is an educator in Austin, Texas. I "met" Frank a number of years back when our respective writing covered very similar grounds, and this summer I got a chance to travel to Austin for the first time and actual meet him in person. When he is not teaching, Frank is a tireless advocate for free and honest education in the state of Texas, which is not an easy job in this day and age. He his one of the co-founders of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, which you can read about here. You can find his written work at Anger and Clarity.
Frank is also a proud graduate of the University of Texas. Texas has a big game Saturday against Ohio State in Austin, so it made sense to me to bring him on to discuss college football. There are some small edits to his responses for organizational purposes, but otherwise we can let Frank tell you his thoughts.
Is being a Texas fan fun?
The short answer is yes. I liked the elements you named in your last essay: football fandom is pretty fun when you beat your rivals, win most of your games, and sometimes beat teams you’re not expected to beat. By those measures, being a Longhorn fan is pretty fun. We’ve had some bad years in the past decade and a half but, overall, being a Texas fan has been a net positive in my life.I would add that it’s fun to cheer for great players. I started at UT in 1997, and it was really fun to watch Ricky Williams in his last two years. Vince Young was so fun to watch. So was Bijan Robinson, even on mediocre teams. And I love speed, so watching Xavier Worthy return punts and run past defensive backs was incredibly fun.
That said, last week you wrote about miserable Ohio State fans: “When they win, it is treated as something that is expected, like breathing air. When they lose, it is an existential crisis.” Texas has its share of those fans, and I try to avoid them.
I realized this year that I have become selective about the voices I’ll listen to when it comes to college football. For example, when I was younger, I used to look forward every summer to the release of the college football preview magazines (Athlon, Lindy’s, Dave Campbell’s Texas Football). Later, I would comb all of the online forums and websites for every bit of Longhorn news and analysis. And of course I would listen to sports radio. But over the past couple of years I’ve realized that it’s just as fun–actually more fun–to turn on the game on Saturday morning without all of those voices buzzing in my head.
Last year, the Longhorns went 10-3 and missed the playoffs. A lot of people saw that as a disappointing year, because all of those preseason magazines and websites had Texas at #1 and predicted Arch Manning would win the Heisman. But, to me, it was a great year: we beat OU, A&M, and Arkansas (which has only happened a handful of times in our history), won ten games, beat some highly ranked teams, and won our bowl game. It was fun!
Of course I love talking about football with people I care about and whose perspectives I value. This weekend, I’ll watch the Ohio State game with my wife–there’s no one I’d rather share the game experience with. We’ll probably go up to her childhood house in Georgetown, Texas, and watch it with her brother and mom. If we win, the whole weekend will be a great celebration. If we lose, I’ll be with people whose company I enjoy. It will be fun no matter what.
Those lessons are hard-won, and came precisely because there were stretches where I didn’t feel like being a fan was fun.
For example, I didn’t particularly enjoy the 2009 season–which was Colt McCoy’s run to the Championship Game against Alabama. We expected to go to the championship that year, so there wasn’t really any room for good surprises or magic. If you asked me to describe that year, I would still say, “We almost lost to Nebraska in the conference championship game.” Not, “We won the conference championship!”
In contrast, except for the 2005 National Championship season, the 1998 season remains the most fun I’ve ever experienced as a fan, even though we only went 9-3. Why? So many reasons:
- Ricky Williams won the Heisman, rushed for 2000 yards, and broke the all-time rushing record.
- We beat both OU and A&M.
- We won some games no one expected us to (Nebraska & A&M).
- Our three losses weren’t especially painful or embarrassing.
- And we ended the season with a Cotton Bowl win over a Mississippi State team that was coached by an old enemy, Jackie Sherrill.
I was a college sophomore, and I went to every home game, plus the OU game and the Cotton Bowl. I can still see the joyful looks on my friends’ faces when Ricky Williams broke Tony Dorsett’s all-time rushing record on a 60-yard touchdown against A&M.
For a while, the discussion around Texas football was whether or to what degree it was "back". Was that annoying?
Very annoying!
That’s precisely the kind of discussion that takes the fun out of football. It’s tricky, because a conversation about Texas’s place in the national landscape is a conversation about history and national context, and those are things that I care about. If I weren’t a Longhorn fan it might have been a fun discussion. But there’s something about that particular discussion that seemed to imply that college football isn’t worth doing if you’re not going to win the national championship, and that doesn’t reflect my experience as a Longhorn fan. On top of that, that conversation was also a constant reminder of how far we had fallen, and how far we were from “mattering” on a national scale. It’s one of the things that pushed me away from sports radio, forums, and websites.
Tell me the story of watching the Vince Young game against USC.
Like I said, I like to watch big games at home with my wife. I’ll watch an early season game at a sports bar or someone else’s house, but if I think a game matters and is going to be tense, I want to be in a place I’m comfortable with people I like.
That year, we were living in a little rental house with wood floors in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston. In the 4th quarter, I took off my shoes and socks to make sure that I was touching wood at every possible moment. And even that wasn’t enough! I ran around, touching every piece of wood I could find in the house–tables, chairs, cutting boards, everything.
So I was obviously very nervous. But–and I’ve written about this before–something about watching Vince Young play was inherently calming. I wrote that watching him play taught me a religious lesson: the difference between hope and faith.
With other Longhorn quarterbacks–even very good ones, like Chris Simms, Sam Ehlinger, or Quinn Ewers–I hope for the best. I always believe that they can do great things, but I’m also aware that those great things might not happen. But every Longhorn fan who watched that game will tell you that, at a certain point in that 4th quarter, on a certain level, they knew that Vince Young was going to win the game.
This was faith–knowing without knowing. Of course, it was always possible that Vince could throw an interception (he almost did!), or fumble the ball, or get tackled behind the line of scrimmage on 4th and 5. But no Longhorn fan believed that would happen.
That’s why, for me, the tensest moment of the game wasn’t VY’s last, game-winning drive–it was the 4th-down play on USC’s previous drive, which determined whether or not Vince would get the ball again. When we stopped Lendale White on 4th and short, to me and lots of Longhorn fans, that was it. In a real sense, we won the game right there.
Of course, I still catch my breath when I watch replays of Vince’s game-winning touchdown. I still feel a moment of elation when I see USC’s defensive end, Frostee Rucker, dive at Vince’s feet and I realize VY’s going to get into the endzone. That feeling never goes away.
How would you explain Texas A&M to a non-Texan?
I have some experience with other intense intra-state rivalries. My dad went to Michigan, but all of his brothers went to Michigan State. And I lived for part of my childhood in South Carolina, where we would have actual schoolyard fights about the Clemson/University of South Carolina rivalry.
But I think the Texas/Texas A&M rivalry is unique. To understand why, you have to look at history.
Most intra-state rivalries exist because, when states were setting up their higher education systems, they established a flagship university (The University of _____) and then an “agricultural and mechanical” college. There was Oklahoma A&M, Kansas A&M, Mississippi A&M. Michigan State, Washington State, and Oregon State were all agricultural colleges.
At some point, most of those A&M schools decided they didn’t want to be seen as cow colleges; they had become modern institutions of higher learning and research, with esteemed faculty in arts, letters, and theoretical sciences. So they dropped the “A&M” and became “_______ State University.” They stopped calling themselves “Aggies” and adopted a more respectable–if generic–nickname. The “Bulldogs” or the “Cougars.”
But Texas A&M went in the opposite direction: They kept the A&M and the “Aggie” moniker; they started yelling “Farmers Fight!” at their games.
That would be kind of admirable if not for the reason they did it: their burning hatred of UT, and their refusal to do anything that would make themselves seem more like us. That’s how A&M has acted for its entire history. When students at UT were protesting the Vietnam War, Aggies bragged about their military identity. When feminists at UT embraced gender equality, Aggies fought as hard as they could to keep women out of A&M.
That compulsion, nurtured over 150 years, has turned A&M into a sort of bizarro college. It’s a place where instead of cheerleaders they have an all-male squad of overall-wearing “yell leaders.” If you visit A&M’s campus, it feels weird. It doesn’t feel like a normal university.
What you said last week about kayfabe is true, of course. Individual Aggies can be great. I have good Aggie friends. I’ve leapt for joy when my students have gotten their A&M acceptance letters, and I’ve even thought “Aww, isn’t that nice!” when I’ve seen pictures of them dunking their rings or even throwing the horns down.
But there are real, deep, cultural differences between the two schools. The Texas-Texas A&M rivalry is where kayfabe gets stretched to its thinnest, where the rivalry doesn’t feel arbitrary, as you put it last week. Instead, it feels like there are real stakes, because the two schools seem to represent wholly different and incompatible worldviews.
The SEC. Discuss.
I don’t have strong feelings about conferences. There was no conference pride in the original Big 12, and I kind of liked that. I didn’t root for fellow Big 12 teams in their bowl games, and I didn’t feel a vicarious glow if, for example, Iowa State beat Iowa. In general, I thought the SEC’s conference pride was silly, and didn’t want anything to do with it.
But the powers that be don’t care what I think, and now we’re in the SEC, and it’s not the worst thing in the world. Objectively, it’s fun to play teams like Ole Miss, LSU, and Alabama. And the move allowed us to rekindle our rivalries with A&M and Arkansas without losing our rivalry with OU. That’s all great.
But mostly I’m sad about conference realignment. I don’t like super-conferences, and I can’t wrap my head around UCLA and USC being in the Big 10 or Cal being in the ACC. Us being in the SEC has brought us some good things, but it’s part of a general trend in college football that I don’t like.
Sarkisian. Discuss.
I’ve rooted hard for every UT coach since I enrolled in 1997–even Mackovic and Tom Herman–so I’m probably not the guy to ask, but: I like him.
He has a calm demeanor in games, which suits me. I think he has handled our last two quarterbacks, Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning, about as well as a coach could. And he’s good at getting the ball into the hands of playmakers in space, which makes the football fun to watch.
This probably doesn't work since you live in Austin, but I am always fascinated by the breakdown of which public schools get which fans in a state. For example, when I was living in North Florida in the 90s, Florida versus FSU was kind of a class thing. Is Texas broken down geographically, or is it class based, or what?
As I suggested above, the big divide in Texas public schools is Texas-Texas A&M. Everybody in the state (even if they go to Tech, or Texas State, or UNT) takes a side. And the divide there is not really class-based; it’s cultural.
For all the Aggie jokes, Texas A&M is actually a well-regarded academic institution, and kids who get into A&M come from roughly the same background as the kids who get into UT. My high school classmates who went to A&M had roughly the same grades, roughly the same test scores, and took all of the same AP classes as the kids who went to UT. And although Aggies like to call themselves farmers and act like UT is a bunch of city-boys, in reality the average student at both schools is probably from the suburbs.
I think that’s part of what makes the rivalry so intense: people are choosing a side, and the side they choose maps onto divisions (cultural, political) that are already deeply entrenched.
At least that’s the rivalry as I grew up with it. As a teacher, I can say that my students choose their college differently. Most of my students come from immigrant families and will be first-generation college students. They are less concerned with culture-war stuff and just want to go to the best school that will admit them. A&M is slightly less selective than UT, so we have actually sent more students to A&M than UT in recent years.
Those students aren’t prototypical Aggies, but they do become Aggies over their four years in College Station. They say “howdy,” they start ribbing me over the rivalry. But I suspect they are changing the institution, too.
Anything else you think might be relevant or interesting.
Perspective is so important.
Finally, I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone interested in your project watch Mack Brown’s locker room speech after the National Championship game in Pasadena.
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