Bigger than Red River? Quinn Ewers gives surprising praise to A&M-Texas rivalry

Quinn Ewers speaks at SEC Media Days on renewed Texas A&M-Texas game

Today marked the first-ever occasion of the Texas Longhorns taking their turn at SEC Media Days, though you may not know it if you had just been listening to the event without a schedule in front of you. The amount of burnt orange-tinged questions throughout the previous two days would have led one to believe that this was a media scrum for The Longhorn Invitational Football Circuit rather than the nation's top conference—a fact not lost on most SEC fans accustomed to these proceedings.

Amid all this, the Longhorns actually spoke today. Steve Sarkisian took the big podium, but it was his quarterback, Quinn Ewers, who had the most interesting quote of the day out of the Austin contingent.

When asked about the rivalry with A&M and their impending late-November matchup, Ewers (raised a Longhorn fan) shared that his father always considered the Lone Star Showdown a bigger game even than the Red River Rivalry.

This should come as no surprise to most A&M fans. There are precious few rivalries in the nation that could burn as hot as A&M-Texas for a dozen years where the two schools never actually meet on the field.

Both sides have their fair share of deniers about who the true rival is for their school—Texas fans like to pretend they are more concerned with OU, and there are A&M fans who try to seem as though they are more concerned with LSU.

This, though, is clearly folly. There is no school on either team's schedule that fans would rather beat than their in-state foe. Texas fans can't stand losing to A&M, nor A&M fans the Longhorns.

Texas and OU is great. A&M and LSU has been very entertaining since the Ags came over, even producing one of the sport's best games of all time. But nothing replaces the pure passion and hatred of the Lone Star Showdown for either fanbase. Only months from now, we'll see it again—for the first time in thirteen years.