Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then.In early June, when former Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s playing status was still up in the air, a group of key Red Raiders released a 21-minute video, explaining the school’s position in Sorsby’s fight to retain his eligibility and why they supported the quarterback in that battle.The video elicited a wide range of responses, but this post from in-state rival TCU garnered the most attention.
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— TCU Football (@TCUFootball) June 12, 2026And the Horned Frogs weren’t the only ones to jab Texas Tech this offseason: Texas seemingly got in the mix in May when coach Steve Sarkisian, at a speaking engagement in Houston, alluded to “a team in our state in another conference with a schedule that I would argue, if I played with our twos and threes, we could go undefeated.”These mostly harmless quips resemble the type of pettiness that once ran roughshod across the Lone Star State, back when eight Texas programs were members of the Southwest Conference. Many things make college football special, but talking trash with and beating your rivals and/or neighbors ranks near the top. Few leagues manifested that better than the SWC, which was once home to Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Rice, SMU, Texas, Texas A&M, TCU and Texas Tech, before it fractured in the early 1990s and dissolved for good in 1996.“In Dallas or Houston, graduates from all the schools would have lunch and argue (about each other’s schools),” retired Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds once told me. “It was personal. It wasn’t somebody from Nebraska or Missouri. It was your neighbor, with flags out in their front yard, next door to each other.”Now 30 years removed from the SWC’s demise, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the league, its death, the legacy it left and how it foreshadowed and informed the changes in the sport we saw in the decades that followed, all the way through the present.Former SWC schools’ current success is no coincidenceFor the most part, former Southwest Conference schools are thriving on the football field. Texas just enjoyed its third consecutive double-digit-win season and played in the College Football Playoff in 2024 and 2025. Texas A&M made its first CFP in 2025 and had its second top-10 finish in the polls in six seasons.Texas Tech has taken full advantage of college football’s new era, positioning itself for the first time as a factor in the national landscape after winning the Big 12 and reaching its first CFP last season. TCU played for the national title in 2022 and is coming off consecutive nine-win seasons. SMU made the CFP in its first year in the ACC, and Houston was one of the most improved teams last season, going 10-3 in Willie Fritz’s second year and just the Cougars’ third season back in a power conference.Those six schools went a combined 61-18 in the 2025 season. It seems fitting that in an era in which player compensation is allowed and above board, schools from the conference known for paying players under the table are succeeding.“No, it’s not a coincidence,” said former Houston linebacker Ted Pardee, son of the late Jack Pardee, who played and coached in the SWC. “I think there was so much of that compensation that was happening back when I was in school. It was just really hard to prove it. Everybody wants Texas high school football players.”Of course, not every former SWC member is in a golden era. Baylor, which won the Big 12 in 2021, has struggled for most of the Dave Aranda era. Sustained success has been fleeting for Arkansas since it joined the SEC in 1992 (six top-25 finishes in 34 years). Rice has never been known as a power, and the Owls remain the lone former SWC program that has not landed in a power conference.But most of the former SWC schools have committed to doing what it takes to win. Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech all signed top-10 transfer portal classes and are considered to be among the biggest spenders in the sport. SMU gave up media rights money just to join the ACC and has also been a big player in the name, image and likeness era. TCU and Houston both found their way into the Big 12 after being left out and became competitive in a short time.The institutional want-to for Texas college football programs hasn’t gone anywhere.SMU and Texas Tech last shared a conference in the Southwest in 1995. (Robert Seale / Allsport / Getty Images)The market forces that killed the conference still matter todayIf you ask the question, “Who runs college football?” you might get multiple answers.The NCAA once had that distinction but has seen its power largely stripped away. Conference commissioners, particularly those in the power conferences, have certainly become more influential in the last 20 years.But the most appropriate answer is the television networks. Since NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in 1984, the Supreme Court antitrust case that allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their own media rights, television revenue has been the primary driver of major conference realignment.The Southwest Conference was the first major conference to collapse post-1984, but it wasn’t the last. And TV was a major factor, though not the only one. The NCAA Death Penalty SMU received, not to mention a host of sanctions for other SWC schools for recruiting violations, chipped away at the league’s standing. So did the flirtation of its biggest brands with other leagues.After Arkansas defected to the SEC, the SWC was left with all its schools in just one state. Although Texas is one of the most populated states, school officials across the league feared it wasn’t enough to carry them into the future, especially after the SEC landed its landmark TV deal with CBS in 1994.Dodds and the late Donnie Duncan, then Oklahoma’s athletic director, often discussed television happenings in the sport and began theorizing a different path.“Watching the SEC do their deal with CBS, it just became apparent to both of us that the Big Eight and Southwest Conference were both too small to do business on our own,” Dodds told me in 2020.On Feb. 25, 1994, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor decided to leave the SWC to join the Big Eight schools to form the Big 12, which began play in 1996.Fast forward to 2023 and the Pac-12 suffered a similar fate for similar reasons. USC and UCLA announced in 2022 that they would leave the league for the Big Ten, effective in 2024. A year later, when the then-10-member Pac-12 fielded offers from television providers, none were as lucrative as those obtained by the other four power conferences.Oregon and Washington soon bolted, also for the Big Ten, and eventually Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah joined the Big 12, and Cal and Stanford joined the ACC. Oregon State and Washington State, much like Houston, Rice, SMU and TCU in the mid-1990s, were left behind and will be part of a new Pac-12 that will include eight football teams, starting this season.While some of the mitigating factors may have been different, the result was the same: A major conference died because the biggest brands in the league feared falling behind their counterparts in television revenue.What’s old is new againDiscussions about reining in spending on players, pooling television rights and playoff expansion are all versions of conversations that were held decades ago.The SWC was not the only conference with teams paying players in the 1980s, but it had multiple programs sanctioned for recruiting violations, none more notable than SMU.Paying players is no longer taboo, but it’s still a hotly contested topic. Back then, it was stamping out impermissible benefits; now, it’s school officials and other power brokers in the sport begging for an enforceable hard cap on roster budgets.Pooling television rights between conferences, a pet project of Texas Tech board chairman and mega-booster Cody Campbell, has been done before. The SWC was one of six conferences that were part of the College Football Association, along with the ACC, the Big Eight, the Big East, the SEC and the WAC. The CFA, run then by the late Chuck Neinas, pooled rights for those conferences and negotiated deals with the television networks.Notre Dame, which was one of a handful of independents in the 64-team CFA, became the first to defect and sign its own television deal with NBC in 1990, a partnership that remains today. The SEC, ACC and Big East did their own deals in 1994, and that effectively was the death knell for the CFA, which went defunct in 1997. Amid renewed efforts to pool rights, which are also part of the “Protect College Sports Act” Senate bill, the SEC and Big Ten have remained resistant to doing so, as their rights are more lucrative than their counterparts’.The erosion of games between neighbors and/or rivalsSomething that came out of the Sarkisian-Joey McGuire spat was that McGuire challenged Texas to play Texas Tech in a nonconference game this fall, despite how unrealistic an option it is, given the short time frame.But the spirit in which the challenge was launched was admirable and rooted in the fierce competitiveness that both made the SWC fun and perpetuated its demise.As conferences shifted, we’ve lost too many games between rivals or neighbors. Texas and Texas A&M didn’t play for 12 seasons after A&M left for the SEC, and they didn’t restart the series until Texas joined the conference. Bedlam, between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, was also a realignment casualty. Notre Dame and USC have paused their series. The list goes on.Even before the recent trash talk, Texas Tech had tried, unsuccessfully, to get Texas on its nonconference schedule after the Longhorns left the Big 12. TCU and SMU have no current plans to play after their 2025 clash — the 104th between the teams. Houston and Rice aren’t on the schedule for the foreseeable future. Texas A&M hasn’t played Houston since 1995, TCU since 2001, Baylor and Texas Tech since 2011, and SMU since 2014.We aren’t without some of those games, though. Baylor, Houston, Texas Tech and TCU are in the Big 12, so they play each other regularly. SEC realignment brought Texas, Texas A&M and Arkansas all back together.But the quaint nature of conferences — Pardee said when he played at Houston in the 1990s, conference road trips only required a plane to go to Texas Tech or Arkansas — is no more. And while it’s not everything, it’s chipped away a little for fans who used to be able to drive to most road games to see their teams.The coexistence of bigger and smaller brands is fleetingAs college football evolved from true amateur sport status into a business post-1984, as TV money became more of a factor, it stress-tested the coexistence of the sport’s brands of all sizes.The Southwest Conference was ground zero for this. Five public schools (four after Arkansas defected) and four private schools. Arkansas, Texas and Texas A&M, as the bigger brands, had more freedom to dictate their futures, and once they decided they didn’t want to play in the same sandbox with the others, it changed everything.It’s the same issue we’re seeing and discussing today. The bigger brands want more revenue, more Playoff berths, more power. Terms like “breakaway” and “self-governance” are becoming en vogue. Those who can pony up the money to play for championships will survive and the rest will be left to figure it out for themselves.The late Bill Carr, a former Florida athletic director who was Houston’s AD when the SWC breakup began, once summed this up to me in a way that still sticks.“When you’ve got such a difference in your ambition level and your resource level, it can’t go on forever,” Carr said in 2020. “That led to the chasm being widened and eventually led to the Power 5. And I’m one of those people that believes the Power 5 will separate and form its own entity. I think it’s inevitable.“Money talks and everything else walks.”
