I come to you with a warning: Right here in Texas, there are trolls among us. And they are everywhere.
They are your local business owners. They are CEOs. They are your spouses, your grandparents, and your children’s teachers. But online, they wear different masks. They adopt new identities. They risk everything—and for what, exactly? Go ahead. Check your loved ones’ internet search histories. You’ll find a pattern that some might consider troubling.
Longhorn fans on Aggie message boards.
Aggies on a website called
Orangebloods.
“I’m not going to lie,” one Texas A&M alum told me. “During the peak of the season, it could be fourteen hours a week that I spend on those sites.” (This source, along with many of the other fanatics interviewed for this story, asked to remain anonymous. Some wished to avoid scrutiny at work, some didn’t want to hear about it at home, and others said that blowing their identities could risk their ability to troll rival message boards.)
“Here I am in my forties,” said one Longhorn. “I’m a company president, and I just cannot get enough of trolling Aggies. I love it. It’s my favorite thing to laugh at. It just brings me joy.”
Everyone knows that the UT-Texas A&M rivalry hasn’t been settled on the football field since 2011. But online, particularly on team-specific sites like Orangebloods and
TexAgs, the flames of the feud have remained ignited for more than a decade. Not once have the embers gone cold.
“Sometimes, when you grow apart, you grow together,” said a Longhorn whose monthly subscription fees to team websites (three for UT, one for A&M) total $47. “Other times, the hatred grows with the distance between you. That’s what happened here. The rivalry is probably stronger today than it’s ever been in my lifetime.”
For the uninitiated, these websites might be most easily understood as message boards where Longhorn and Aggie die-hards discuss topics ranging from the team’s recent performance to restaurant recommendations. But they’re more than just online forums. After Texas or A&M students graduate, these are the communities in which they gather to celebrate their alma maters. So yes, there’s plenty of sophomoric humor. But over the past decade, these websites have transformed into big business—and sophisticated media operations.
“Some of these websites have three, four, or even five beat writers covering the team,” said Bobby Burton, an industry veteran who has worked at the college recruiting websites Rivals,
247 Sports, and
On3, and is now the publisher of
On Texas Football. “That’s more than the
Austin American-Statesman has.”
Burton calls the sites “virtual barstools,” and Texans visit these internet watering holes just as much as the real ones. TexAgs boasts one million daily page views. Orangebloods users have posted more than seven million comments on its message boards since 2001. Both sites employ editorial teams who attend press conferences and often break news. They’ve turned college football recruiting, especially, into a legitimate industry, with parent sites like Rivals (the network of team websites that hosts Orangebloods) sold to Yahoo years ago for a
reported $100 million. Access to the message boards and exclusive articles is restricted behind a paywall, and fans fork over anywhere from $50 to $275 a year for subscriptions. In some cases, those subscribers happen to be powerful business and government leaders. Over on TexAgs, a poster known as “Ranger65” was revealed to be former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. UT president Jay Hartzell, for his part, is known to scroll through Orangebloods. If this is all news to you, ask any serious college football fan in your life which board they read; they’ll know what you mean.
“It’s from all walks of life,” said Burton. “And the commonality that brings them together is Texas football or Aggie football. I mean, you could have the CEO of a bank talking to a guy that works as a valet, and guess what? Neither one of them are worried about what they do for a living. They’re worried about if the Longhorns are going to have a quarterback that can get it done.”
Online, each fan base has developed inside jokes and shorthand. On TexAgs, Longhorns are “whorns” or “sips” (as in, fancy-pants “tea sippers”). Over and over, you hear the word “entitled.” When I asked one Longhorn if those insults poked any buttons, he laughed. “That’s cute,” he said.
On Orangebloods, A&M is taunted as UT’s “little brother” and is almost exclusively referred to as “aggy,” always singular, always intentionally misspelled with a ‘y,’ and always lowercase. Remarked one Aggie, “There are guys on our side that have MBAs and PhDs, and they let ‘little brother’ and lowercase ‘aggy’ drive them bonkers.” One Orangebloods poster recently objected to the “aggy” nickname, saying that the lack of respect was behavior more befitting of the Aggies themselves. A user named “Jefferyb31” responded: “Clearly you come from an aggy family or are married to an aggy and are either an aggy troll or a self-hating Longhorn fan who secretly roots for those sheep humpers.”
While the team-centric websites are mostly filled with their corresponding fans, there are scores of more nefarious actors lurking deep in the comments—poking, prodding, stoking the flames. These are the trolls: the Aggie fans who subscribe to the Longhorn sites and vice versa, partially to laugh when things go wrong and partially to lob grenades and watch the wreckage. “It’s an art form,” said one of these chaos agents. “A subtle art form.”
Talk to Aggies who have crossed enemy lines, and you’ll hear similar reports. Horns fans are “cocky” and “arrogant.” They brag about Texas’s all-time accomplishments but get quiet when confronted with the program’s more recent shortcomings. They’re hypocrites who claim the Aggies can only get a good recruiting class if they buy one—and then go and park Lamborghinis outside the football complex during a recruiting weekend.
I asked a
Texas Ex to describe the A&M commenters on TexAgs. They replied with a short dissertation on how the other side lives. “TexAgs is this bastion of hardcore, die-hard Aggies, and you’ve got two different sets within that,” the Longhorn explained. “You’ve got the ‘sunshine pumpers,’ which are the fans who think every week they’re going to win by fifty, the coach is the greatest to ever live, the quarterback is going to win the Heisman, and are perpetually believing the Aggies are on the cusp of greatness. And it never, obviously, happens. Then, you have the ‘pot bangers.’ That’s the other side of the coin. Those are the Aggies that have what’s called ‘battered Aggie syndrome.’ Everyone knows about that—‘B.A.S.’ They’re so sick of falling on their faces that they’ve just come to terms that failure is inevitable.” The Longhorn laughed. “It’s like catnip for me.”
“When you boil it down,” said a former Aggie track athlete who now lives in North Carolina, “you truly just have two high-class, high-powered educational institutions that put out a great product in the workforce, in athletics, and in the world. I mean, both schools have changed the world for the better. But you get online, and you’d think you had two damn Neanderthals going at it.”
Part of the fun is the witch hunt, sniffing out the authentic fans and the posers, a way to prove that you know the enemy so well that you could never be fooled by a fake. Although sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between a poster who’s trolling and one who’s just a disgruntled fan worked up after a disappointing game. After all, anybody could be on the other side of that screen. If an imposter gets caught, the website moderators might ban their account—which often just means the troll needs to create a new email and start over again.
“Somebody will post something like, ‘aggy actually has a decent team this year, and I think we should be worried about them.’ Pretty innocuous stuff,” said one Longhorn. “But if it’s even slightly positive about A&M, people come after them, asking moderators to ban them, because they think, ‘How could you be on here and say something nice about the Aggies unless you
are an Aggie?’ ”
Now is the part of the story where we should expand the scope and let some air out of the balloon by saying something like, “It’s all in good fun!” But that would be a lie. The animosity on these sites is
not expressed in good fun. It’s not just another joke. There is actual bad blood between the two schools and fan bases, and the hardcore types who congregate online do so to revel in the other side’s failure. “It’s
almost friendly,” one Aggie poster told me, “but not quite.”
Over the past thirteen years without a football game, the Longhorns and Aggies might have drifted apart. Their mutual enmity could have dissipated. Both sides’ schadenfreude might have given way to grudging respect for the other. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Aggies and Longhorns have spent more than a decade talking trash. They got clever; they twisted the knife; they sometimes got downright mean. Often, it was about recruiting battles over top high school talent. Other times it was just laughing at their rivals’ expense about poor coaching hires (
Tom Herman?
Kevin Sumlin? Take your pick), bone-headed losses (Texas losing to Kansas and A&M losing to Appalachian State are frequent points of emphasis), and low-hanging fruit (
Texas is back!
Jimbo Fisher’s buyout!). Some might call it bad sportsmanship. Those who understand call it
gamesmanship.
On the phone this month, after listing all the ways Longhorn fans drive him crazy, an Aggie took a breath. “Man,” the Aggie said, “wouldn’t life just be so dull, though, if we all pretended like it didn’t matter?”
So when you confront your husband, or when you check the credit card bill and see that your Longhorn daughter purchased an annual subscription to TexAgs, or when you peek into your boss’s office and see that their computer isn’t
actually open to emails—don’t be mad. Don’t feel betrayed. These keyboard warriors are wasting neither time nor energy. They’re doing a public service. They’ve kept the rivalry alive when the football teams could not. And now that the game is back, we all will reap the rewards of their efforts. Thanks to the battered Aggies and tea-sipping Longhorns who have logged on every day to do battle in cyberspace, the rivalry remains even richer for the rest of us.
