When Texas A&M University’s move to the Southeastern Conference finally became official the evening of Sunday, September 25, 2011, Gene Stallings was at home with his wife Ruth Ann at their ranch north of Paris, Texas.

Both had been born and raised in the Paris area.

Stallings’ “Hike-A-Way Ranch,” honors both the sport in which he had spent most of his life, as well as a favorite family pastime.

“‘Hike,’” as Stalling reminds visitors, “is what the quarterback says to begin each play. The word also refers to something I’ve spent a lot of time doing with my children and grandchildren through the woods and pastures on this property.

“I think I’ve walked every inch of the place,” he adds, “and I have the arrowhead collection to prove it.”

Many call Gene Stallings the single most influential figure in steering Texas A&M toward membership in the Southeastern Conference, the most prestigious sporting affiliation of universities in the country.

With close ties both to Texas A&M and the SEC, Stalling was uniquely qualified to weigh in on a matter which, for many, took on nearly life-and-death proportions.

Stallings both played and coached football for the Aggies. As a player in the ‘50s, he was a “Junction Boy.” As head coach, he led the A&M program from 1965 to 1971. 

Stallings also spent seven years as head coach at the University of Alabama. Under his watch, the Crimson Tide won a national championship in 1992.

In between those two college coaching stints, Stallings won a Super bowl title as an assistant coach with the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys.

If anyone knows what it takes to put together a winning football program, it’s Gene Stallings.

In 1967, at the age of 32 and in just his third season as a head coach, Stallings guided Texas A&M to its first Southwest Conference championship in more than a decade. In that year’s season-ending Cotton Bowl Classic played in Dallas on New Year’s Day, Stalling’s Aggies upset an eighth-ranked Alabama team which had won the Associated Press national championship just two years before.

On that day, the student got the best of “The Bear.”

Paul “Bear” Bryant won a total of six national championships as head football coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. But before he became a legend in the Southeastern Conference, Bryant spent four years in charge of the football program at Texas A&M. It was Bryant, preparing for his first season as head coach of the Aggies, who infamously took his team into the Texas Hill Country for preseason workouts in the late summer of 1954.

There, on A&M’s adjunct campus in Junction, Bryant put his charges through a ten-day stretch of torturous practices and drills. In doing so, he looked to determine which of his players were willing to pay the price he demanded to achieve success.

More left the camp than finished it.

Gene Stallings was among those who “survived.”

“Quitting never entered my mind,” Stallings says of the experience, “although, there were times I would have liked to have died.”

The Aggies’ reward for their Junction experience: a 1-9 record for that 1954 season.

In another two years, though, the “Junction Boys” were champions of the Southwest Conference, a first for A&M since the three consecutive league crowns–and national championship–won by Coach Homer Norton from 1939 to 1941.

Following the 1957 season, in which John David Crow became A&M’s first Heisman Trophy winner, Bryant resigned to become head coach at Alabama, his alma mater.

With Stalling’s playing eligibility at an end, Bryant hired him to be a member of his first Alabama coaching staff.

That history made the ’68 Cotton Bowl an intriguing encounter. And, as the final gun sounded ending the game and the two head coaches trotted toward the center of the field, a new chapter in the saga of their enduring football friendship was written.  As Stallings approached his mentor, Bryant bypassed the traditional postgame handshake, instead lifting Stallings high into the air in what could only be described–for obvious reasons–as a “Bear” hug.

That game, it would seem fitting to suggest, and that moment of mutual respect and shared affection between two extraordinary men, marked the beginning of a nearly half-century journey which would end with Texas A&M following Bear Bryant’s lead into the ranks of the SEC.

After his eventual retirement from coaching, Gene Stallings sat on the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, from 2005 until 2011. He was appointed as an “east-Texas” representative by then-Texas-governor Rick Perry a fellow former student at the System flagship.

“The Board of Regents main responsibility,” Stallings says today, “is to hire presidents.”

Eleven schools, including the A&M flagship in College Station, make up the System’s roster of institutions, thus there is frequent need to find a new man or woman to put in charge on a System campus.

“We do not hire coaches.” Stallings adds, emphatic in his words. “We don't run athletic departments. We hire presidents that run our schools.”

The regents do though, on a regular basis, weigh in on matters important to the System as a whole or, when the need arrises, its individual institutions.

Such was the significance of the discourse pertaining to Texas A&M’s continued affiliation with the Big 12 Conference in 2010 that the Regents opted to monitor the situation closely. As an influential and respected member on that board, Stallings had a ringside seat to the proceedings.

Most troubling to Stallings at the time–and to many others in Aggieland and beyond–was the prospect that soon “you could turn on the television 24 hours a day and find something about the University of Texas” on the ESPN cable network’s proposed Longhorn Network. 

As fans of college football will recall, 2010 marked a crossroads for the sport. Television-rights fees to broadcast college games had skyrocketed,  thanks in large part to the enormous investment ESPN was making in the game. Major conferences–soon to be labeled the “Power 5”–were looking to expand membership to increase their broadcast footprints, thus increasing their financial value to television executives. More prospective viewers meant larger sums of money for exclusive rights to televised coverage of games.

The Big 12 Conference, of which A&M had been a member since 1994, suffered two major defections as a result of the game of musical chairs which went along with conference realignment. Perennial power Nebraska moved to the Big 10, and the University of Colorado left the league to join the Pac-10. The impending Longhorn Network deal between the University of Texas and ESPN played a part in both school’s decisions. The University of Texas had no intention of sharing revenues generated by its own network, thus creating a potential economic imbalance within the Big 12.

The “arms race” that big-time college football had become centered squarely on money in the bank.

With the Big 12 thus mired in both uncertainty and resentment, the conference looked ripe for further defections, and the Southeastern Conference–eager to broaden its geographic scope–saw a golden opportunity.

Or rather, one clad in maroon and white.

“I knew something about the Southeastern Conference,” Stallings says of the role he played in steering Texas A&M toward the SEC. “I still had a good relationship with a lot of coaches there, as well as with the commissioner’s office. I would think those relationships certainly didn’t hurt our chances of getting into the league.”

According to Regent Phil Adams, another of Stallings key contributions in A&M’s move to the SEC was his vocal opposition to a proposed alternative alignment with the Pac-10.

“The Regents had been informally discussing conference affiliation for some time,” Adams says. “When Nebraska and Colorado left the Big 12, things became a mess. We weren’t sure the Big 12 would last and we needed to consider other options.”

As it turned out, administrators on the A&M flagship campus had already initiated discussions with the Pac 10. When those talks came to the attention of the Regents, typically a collection of Aggie alumni who have succeeded in their post-graduate careers, a vocal subset of the board let their opinions be known.  

“Coach Stallings was dead-set against going to the Pac-10,” says Adams, who played football for Stallings at A&M in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “He thought that was a terrible idea, and in time, most of us on the Board of Regents agreed with him.”

Stallings reasoning, according to Adams, was sound.

“We had nothing in common with the schools out west,” Adams says. “As Coach pointed out, the idea of West Coast night games getting started at 10 o’clock back here in Texas wasn’t exactly fan friendly.

“Plus, the thought of the ‘Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band’ playing at halftime of a game in Berkeley, California, was something we just couldn’t imagine ever happening.”

As the System board eventually discovered, the allure of affiliation with other Pac-10 schools had already captured the interest of A&M President R. Bowen Loftin and Athletic Director Bill Byrne. That “siren’s song” as it turned out had come, not from the Cal or Stanford or USC campuses of the far west, but from within the State of Texas itself. University of Texas president Bill Powers was a Berkeley graduate and he felt the Pac-10 was a perfect home for his school and its football team. And, he had convinced Loftin the Pac-10 was the right place for Texas A&M, too.

By the summer of 2011, according to Dr. Richard Box, the former chairman of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, Texas’s largest Big 12 schools had gotten a little too cozy with their West Coast suitors.

“There were rumors flying all over the place at the time,” Box says today.  “Most of what we were hearing was that Texas was going to take the lead in orchestrating A&M’s move to the Pac-10, and that didn’t sit well with most of us on the board.”

For more than 80 years to that point, Texas A&M had participated in intercollegiate athletics alongside the University of Texas, mostly as members of the Southwest Conference. For much of its existence, that league was comprised of eight Texas schools and the University of Arkansas.

A&M’s intrastate football rivalry with the University of Texas goes back even farther. The schools first clashed on the gridiron in 1894.  A&M failed to score in the first eight tilts with Texas. Finally, in 1902, the Aggies posted their first win in the series, beating the Longhorns by an 11-0 score.

A&M’s status as an early underdog to its intrastate rival transcended the outcome of football games. Mandated by the state’s original constitution, what became the University of Texas, held the favor of state policymakers from the time it opened its doors down the street from the state capitol in Austin. While the land-grant school known as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas mostly attracted young white males from the rural regions of the state, UT’s student body was seen as more diverse and more affluent.

Aggies coined the term “tea-sip” to belittle the highbrow ways of their collegiate counterparts. Still today, one of A&M’s most fervent rallying cries beseeches, “Farmers, fight!”

By 2011, the Aggies were ready to do just that to separate themselves from the long shadow of the Longhorns and their impending football network. Thus, did the unthinkable became a possibility: the end of the storied football rivalry between Texas A&M and Texas.

In a move portending A&M’s own exodus to the SEC, Arkansas realigned itself with the Southeastern Conference in 1990. Four years later, the Southwest Conference completely imploded thanks in large part to a legion of football recruiting scandals within many of the league’s elite programs. The Big Eight conference assimilated the four top schools from Texas– UT, A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor–to form the Big 12 Conference.

The expanded league manifest itself into two divisions of play. Texas, a newcomer, assumed unspoken authority over its new domain, thanks in large part to the immense and disproportionate size of its athletic department budget, at least compared to most of its other league rivals. The likelihood the Longhorn Network would widen the financial disparity between Texas and the other 11 Big 12 schools led both Nebraska and Colorado to seek other affiliations.

Forced to scramble to avert wholesale mutiny, the Big 12 invited TCU, from the old Southwest Conference, and West Virginia, far removed from the league’s traditional geographic footprint, to fill the void. That salvaged the Big 12’s short-term viability, but within the swirling storm of college football’s new paradigm, the league’s foundation was anything but solid.

Having already lured one Big 12 school into its midst, the Pac 12–renamed with the addition of Colorado and Utah to its ranks–set its sites on further expansion. The goal was four new schools to create a Pac-16 “super-conference,” and the Big 12 appeared to be fertile grounds toward achieving that objective. Strong overtures were made to Texas, and UT listened eagerly, thanks in part to Powers’ own west-coast academic pedigree.

As a member of the Big 12, UT had originally convinced the conference to base the division of television revenues on the number of TV appearances that each school made. In leagues like the Southeastern Conference and the Pac-12, television revenues were distributed equally among schools.

As one of the “have’s” in the Big 12–a winning program popular among a large segment of TV viewers–UT insisted on unbalanced revenue sharing. This ensured that lesser programs like Kansas, Iowa State, and Missouri got a smaller piece of the financial pie, thus creating the likelihood they would remain among the “lesser.”

With the Big 12 in a state of flux, the Pac-12 seemed like a logical destination for Texas. Among power-brokers and influencers within the Lone Star State, it was unimaginable that Texas A&M wouldn’t follow Texas wherever the Longhorns might go. Yet among those sitting on the A&M System Board of Regents, a west-coast pilgrimage was far from preordained.

Not only were disparate time zones and cultural leanings at issue, Aggieland had also grown weary of constantly playing second fiddle to the Longhorns.

Under the chairmanship of Richard Box, the A&M regents began trying to make sense of the rumors and speculation swirling around their flagship’s athletic program.

“We knew our athletic director at the time, Bill Byrne, was holding meetings with his counterpart at Texas, Deloss Dodds,” says Box. “We had a board meeting scheduled for July 21, 2011, and I asked President Loftin, to make sure that both he and Byrne were at that meeting.”

“No problem, we’ll be there,” was Loftin’s reply, according to Box.

On the day of the meeting, the A&M president showed up alone.

“Where the hell is Byrne?” Box inquired, confused and concerned.

“He’s going to join the meeting via conference call,” Loftin responded.

“From where???” Box says he was incredulous at the appearance of insubordination.

According to Box, Loftin answered, “He’s on a fishing trip in Alaska with Larry Scott.”

Scott was and remains commissioner of the Pac-12. The fact Byrne was with Scott suggested one of two things to Box: The importance of the meeting-at-hand had not been appropriately communicated to Byrne, or the university president and his athletic director had plans they weren’t yet sharing with others.

Loftin, to that point, had been the media’s point person on the matter of A&M potentially changing conference affiliation. But while the regents had strong doubts about the Pac-12, thanks to Stallings’ urgings before leaving the board, Loftin and Byrne seemed headed in a very different direction.

Something was obviously amiss.

“I wanted to fire both of them on the spot,” Box says of his reaction to Byrne’s absence from the meeting.

With a clearer picture of the mutiny at hand by the A&M flagship’s top leadership, the regents decided it would be necessary for them to play a more active role as realignment talks moved forward. For all practical purposes, Byrne was completely removed from that equation following the July 21 meeting.

Ten days later, Box; Loftin; regents Jim Schwertner, Cliff Thomas, and Jim Wilson; and A&M System legal counsel Scott Kelly, boarded Schwertner’s private plane for a secret trip to New Orleans to meet with then Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive.

So secret was the mission that Schwertner piloted the plane and Box served as his co-pilot. Both men possessed extensive aviation experience, and neither was interested in bringing aboard an outside party to fly the group to the Crescent City.

“Jim has more hours than most airline pilots,” Box offers in recounting the story of that trip.

The meeting, held at the Million Air fixed-based operations facility located within the confines of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, determined many of the details of the agreement ultimately put into place between Texas A&M and the Southeastern Conference.

“The regents weren’t aware of this at the time,” Box says, “but SEC Commissioner Mike Slive wanted Texas A&M as much or more than we wanted his league. The Texas television markets we brought to the table nearly doubled the SEC’s number of TV households.

“In the two hours we were in New Orleans,” Box adds, “we had a great meeting and it was obvious that the chemistry between our two parties was perfect.”

Following the New Orleans meeting, the die was cast, but getting to the September 25 announcement date that A&M would be joining the SEC was fraught with challenges, misinformation, and bad blood.

When word that the SEC courtship of A&M had turned serious, cries of doom and despair echoed from every corner of the Lone Star State.

Baylor president Kenneth Starr–the former prosecutor in the impeachment proceedings of President Bill Clinton–put forward the total demise of the Big 12 if A&M “went rogue”. Starr threatened to sue the SEC commissioner’s office if further action on the matter took place. Jim Schwertner then suggested the regents enter into an indemnity agreement releasing the SEC of legal responsibility, effectively negating Starr’s legal maneuvering.

The biggest blowback from the speculation about A&M’s move to the SEC came, not unexpectedly, from the University of Texas campus. The outcry from Austin was not only loud but also misleading. An Aggie move to the SEC, Texas administrative officials said, “would kill the Big 12,” making no mention of their previous interest in aligning with the Pac-12.

Other opposing views came from legislators in Austin. Dan Branch, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives from Dallas, was chairman of the House Higher Education Committee at the time. Although he had no direct ties to the school, Branch was known as a staunch UT supporter. When he announced his intent to hold a hearing on A&M’s proposed move, those in Aggieland grew nervous, fearing the public outcry certain to follow might force A&M to abandon its plan.

Just weeks away from becoming chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, John Sharp was technically on the sidelines of the SEC debate when Branch made his move. Still, Sharp was partisan to the Aggie cause and in possession of both an extensive network of contacts in Austin, as well as a proven track record of persuasive political powers.

On vacation at his mountain home in Telluride, Colorado, Sharp pondered the possibilities.

“I knew Dan would rake A&M over the coals about going to the SEC,” Sharp says today. “I thought a good way to convince Dan to leave A&M alone would be to mobilize the vast numbers of Aggie faithful who regularly convened on the message boards of TexAgs.com.“

Sharp’s plan was simple–and perhaps a little devious–but as a former office holder, he understood what constituted a “fair” political fight.

“I gave the folks at TexAgs Dan’s cell number and told them it might be a good idea for their followers to give Dan a call.”

Remnants of several “Hey, Dan Branch” threads are still viewable on the TexAgs website. Still vivid in Sharp’s mind is Branch’s white-flag response to the initiative.

“Dan and I are good friends today,” Sharp says, “but when I released his phone number, he was less than thrilled with me. His cell phone received so many calls he had to put it into the freezer of his refrigerator at home to keep the thing from melting.”

The House Higher Education Committee hearing never took place. No other serious threats or legal actions materialized, and on September 25, 2011, Texas A&M was welcomed into the SEC.

The initial announcement amounted to a post to the SEC website. A&M held its press conference the next day.

From the beginning–perhaps as far back as that fateful day in Dallas when his Aggies shocked the Crimson Tide–Gene Stallings’ gut told him the Southeastern Conference was the right place for Texas A&M to be.

“Even though Gene was no longer on the board, he kept in close contact with some of us,” Schwertner says today. “He was always whispering in our ear, ‘The SEC is the right place for Texas A&M to be.’

“But he was a realist about the move, too. ‘Your boys are going to get their butts beat for the first five or six years in that conference,’ Gene told us over and over. ‘Going to get beat bad.

“‘You need to do it, though, because you’re going to be on TV every weekend and that's going to help in recruiting and eventually you’re going to win a national championship.’”

In 2018, Forbes magazine listed Texas A&M as the most lucrative program in college football. The Longhorn Network may have provided Texas with a steady revenue stream–the original deal, since amended, was worth $300 million over 20 years–but the school’s fortunes in both football and basketball waned in the years after the ESPN agreement was signed. Some have speculated, at least in the early years of the network, that wall-to-wall coverage of Longhorn sports distracted UT coaches from the matter of fielding winning teams.

As for the state of the now defunct A&M-Texas football rivalry, most believe it will be resurrected.

Gene Stallings is cautiously optimistic about the return of the rivalry. After all, he points out, both schools still sing about the game in their respective fight songs.

 “I think A&M would like to play,” Stallings observes. “What I’m less certain about is who will ultimately make the decision to get things going again. Will it be the presidents? The athletic directors? I don’t think it’s for the legislature to decide.

“Maybe the two school’s chancellors will get together and eventually work things out.”