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Texas Motor Speedway president wants to host a college football game
The Battle at Bristol seemed to go pretty well, so why not hold another college football game at a NASCAR track?
Eddie Gossage, the president of Texas Motor Speedway, was in attendance Sept. 10 when more than 150,000 fans crammed into Bristol Motor Speedway to see Tennessee face Virginia Tech. Now, he told SEC Country, he’s thinking about what it would be like to have 200,000+ for a game at his race track in Fort Worth.
Gossage said the idea of Texas and Oklahoma playing at Texas Motor Speedway came up back in 2002, but the Longhorns were not interested. Gossage knows the history of OU and UT playing at the Cotton Bowl, so he has other matchups in mind, including one longtime rivalry.
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From SEC Country:
Oh, and Gossage isn’t married to a Sooners-Longhorns matchup at his place, knowing their long history with the Cotton Bowl. He’s open to adding SEC flavor and helping renew the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry that died after 118 meetings in 2011. Perhaps a massive payday and the national hype that would surround those programs playing at a race track would be incentive enough to get back together.
“I think everybody that lives in Texas would love to see them play again. It’s a crime they don’t,” Gossage said. “That would be a perfect game for us, because that’s a special one. That was one you always looked forward to. Maybe to revive it, something like this would help.”
Texas and Texas A&M were longtime rivals, but haven’t played since 2011 when the Aggies left the Big 12 for the SEC. This rivalry stems back to 1894 (and was played yearly from 1915-2011) and since its dissolution, there has been plenty of back and forth (bickering, some would say) from both sides about the possibility of it resuming.
So before Gossage’s vision becoming a reality, those two athletic departments would need to get on the same page. With a new athletic director in Scott Woodward at A&M and Steve Patterson out of the picture at UT (Mike Perrin is running things on an interim basis), there seems to be a bit more hope about the rivalry resuming.
Longhorns coach Charlie Strong said in June that the two sides are “trying to work something out.”
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Playing in front of 200,000 people at a racetrack sounds like a pretty cool way to resume a historic rivalry.
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Sam Cooper is a writer for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
