The Texas Longhorns take on the Oklahoma Sooners for the 112th time on Saturday afternoon from the Cotton Bowl in Dallas (3:30 p.m. ET, ESPN). The annual rivalry is timed each year around the famous State Fair of Texas.
Most people refer to Texas-Oklahoma as the Red River Rivalry, but Shootout is still popular, too
And neither of those is the current official name.
Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
The game’s technical name these days is the “AT&T Red River Showdown.”
For the majority of the first 100 years of rivalry’s history, it was the Red River Shootout.
A lot of people still call it that. Google Trends shows it’s still more popular than the current official one, but not quite as popular as the second one:
The Shootout name stuck until 2005, when a corporate sponsor changed the name to the “SBC Red River Rivalry” to avoid the gun violence connotations that “shootout” has. The reaction remains pretty mixed.
After all these changes, some television announcers don’t really know what to call it, either.
Can’t blame em!
The bottom line here is that this is America, and you can really call this game whatever you so please.
Just wanna stick with the traditional Texas-OU or OU-Texas? Go ahead! Let’s be honest, this thing will most likely get a different corporate sponsor every so often, as we pointed out a couple of years ago:
In 10 years, the game will be renamed the Bank of America Red River Meetup, with the Comcast-Netflix Red River Event following 10 years after that. The Facebook Red River Facebook looms in the distance as a warning to us all.
Sure, you can try and keep up with the likely forthcoming changes, but it’s probably just easier to just pick one and roll with it!
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