Aggie Hoops Paired With Kansas State in 2021 Big XII / SEC Challenge

The SEC and Big XII revealed the matchups for their annual challenge... and per tradition, Texas A&M was paired with the least exciting opponent they could find.

If you attended A&M during the Big XII days (spoiler alert: I did), you saw a series of regional basketball rivalries flourish under BCG and Turgeon. Annual Big XII South home-and-homes established legitimate bad blood, and that’s been sorely missing from the majority of our schedule in the SEC.

With that in mind, here are our opponents during the eight-year history of the Big XII / SEC Challenge:

• Oklahoma (2013)
• Did not participate (2014)
• Iowa State (2015)
• West Virginia (2016)
• Kansas (2017)
• Kansas State (2018; 2020)
• Oklahoma State (2019)

The only four schools missing from that list? You guessed it — the four schools that share the Lone Star State: Texas, Texas Tech, Baylor, and TCU.

Look, I’m not demanding an annual game against Texas. That’s a battle for another article. But is it really too much to rotate A&M among the Big XII south? Let’s send a Buzz Williams squad to a (post-COVID) rabid sellout in Lubbock and see how they hold up. Let’s play a game against the literal closest major university to our campus. Let’s do something different. Anything. The Oklahoma schools should be the off-year matchup that we begrudgingly settle for. They shouldn’t be the highlight.

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OK, y’all. Rant over. Kansas State isn’t supposed to cause too much trouble this season, so this does provide us a winnable game in a limited non-conference schedule. But man, when you consider the potential opponents... it’s hard to not see this as an opportunity lost.