Remarkably, this is first time in three-plus years of blogging that I have ever made a post devoted entirely to Texas A&M football. And it comes after perhaps the worst loss of my being a Texas Aggie football fan. Twenty-point losses to the Baylor Bears are a good time to get philosophical about the fortunes of a football team, which is where this post has its genesis. I started thinking about the likelihood that, after a certifiably abysmal start, Mike Sherman will end up being a good Aggie football coach. I then started thinking about the fact that, according to the Aggie faithful, R. C. Slocum became a bad coach at roughly the same time that Mack Brown started coaching at Texas, or at least at the time when his recruits started playing at Texas.
Which raises an interesting question: which coaching change would most benefit Texas A&M, replacing an underperforming coach in College Station or replacing a legend-in-the-making in Austin? Does Texas being good make it less likely that A&M will be good?
I compiled the yearly winning percentages for A&M and Texas over the last 100 years. The correlation coefficient between those two sets of data is -0.262. (First off, a couple caveats. Doing any kind of statistical analysis using only correlation is dubious at best. Thankfully, none of the two people who read this blog are statisticians. And all of the correlations mentioned in this post are what scientists call "weak". The strongest correlation you can have is 1 or -1, and nothing mentioned here gets close to that. Still, I think some of the relationiships I am about to describe are real; it's just that there are far too many factors that affect a team's success, most of them internal.)
This negative correlation means that when Texas has a relatively high winning percentage, Texas A&M is more likely to have a relatively low winning percentage. In other words, it's more likely that Texas is good and A&M is bad (or vice versa) than that both of them are good. In 2004, when the two teams played the day after Thanksgiving in Austin, it was only something like the fifth time that both had been ranked. Kind of surprising until you consider that the teams have been good at different times.
But of course there is going to be a not very strong negative correlation between the two teams' success---they play each other once a year, right? So for each team, roughly 8% of its games will be played in a zero-sum environment---only one can win. To test that, I took a couple other teams that A&M has played every year. A&M and Baylor have a correlation of 0.066. That's a much weaker correlation, and it's not even negative. The next team I looked at was TCU. (Texas Tech, the only remaining team that has been in both the Southwest Conference and Big 12, started playing football in 1925, so TCU has actually played more against the Aggies in the last century.) TCU's correlation with A&M is -0.058, another near-zero correlation.
What about other rivalries? It would make sense that when one rival starts winning, he would get access to better recruits and more money, fostering an imbalance of power, at least for a little while. Michigan and Ohio State have a correlation of -0.073, another remarkably weak correlation. Army and Navy have a correlation of positive 0.294. This sort of makes sense. Both were good in the first half of the century and bad in the second half, when superconferences took over from Notre Dame, the Ivy League, and the military academies.
If access to recruits is a factor in the relative fortunes of two rivals, then you would expect in-state rivals to have a stronger inverse relationship than other rivals because there is a bigger overlap in recruiting territory. Auburn and Alabama have a correlation of -0.175, which is getting there. UCLA and Southern Cal, who have met fewer than 90 times, have a correlation of -.104. Now we're getting somewhere, perhaps.
So maybe there is something to the idea that it's tough for rivals to be good at the same time, especially when they are in close proximity. If that's the case, then it's probably the case that the historically dominant school has an upper hand in determining who will be successful. Darrel Royal coached for 20 years, and Texas A&M had a winning record in just 5 of those years (4 of which were his first year and his final three). The Aggies started the Mack Brown era by twice finishing the year in the top 25. Since then--you guessed it, zero times in nine tries (I'm counting us outside the top 25 in 2008, which is not going out on too much of a limb). So as the boosters are passing the hat around to buy out Mike Sherman, they might think they're doing some good. And they might actually be. But it could be that the key to success at A&M lies more than we realize in waiting out the situation in Austin.
