Saturday’s Dr Pepper Big 12 Championship game will be the 1,369th official game in the history of the University of Texas football program. The very first out of all those games took place 130 years ago today.
A win on Saturday would give the Longhorns their 27th outright conference title, and possibly put them in position to gain a spot in the College Football Playoff. But long before the program’s first conference title, the four claimed national championships, the many All-Americans and hundreds of players sent to the professional football ranks, three decades before the construction of Texas Memorial Stadium, over a decade before the legalization of the forward pass, and even before the adoption of the “Longhorn” nickname itself, UT football’s history began in earnest on Thanksgiving Day in 1893 when a dozen or so young men, most of whom were new to organized football, took on a team of older and more experienced men from the Dallas Athletic Club.