Big 12 Quarterback Picks Texas Longhorns as Dream Opponent

The start of the 2025 college football season is right around the corner, with many programs reporting for fall camp in the coming weeks. Media Days for all Power 4 conferences are in the books, and the sole focus for teams is now on Week 1.

The Texas Longhorns were a hot topic at SEC Media Days a week ago across all three days, but that was not all, as Texas managed to come up at another conference's Media Days.

As the Longhorns were brought up at the Big 12's Media Days in early July, by TCU quarterback Josh Hoover after he was asked by ESPN's Greg McElroy if he could play on the road against anyone, what team would it be, and the Horned Frog's quarterback picked the Longhorns.

“I feel like we’ve always had — last couple years of the Big 12, they just got out of the conference — but there was a rivalry there,” Hoover said. “Playing on the road at Texas is a big one. And that’s where I would want to play.”

The first time the Longhorns and the Horned Frogs matched up dates back all the way to 1897, when the Longhorns scored the first victory of the series. Since then, the rivalry has spanned over 120 years and has been played a total of 94 times in its history, with the Longhorns dominating the all-time series with a record of 65-28-1.

The status of the rivalry shifted after TCU joined the Big 12 in 2012, with the Horned Frogs seeing the most success in the rivalry for the majority of the 2010s and into the early portion of the 2020s, winning eight of the last 12 matchups against Texas.

However, the Longhorns got the last laugh over TCU as the matchup in 2023 was the last time Texas and TCU would play each other as conference rivals, with the Longhorns moving to the SEC after the season. Hoover was the starting quarterback when Texas traveled to Fort Worth in 2023, where he threw for over 300 yards and two touchdowns, and his performance was not enough as Texas left with a 29-26 victory to cap off the long-standing rivalry on a good note.

Now that Texas and TCU are in different conferences, the only likely time both teams could see each other soon would be in the College Football Playoff, especially if the playoff gets expanded from 12 teams. Or a scheduled nonconference matchup was to be made between the teams in the upcoming seasons.