Boots on the ground for the first UTRGV football game ... ever

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I love the first week of college football season. Since the first Saturday is usually packed from noon until midnight with huge games, I usually try to avoid big road trips. That way, I can park myself on the couch, surrounded by screens.

But this year, there was a game I knew I had to see in person, one that was going to be a bit off the beaten path. I spent the last few days in the Rio Grande Valley to catch the very first UTRGV football game.

This was a not a game with major postseason implications. There were no national pregame TV shows being filmed in the parking lot. I didn’t see any NFL scouts in the press box.

I didn’t go for the football game, exactly. In fact, I’ll spoil it right from the jump. UTRGV beat Sul Ross 66-0, a matchup about as entertaining and competitive as the battle between a bug and a windshield.

But that game was worth braving the South Texas heat. It was worth missing LSU-Clemson and Alabama-FSU. Because what interested me about this game was something much bigger than just football.

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Let’s start at the beginning. What is UTRGV?

If you aren’t from the Rio Grande Valley or a diehard follower of mid-major college baseball, you could be forgiven for not being familiar with the school. UTRGV, or the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is one of the newest colleges in Division I.

In 2013, the University of Texas system consolidated two different schools: the University of Texas at Brownsville (which competed in the NAIA), and the University of Texas-Pan American. If you wander around a UTRGV tailgate or athletic event, chances are, you’ll find somebody still flying a UT-Pan American flag.

Post-merger, UTRGV became a “distributed campus,” meaning there are classrooms and buildings at multiple sites. There’s the main campus in Edinburg, the old campus in Brownsville and research centers all over the Valley (McAllen, South Padre Island, Harlingen and more).

That’s a fitting arrangement. The RGV isn’t a metropolitan area built around one large city. Brownsville is technically the largest city in the region, with roughly 180,000 people. Edinburg and McAllen each have more than 100,000 residents.

“This area used to be a lot more rural, but now, residents don’t always even know what city they live in. We’ve kind of grown into each other,” Edinburg mayor Ramiro Garza Jr. said. And he’s right. Driving across Interstate 2, it can feel like the towns blend into one continuous city.

And that’s just on the American side. UTRGV’s Edinburg campus is only about 20 miles from Mexico, close enough for multiple students and employees to make a daily commute. Right across the border is Reynosa, a city of more than 600,000 people. Just over the line from Brownsville sits Matamoros, a Mexican city of more than 500,000.

Taken as a whole, the entire RGV, as Garza put it, is a multinational metropolitan area of well over 3 million residents. Geographically isolated from the other major population centers in Texas, the RGV proudly sports a unique culture that’s part Mexico, part Texas, very American, and very theirs. Puro 956.

And when it comes to football, that culture starts on Fridays.

Every UTRGV fan and staffer I spoke to all had the same recommendation: If I wanted to really understand how the Valley felt about football, I needed to go to a high school game.

Upon the advice of the locals (and the editors at Dave Campbell’s Texas Football), I decided to catch a Weslaco Panthers game that Friday night, a few highway exits away from my hotel.

I know that high school football is a big deal in much of the country. I’m from Ohio, after all, and started my reporting career covering prep football in the Midwest. The idea of high school football being something of a civic religion isn’t foreign to me. I’m used to big crowds, full press boxes, and the full pageantry of Friday night lights.

But it really is different in Texas.

I wasn’t prepared for the size of Bobby Lackey Stadium, a facility with nearly the capacity of UTRGV’s field. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that I needed to buy a ticket online, with a specific seat number, because the 13,000-seat stadium might sell out. I wasn’t prepared for a video board that was orders of magnitude larger than the screens at many small college stadiums I’ve visited. I wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of sponsored segments, the production value and pageantry of the pregame or just the sheer dang bigness of everything.

But it wasn’t just the big grandstands and loud marching bands. I found myself sitting in a section of downright Ball Knowers as fans, even though those fans were elementary school teachers and marching band dads and grandparents. These were fans who were screaming about blocking assignments.

You had every other small-town community gathering ritual associated with high school football. By the end of the third quarter, my seatmates knew the names of my girls, and I not only learned about their kids, but a general history of prep football in the RGV over the past several years. It was clear that this was a group that loved, and I mean loved, football.

Weslaco beat the crap out of Harlingen, 49-28.

The hope at UTRGV is that football on Fridays (and Sundays) will lead to supporting football on Saturday.

“This is football country,” UTRGV president Dr. Guy Bailey told me. “They love high school football, and they love the Dallas Cowboys. But it isn’t just that. Many people don’t realize that the NFL is the second most popular sport in Mexico. We have college football in Mexico, at places like Monterrey Tech. … I felt that football could be something that really brings the entire RGV together.”

There aren’t many places in the United States that have such a deep love for football but lack college football options. The closest FBS school to the Valley is UTSA, and that’s a good 3.5-hour drive away. The closest football program is Texas A&M Kingsville, a Division II school that is still more than 100 miles away from most of the Valley.

I talked to dozens of fans at the tailgates who had been watching and loving football their entire lives … but had never gone to a college football game before.

School officials believed that the point of starting a team wasn’t just to establish football in a place that didn’t have enough of it … it was also about establishing a football team for the Valley.

Which got me thinking. Bailey isn’t from South Texas. Neither is Chasse Conque, the school’s athletic director. The football coach, Travis Bush, is from the area, but most of his staff, along with other key administrative staffers, are not.

Can this group be the one to build a program that the entire Valley can rally behind?

The answer is going to stick with me for a long time.

“It helps if you've got somebody who has ties in the region, and if you talk to people in the region, they'd love that. But that's not absolutely essential.” Bailey told me.

“What is essential is that you will embrace the region. You'll embrace the culture of the region, and want to be part of it.”

Part of what made Conque an attractive candidate to UTRGV wasn’t his background running a football school (Conque’s last institution, Arkansas Little-Rock, doesn’t have football), but because Bailey thought he had the ability to connect with folks in the Valley.

“His family … they’ve become part of the community,” Bailey said. “They’re involved in everything. You’d think they had lived here all their lives.”

He added: “And that’s really it, isn’t it? Can you involve yourself in the community on their terms? A lot of the people in higher education, we don’t do as great a job with that. When we talk about interacting with the community, we usually mean on our terms. What I’ve tried to do here is meet the community on their terms.”

“We belong to the Rio Grande Valley as an institution.”

So in that sense, starting a college football program at UTRGV isn’t about growing enrollment (UTRGV is growing without football), or about necessarily optimizing revenue, or about chasing prestige. It’s a way to connect to the people in the region on their terms, using something they already love and understand.

It means honoring and recognizing the Hispanic heritage of the region. (UTRGV is one of the largest and most visible Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the country.) It means that campus leaders and coaches need to be visible and participatory in their region.

The Valley is different and unique, like all places. But like all places, it also just wants to be loved and recognized for what it is.

“There’s a lot of pride here, a lot of rich history here…but it’s also an area that I feel is undervalued, underreported, you know?” Garza, the Edinburg mayor, told me. “But we’ve got Fortune [500] companies here. This area can compete with anywhere all over the world.”

And now, it can do it on the football field. Officially, 12,726 people came to Robert and Janet Vackar Stadium on Saturday to watch the Vaqueros, led by former UTSA quarterback Eddie Lee Marburger, himself a product of the Valley. Tickets were sold out days in advance, and school officials told me tickets on the secondary market were going for well into triple digits. (There’s a waiting list to buy season tickets.)

Not every game is going to end in a massive blowout in favor of the home team. There will be recruiting misses and dropped passes in the future, and fans were eventually taste disappointment. Sul Ross, UTRGV’s opening night opponent, is a D-II program that only recently reclassified from Division III. Some of UTRGV’s Southland Conference opponents will likely prove to be much stiffer tests.

But the team doesn’t have to be perfect to be successful. It just needs to belong to the Valley. On its terms.