Former OU Basketball Head Coach Speaks on the Sooners’ Rivalry With Texas

Houston’s basketball head coach, Kelvin Sampson, spent time coaching the Sooners from 1994 to 2006. In that time, he was able to embrace the Sooners’ rich tradition, which includes a deep-rooted rivalry against the Texas Longhorns.

Recently, the Longhorns have been dominating the news cycle. Their basketball head coach, Rodney Terry, had a viral moment where he was telling the UCF Knights not to do the horns down sign, claiming that it was “classless.”

“I’m a big believer in you win the right way, you lose the right way…. You carry yourself the right way,” Terry said after Texas’ loss to UCF. “You don’t go through the handshake line, or prior to getting to the handshake line, and have about six or seven guys putting the horns down. We don’t do that.”

While this dominated the headlines, Sampson spoke on the matter, citing that Texas should embrace the hate rather than react like Terry has.

“The University of Texas has ‘OU sucks’ in their fight song, for God’s sake,” Sampson said on Friday. “Look at their fight song, it says ‘OU sucks.’ I think OU was the one that started the Horns Down.”

The Longhorns are moving from the Big 12 to the SEC along with Oklahoma in 2024, and the rivalry is far from going away. The traditional football game at the Texas State Fair will continue and, though it’s not as solid as Big 12 basketball, they’ll continue to see challenges in basketball. SEC fans are going to be brutal towards Texas, and they’re going to have to be prepared for that.

“In an indirect way, the University of Texas should actually take it as a compliment because they have such a great athletic department,” Sampson continued. “You’ve got to be really, really good for people to hate you.”

Oklahoma fans are always going to throw a horns down any time they see burnt orange or when Texas is mentioned, as is tradition. In return, Texas fans are going to continue singing that OU sucks in their fight song.

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