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The Texas Longhorns have fallen off a bit from their typical baseball standards in 2024, posting a 22-16 mark and currently standing far from Top 25 consideration.
Baseball America last listed the Longhorns as a three-seed in their NCAA regional predictions, and that was before an embarrassing midweek loss to sister school UTRGV.
Texas more closely resembled the Bad News Bears in that defeat as opposed to the program that’s made more College World Series appearances than any other school in the country.
Things got so bad that the social media team went “dark” for the second half of the matchup!
The ‘Horns fell behind early thanks to a solo HR from UTRGV in its first at-bat. They tied things up with a return shot in the bottom half of the frame, though, to tie the game at 1-1.
From there, it was all Vaqueros.
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley scored the next 14 runs in the ballgame to blow the doors off their typical “big brother.” After going up 15-1 through five and a half innings, they cruised to a 17-9 victory.
Texas pitching struggled, with 10 Longhorn arms combining to plunk nine batters, walk 11 more, and throw three wild pitches. No pitcher completed two innings of work before being replaced, and the Vaqueros scored those 17 runs on just 11 hits.
It was UTRGV’s first win over the Longhorns since 1971, and the first in Austin since 1968.
If you’d been following along on UT’s social media feed, though, you might not have gotten the full story.
Updates could be found following each inning up until the bottom of the sixth. At 10:29PM, the feed posted a 15-7 score update after the Longhorns plated six runs to cut the gap and save them from being 10-run ruled.
From there, silence.
No one knew what happened in the final three frames as the social media team embarrassingly stopped tweeting about the contest. Over an hour passed before, at 11:38PM, the final score was posted.
The Vaqueros, meanwhile, are reveling in the accomplishment. Shortly after landing the historic win, the school offered a celebratory ticket package for its upcoming home series where the first 1,000 attendees will receive “We Beat Texas” t-shirts.
What a win for UTRGV!