Atmosphere
A unique attribute is that ticket sales for the game are equally divided between the two schools, and the Sooner and Longhorn fans are split on the 50-yard line. This creates extraordinary game dynamics, because half of the stadium crowd is happy and the other half unhappy, depending on which team is in the lead.
There are three Red River Shootout trophies exchanged based on the outcome of the game. The best known of these is the Golden Hat, which is, appropriately, a gold ten-gallon hat, formerly of bronze. The trophy is kept by the winning school's athletic department until the next year. A newer trophy, the Red River Rivalry trophy, has been exchanged between the two student governments since 2003. The governor of Texas and governor of Oklahoma also exchange the Governors' trophy and often place a bet on the game such as the losing governor having to present a side of beef to the winning governor, who then typically donates the winnings to charity.
Another annual tradition is the running of game balls by the schools' Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs. Each school's ROTC program uses a relay running system to run one game ball all the way from their respective campus to Dallas. Once there, they participate against each other in a football scrimmage, with the winner taking home a rivalry trophy and bragging rights. For both teams, the rivalry is bitterly emotional and territorial in nature relating to the two states' close proximity, past border disputes and economic and cultural differences. Though some feel that Oklahoma recruits heavily in the larger state of Texas, four of their five Heisman winners are from the state of Oklahoma (not to mention Oklahoma resident Troy Aikman who transferred after breaking a leg and also became a Heisman winner).
Read more about this topic: Red River Rivalry
Famous quotes containing the word atmosphere:
“Friendship among nations, as among individuals, calls for constructive efforts to muster the forces of humanity in order that an atmosphere of close understanding and cooperation may be cultivated.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incence exhales from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We must be generously willing to leave for a time the narrow boundaries in which our individual lives are passed ... In this fresh, breezy atmosphere ... we will be surprised to find that many of our familiar old conventional truths look very queer indeed in some of the sudden side lights thrown upon them.”
—Bertha Honore Potter Palmer (1849–1918)