Your Friend said:
The game must go on
The phrase is oddly recoined from this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_show_must_go_onThe concept that there is some minor inconvenience that is preventing the game from being played is downplaying flagrant acts of threats and extortion to get us to stay in the Big 12 including collusion in an effort to prevent us from playing major universities in our own state.
In retrospect their fans missed out on the novelty of playing the only SEC team in Texas and our fans wisely accepted our outcast status with our supporters accepted that status and the majority turned to enjoying the formation of new ties with the potential for the emergence of new rivalries with schools that are more like us and generally have fans that are more like fanatics. All good stuff.
I'm not sure what it means that the game must go on but at first blush it's the sport of college football and at second blush it's actually our team that must go on. Elevating the one annual game to the same status largely exposes the willingness to sacrifice literally everything as long as the one requirement is met.
That's an untenable position going into a negotiation with a weakened opponent who successfully plays any weakness into an advantage. And who took a shared tradition of playing the game on Thanksgiving and turned it into a holiday game for them always in Austin.
We have no shared memories that they haven't shown a willingness to exploit often for naked financial gain. Smart people don't do business with people like that. Southwest Airlines has even been known to book problematic customers with other airlines and convey that rebook to them with an invitation to never book with Southwest again.
That's how we should deal with this though it was politically canny to offer to renew the series "anytime, anywhere" with the implication that there must be a negotiation between peersvto arrange the details. That highlighted the brazen threats and attempt to control the other party that Texas was using. It was disarming.
And the only way to restart the game is as equals. Our former students should demand that and should disdain any fake continuation that doesn't clearly establish that the two sides came to the table as equals and both left satisfied. Anything less is intentionally choosing to be taken advantage of.
There currently is no relationship to "go on" or to support that game going on.