This article was written by Mark J. Burns and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.
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“I might fire you for it.”
Those might be the last words uttered to me by Sport & State founder Clay Travis.
Hey, I didn’t choose the UT debate. The UT debate chose me. And as the resident Big Ten alumnus on the editorial team at the Next Great Sports Media Company, it’s my unbiased duty to set the record straight.
In case you need a reminder, the ‘Battle of the UTs’ is Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn. — at least that’s what the ABC/ESPN marketing apparatus tells me as the Longhorns play the Volunteers at Neyland Stadium.
Time to find out who the real UT is 😏
We’ll see you in Knoxville on Saturday for a showdown between Texas and Tennessee! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/WiD1PRelNR
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) September 20, 2026
It’s also the return of ESPN sideline reporter Holly Rowe as she reunites with Texas football, head coach Steve Sarkisian, and quarterback Arch Manning following the highly-publicized viral postgame incident from two weeks ago in Austin.
So, it took me 22 years of livin’ — yes, l-i-v-i-n, like my friend Matthew McConaughey said in the 1993 classic Dazed and Confused — to realize there was even such a thing as a UT debate. Maybe you already know where I’m going here.
You can then appreciate the horror on my face when I walked into my first year of law school in Nashville (that’s a column for a different day), a University of Michigan graduate in the fertile land of the Southeastern Conference, when some classmates threw me for a loop.
That was 15 years ago, so the details are naturally a bit fuzzy, but the gist of the matter is this — the consensus in my 1L class at Belmont Law, which was filled with more native Tennesseans than I ever had been in a room with at one time, had big feelings about the real UT being, dare I say, Tennessee.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Mark, have you ever heard of The Alamo? The Volunteers? Davy Crockett? (Go buy your Crocket Coffee, Sport & State readers).
If it wasn’t for The Volunteers, Texas very well might not have secured its future independence from Mexico, you Midwesterner.
Yes, I’m a history major. I recognize the importance of The Volunteers and their service to our country, but we’re not in the 1800s anymore.
Reminder that the school originally known as Blount College, then East Tennessee College, then East Tennessee University only changed their name to University of Tennessee after Texas congress named the state school the University of Texas
Tennessee has a history of copying UT pic.twitter.com/REVpsQUI92
— Nash (@NashTalksTexas) May 8, 2026
And here’s where our history lesson takes a bit of a turn. Texas first federally registered the UT logo in 1983, with a first use cited all the way back in 1906 — that seems like a pretty important statistic for you to know in this “debate.”
It was multiple years before a future legal dispute between the Longhorns and Volunteers resulted in a shared use of the moniker for commercial purposes both east and west of the Mississippi River.
In other words, the Texas Board of Regents didn’t want to aimlessly spend money on what could have been a lengthy court case, and instead, decided to settle.
So, there’s an ability for both schools to use the UT mark. Sure, that’s a fact, but this is a debate, and there’s no ties in our debates at Sport & State.
Fight Over UT
If you let me, I’m going to channel my inner Darren Rovell for a moment here.
Where you stack up nationally as a college football program, and more broadly as an athletic department, matters to see who can lay claim, once and for all, to the title of the real UT.
In 2025, Texas ranked as the No. 1 most valuable collegiate athletic program in the country at nearly $1.5 billion, with Tennessee trailing at couple spots behind at No. 7.
College sports programs aren’t just about wins and losses — they’re billion-dollar brands powered by media rights, fan demand, and scale.
So how do you measure what they’re really worth?@AD_University and @CNBC present 2025’s most valuable college athletic programs: pic.twitter.com/JfZ9edia2z
— Jason Belzer (@JasonBelzer) December 19, 2025
Brand value is only part of the equation, though — so is your school’s reach and notoriety beyond its city and state limits.
National and global brand recognition matter. Perception matters.
I’ve lived in nine states, from the heart of Big Ten country in Illinois and Michigan to the middle of SEC with Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, to the college football desert of Washington, D.C., New York, and New Jersey.
I’ve traveled far and wide, so I like to think I’ve seen some things and been to some places.
Have you ever seen Tennessee apparel in London, São Paulo, and Lisbon? Probably not.
But I’ve seen Texas hats and t-shirts in those three cities — a truly global brand, some might say, much like my still undefeated Wolverines.
Random sports sightings over the past week in Lisbon and southern Portugal:
– Chicago Bulls is by far the No. 1 jersey I’ve seen from the Big 4 in the U.S., followed by the Los Angeles Lakers
– NBA apparel in general has dominated
– There’s this guy named Messi everywhere?…
— Mark J. Burns (@markjburns88) July 6, 2025
At the end of the day here, perception is reality.
I even asked LLM ChatGPT, “What college football team is commonly referred to as UT?” It spit out, “Most commonly, UT refers to the University of Texas at Austin (Texas Longhorns).”
Maybe Chat was a biased Longhorn supporter, huh?
Let’s go to Google Gemini.
The LLM responded to the same query, stating, “The ‘UT’ acronym usually refers to Texas, primarily due to the program’s massive global brand presence and financial powerhouse status.”
Heck, I asked my wife, who is from Brazil and more familiar with futebol than football, what college sports program comes to mind when she hears the two-letter abbreviation, UT?
You guessed it, Texas. Need I say more? You want me to tell my wife she’s wrong?
Gotta post this before some Vol says they’re the “real UT” again #ThisIsTexas #HookEm pic.twitter.com/xslAWbOsha
— Kyle Umlang (@kyleumlang) September 21, 2026
Tennessee fans, at least you’re not South Carolina calling yourself USC. My apologies for the unintended ricochet shot, Gamecocks, but facts are facts. That’s an egregious error of epic proportions.
You might have more football national titles (6 to 4), but the Longhorns have more all-time wins and Heisman Trophy winners. Head-to-head, Texas also holds a narrow 2-1 all-time series lead.
Maybe I’ve ruffled some feathers in the last 800-plus words?
Speaking of Heisman, perhaps you’re still salty that Michigan legend Charles Woodson beat out quarterback Peyton Manning for the award in 1997? And for that, I do not apologize.
I’ll throw you a bone, Vols faithful. Within state borders, I guess you can claim the UT moniker but beyond the The Volunteer State, that’s a right deserved for the real UT.
As for my boss’s text message earlier this week…
If this is the last hurrah, it’s been a heckuva monthlong run at Sport & State.
Clay, thanks for the opportunity to return to sports media.
And for (possibly) my final words, ‘Hook em.’
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