96 Fun Facts About Texas A&M

In which Texas city is Texas A&M's main campus?

College Station took its name from the post office opened beside the railway tracks in 1877 to serve the new college; it did not become a city in its own right until 1938.

What is the official school greeting at Texas A&M?

Howdy is how Aggies are expected to greet one another and, above all, visitors to campus; the university itself admits that nobody knows how the custom began.

What kind of animal is Reveille, Texas A&M's official mascot?

A collie has held the post since Reveille III; by the best-known account the first Reveille was a stray mutt that cadets hit with their car in 1931 and hid in their dorm, until she barked at the bugle call.

What military rank does the mascot Reveille hold at Texas A&M?

Cadet general puts her one diamond above the student who commands the Corps, so a cadet who finds her asleep on his bed is expected to sleep somewhere else.

Where are Texas A&M's deceased Reveille mascots buried?

Outside the north end of Kyle Field, laid to face the scoreboard; when a stadium expansion blocked the view, a small scoreboard was put up by the graves just for the dogs.

Which country star filled Kyle Field in 2024?

George Strait's crowd of 110,905 beat a record the Grateful Dead had held since 1977, and was bigger than any football crowd the 102,733-seat stadium has ever held.

Kyle Field began in 1904 on campus land assigned to Edwin Kyle, a professor of what?

Horticulture lost a plot to football: when the college refused to pay for a ground, Kyle fenced off part of his own teaching land and spent $650 of his own money on a second-hand grandstand.

The 12th Man tradition began in 1922 when student E. King Gill suited up at which game?

The Dixie Classic in Dallas left the Aggie bench so thin with injuries that the coach waved Gill down from the press box, where he was spotting players for reporters; he suited up but was never sent in.

How do Aggie students honor the 12th Man during football games?

They stand for the entire game to show they are ready to be called on, as one student was in 1922 when injuries left the team short of players.

The most famous Aggie Muster was held in 1942 on which besieged island?

Corregidor was under Japanese bombardment when its commander, an Aggie general, had a roll made of every Aggie on the island; the story was wired home and made headlines across a war-weary America.

Which Texas A&M ceremony, held on the first Tuesday of a month, honors students who died while enrolled?

Silver Taps is played three times by buglers on the Academic Building, to the north, south and west, but never to the east, because the sun will never rise on that Aggie again.

What became of Aggie Bonfire after 1999?

Went off campus: after the 1999 collapse killed twelve, the university never lit Bonfire again and built a memorial on the site, so since 2002 students have stacked and burned their own each autumn.

Aggie Bonfire symbolised a 'burning desire' to do what?

Beat Texas, the rival A&M met at the end of each season; tradition held that if the fire was still burning at midnight, the Aggies would win the next day.

Texas A&M opened as a branch of which university not yet founded?

The University of Texas was still only a plan on paper; it never gained any authority over A&M, and the two ended up fighting over the same state funds instead.

Which former governor, credited with saving Texas A&M from closure, took over in 1891?

Lawrence Sullivan Ross lent the struggling college his prestige and steadied its finances; students still leave pennies on his statue before exams, after the 'penny for your thoughts' he is said to have asked for tutoring.

Which president, a D-Day Ranger commander, desegregated the college and admitted women in the 1960s?

Rudder, class of 1932, took office in 1959. Rudder Tower on campus is named for him.

What did Texas A&M's 'A&M' first stand for?

Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas was the name until 1963, when the legislature made it a university and kept the two letters purely as a link to its past.

Before 'Aggies' became official in 1949, what were Texas A&M students generally called?

Farmers was the name until 'Aggies', a common nickname at agricultural colleges, took over in the 1920s; the old one lives on in the yell 'Farmers Fight'.

Which of these, like Texas A&M, is one of America's six senior military colleges?

The Citadel is one, with VMI, Norwich, Virginia Tech and North Georgia; federal law guarantees active duty to any fit graduate of the six whom the college recommends for an Army commission.

What are visitors asked to do on entering Texas A&M's Memorial Student Center?

Remove their hats: the building is a memorial to Aggies killed in war, and its Hall of Honor remembers the seven who earned the Medal of Honor in World War II.

Which U.S. president's library and museum sits on the Texas A&M campus?

George H. W. Bush's library opened in 1997, and he chose its grounds for the family plot: he is buried there beside his wife Barbara and their daughter Robin, who died aged three.

Which conference did Texas A&M leave to join the SEC on July 1, 2012?

Big 12 membership dated from 1996, when the old Southwest Conference broke up; in its very first SEC season A&M went 11-2 and beat top-ranked Alabama on the road.

What did Texas A&M football win in 1939 and never since?

The national title came with an 11-0 season and a one-point Sugar Bowl win over Tulane; A&M also claims 1919 and 1927, titles awarded by selectors looking back years later.

Which Aggie halfback won the Heisman Trophy in 1957?

John David Crow won after his coach declared that if he didn't, 'they ought to stop giving it'; three decades later he came back to A&M as athletic director.

Johnny Manziel became the first player to win the Heisman Trophy as what?

A freshman had never won it before 'Johnny Football', who had sat out the previous year as a redshirt; he clinched it by producing 345 of A&M's 418 yards in the win at Alabama.

Which famous coach put Texas A&M through the brutal 'Junction Boys' training camp of 1954?

Bear Bryant's ten-day camp, held in a heat wave and a record drought, drove many players to quit; A&M then went 1-9, the only losing season of his 38 years as a head coach.

What nickname is given to Texas A&M's defenses, which led the nation in total defense in 1991?

The Wrecking Crew was named not by a coach or a sportswriter but by one of its own players, defensive back Chet Brooks, in the 1980s.

Who is the winningest head coach in Texas A&M football history?

R. C. Slocum won 123 games in 14 seasons without a single losing year, and was fired all the same at the end of 2002.

Which coach did Texas A&M hire away from Florida State in December 2017?

Jimbo Fisher arrived on a ten-year, $75 million contract; when A&M fired him in 2023 it owed him another $77.5 million, at the time the biggest buyout college football had seen.

Which Texas A&M team beat Notre Dame in 2011 for its first NCAA championship?

Women's basketball did it under coach Gary Blair, knocking out two top seeds, Baylor and Stanford, before beating Notre Dame 76-70 in the final.

The Aggie baseball team was runner-up in the 2024 College World Series to which team?

Tennessee lost the opening game, then won the next two to take the title; the day after the final, A&M's coach Jim Schlossnagle left to take over at arch-rival Texas.

Which song does the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band traditionally step off to at halftime?

The Aggie War Hymn launches the halftime drill on the drum major's shout of 'Step off on Hullabaloo!'; some of the band's moves are so tight that charting software calls them impossible.

A new Aggie Ring is 'dunked' in a pitcher of what?

Beer: the pitcher has to be drained in one go and the ring caught between the teeth; the university discourages the stunt, though the ring itself goes back to 1889.

Before the last home football game, Texas A&M seniors wander the campus together in a procession known as what?

Elephant Walk was named in 1926, when an onlooker said the seniors filing round campus, each with a hand on the shoulder in front, 'looked like elephants, about to die'.

Which class at Texas A&M is the first allowed to say 'Whoop!' in Aggie yells?

Juniors earn the word with their rank; a freshman or sophomore caught saying 'Whoop!' early is 'pulling out', and can expect to be told to do push-ups.

In 2003 Texas A&M opened an engineering branch campus in which country?

Qatar's Education City hosted the campus from 2003, funded through the Qatar Foundation; in 2024 A&M's regents voted to wind it down and close it by 2028.

Texas A&M students sent out a play-by-play of the 1921 Texas game using what?

Morse code, tapped out from the Kyle Field press box in a shorthand of abbreviations, reached newspapers faster than the wire services; A&M long called it the first football broadcast, but others came earlier.

Which Aggie head coach was the first African American to lead the football program?

Kevin Sumlin arrived from Houston just as A&M moved to the SEC and won eleven games straight away; six seasons in, the school paid him $10.4 million to leave.

When women first joined Texas A&M's Corps of Cadets in 1974, they were placed in a separate unit called what?

W-1 kept the first women cadets apart from the men's units, and they faced frequent harassment; the college itself had only begun admitting women, on a limited basis, in 1963.

Under which 1862 federal law was Texas A&M founded as the first public college in Texas?

The Morrill Land-Grant Act gave each state federal land to sell to pay for a college; it also demanded military training, which is where A&M's Corps of Cadets comes from.

Texas A&M lore says a couple who pass together under the campus's Century Tree will do what?

Marry: the old live oak by the Academic Building is a favourite place for Aggie proposals, because a proposal made under its branches is said to make the marriage last forever.

Tamu Massif, which takes its name from Texas A&M's initials, is what kind of geographic feature?

An undersea mountain east of Japan, it was announced in 2013 as the largest single volcano on Earth; in 2019 the same lead scientist published evidence that it had formed by seafloor spreading instead.

In which city is the Texas A&M School of Law located?

Fort Worth gained an A&M law school in 2013, when the university bought Texas Wesleyan's outright instead of founding one of its own.

Which Texas A&M coach waved student E. King Gill down from the stands in 1922, creating the 12th Man?

Dana X. Bible had already built a powerhouse, his 1919 team winning every game without conceding a point; he later spent ten seasons coaching A&M's arch-rival, Texas.

Texas A&M won the highest-scoring game in FBS history, 74-72 in seven overtimes in 2018, against which team?

LSU lost a game that produced 146 points and lasted nearly five hours; it prompted the NCAA to rewrite its overtime rules the next season so that such marathons end sooner.

Which school did Mike Elko leave to become Texas A&M's head coach in November 2023?

Duke had him for only two seasons, in which he went 16-9; he knew A&M already, having run its defense for four years, and in 2025 he took the Aggies to their first College Football Playoff.

Which NFL team agreed in 2006 to license the '12th Man' phrase after Texas A&M sued over its trademark?

The Seattle Seahawks settled out of court, paying $100,000 plus an annual fee and publicly acknowledging that Texas A&M owns the phrase. Seattle now calls its fans the 12s.

Texas A&M veterinary scientists produced the world's first cloned pet in 2001, which was what kind of animal?

A cat named CC, short for CopyCat or Carbon Copy, was born that December. She later had kittens of her own, the first time a cloned pet gave birth.

A Texas A&M cadet drill team played the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon in the opening of which 1992 film?

A Few Good Men opens with the Aggie cadets' rifle routine standing in for the Marines. The same team later played Army trainees in Courage Under Fire.

Texas A&M students once dismantled an Aggie Bonfire stack unburned out of respect after which national tragedy?

Kennedy's assassination came days before the 1963 stack was due to burn, so the students who had built it took it apart instead.

Which fantasy author chose Texas A&M's Cushing Library in 1993 as the official repository for his manuscripts?

George R. R. Martin was impressed by the library's science-fiction collection on a tour during AggieCon, the campus convention, and later sent his growing piles of papers there.

Which Civil War figure was offered the job of first president of the college that became Texas A&M but declined?

Jefferson Davis, the former Confederate president, turned the post down, and it went instead to Thomas Gathright, Mississippi's superintendent of public instruction.

Which Texas A&M president left the university in 2006 to become the United States Secretary of Defense?

Robert Gates had already run the CIA before he took the Aggie job. He stayed at the Pentagon until 2011, serving presidents of both parties.

Which future Texas governor was a Yell Leader as a Texas A&M student?

Rick Perry, class of 1972, also helped build Aggie Bonfire as a redpot. He went on to become the longest-serving governor in Texas history.

Which former Texas A&M pass rusher was named Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl 50 with the Denver Broncos?

Von Miller twice knocked the ball loose from Cam Newton in the 24–10 win over Carolina, and the first fumble was recovered for a Denver touchdown.

Texas A&M's baseball stadium, Olsen Field, added the name of which ice cream maker in a rebuild that began in 2011?

Blue Bell Creameries, based in nearby Brenham, helped pay for the rebuild and gained naming rights in return, so the stadium became Olsen Field at Blue Bell Park.

Texas A&M was a charter member of which conference, home to most big Texas schools, that dissolved in 1996?

The Southwest Conference took shape in 1914, with its first organizing meetings held at a Dallas hotel, and its breakup in 1996 scattered schools that had been rivals for eight decades.

Which Fightin' Texas Aggie Band maneuver, introduced in 1947, does drill-charting software insist cannot be performed?

The Four-Way Cross sends four groups marching through each other from the corners of the field. Software balks because two cadets would have to share one spot at once.

Which Grammy-winning Texas singer-songwriter earned Texas A&M degrees in German and journalism in 1980?

Lyle Lovett stayed close after graduating, often playing solo acoustic sets in the small bars just off campus in the early 1980s.

Which Texas A&M defensive end did the Cleveland Browns select first overall in the 2017 NFL Draft?

Myles Garrett went on to be named NFL Defensive Player of the Year with Cleveland in 2023 and again in 2025.

Which historically Black university, founded in 1876, belongs to the Texas A&M University System?

Prairie View A&M began as a branch of the same college and is the second-oldest public institution of higher learning in Texas.

Which former Texas A&M quarterback was the winning head coach of Super Bowl 50 with the Denver Broncos?

Gary Kubiak had spent his own playing career as a Denver quarterback before turning to coaching, and he also led the Houston Texans for eight seasons.

What is the official name of the all-sports rivalry series between Texas A&M and the Texas Longhorns?

The Lone Star Showdown lost its football game after 2011, when the Aggies changed conferences, and got it back in 2024 once the Longhorns followed them into the SEC.

Texas A&M won 29–24 on the road in its first SEC season in 2012 to upset which top-ranked team?

Alabama fell behind 20–0 in the first quarter on its own field, and the win made Aggie quarterback Johnny Manziel a national name.

Which Texas A&M team beat unbeaten Nebraska on its way to a first NCAA title in December 2025?

Volleyball delivered the Aggies' title with a three-set sweep of Kentucky in Kansas City, after the team had knocked out two No. 1 seeds.

Which Nobel Peace Prize winner, the father of the Green Revolution, taught at Texas A&M from 1984?

Norman Borlaug spent four months of each year at Texas A&M as a distinguished professor of international agriculture, and the rest at a wheat and maize research center in Mexico.

Which Texas A&M head coach of the 1980s started the all-walk-on '12th Man Kickoff Team'?

Jackie Sherrill built the whole unit from non-scholarship students. The tradition survives in scaled-back form, with a single walk-on on the kickoff team.

Which former Texas A&M forward won the 2021 NBA championship as a star of the Milwaukee Bucks?

Khris Middleton lasted until the 39th pick of the 2012 draft, yet became a three-time All-Star and added an Olympic gold medal in the same year as his title.

What is the name of Texas A&M's student newspaper, which has covered the campus since 1893?

The Battalion began as a monthly paper put out by the college's two literary societies, replacing their flowery magazine, the College Journal.

Which song, first written as a poem by student Marvin Mimms, is the official alma mater of Texas A&M?

The Spirit of Aggieland has even been played in orbit, as the wake-up call for Aggie astronaut Mike Fossum on shuttle mission STS-124.

The Texas A&M Maritime Academy and its training ships are based at a branch campus in which Gulf Coast city?

Galveston has been home to the academy since 1962, and its first training ship, the Texas Clipper, was a gift from the federal government three years later.

The RELLIS Campus of Texas A&M, renamed in 2016, takes its name from the initials of the university's six what?

Core values of Respect, Excellence, Leadership, Loyalty, Integrity and Selfless Service spell out the name. Before that the site was known as the Riverside Campus.

Texas A&M's domed Academic Building stands on the site of which first campus building, which burned down in 1912?

Old Main, four stories tall, housed every activity of the college for its first ten years. Its replacement was finished two years after the fire.

Which Texas A&M tradition, begun by six students, is called the nation's largest one-day student-run service project?

The Big Event sends more than twenty thousand students out to rake leaves, paint houses and trim trees for local residents, and over a hundred other schools have copied it.

Which airfield beside the Texas A&M campus honors an Aggie who became a Navy flier?

Easterwood Field opened in 1940 and honors Jesse Easterwood, who flew sixteen raids behind German lines in World War I and died in a 1919 crash in the Canal Zone.

The horseback cadets of Parsons Mounted Cavalry do what at Texas A&M home football games each time the Aggies score?

They fire a cannon, a 1902-pattern field gun that students cutting Bonfire wood found buried in a ditch in 1974 with only its rusted wheel rims showing.

Texas A&M is one of the few schools whose spirit leaders, the Yell Leaders, win their place in what way?

Student election by popular vote fills the posts every year, and in 1946 Bill Beck became the first winner from outside the Corps of Cadets.

Texas A&M supplied more officers than West Point and Annapolis combined during which war?

World War II put 20,229 Aggies in uniform, 14,123 of them as officers. The college's wartime fame also brought Hollywood to the campus to shoot a propaganda film.

Which future NFL quarterback spent much of his Texas A&M career catching passes as a wide receiver?

Ryan Tannehill was still lining up at receiver for the first six games of 2010, yet Miami made him the eighth pick of the 2012 draft as a passer.

Martín Torrijos, a 1987 Texas A&M graduate, was later elected president of which Central American country?

Panama is not the only country to have been led by an Aggie: Jorge Quiroga, class of 1981, served as president of Bolivia.

Texas A&M's main campus lies in which Texas county, named for the river that forms its western border?

Brazos County gave 2,416 acres in the 1870s to land the college, a gift that helped turn one of the state's poorer counties into one of its most prosperous.

Bjarne Stroustrup, who taught computer science at Texas A&M, is the creator of which programming language?

C++ was not the faculty's only famous credit: Pulitzer-winning playwright Charles Gordone and Senator Phil Gramm, an economist, also taught at Texas A&M.

Which Junction Boys survivor returned to Texas A&M as head coach from 1965 to 1971 and won a Cotton Bowl?

Gene Stallings beat his old mentor's team in that bowl game, and the older coach hugged him and carried him around the field afterwards.

Which Texas A&M linebacker swept the 1998 Lombardi and Bednarik awards before seven seasons with the Dallas Cowboys?

Dat Nguyen went on to become the first Vietnamese-American to be drafted, to play and to earn All-Pro recognition in the NFL.

Texas A&M graduates are more commonly referred to by which term than as alumni?

Former students is the preferred phrase on campus, which is why the body representing more than half a million graduates is The Association of Former Students.

Which Texas A&M receiver began his NFL career with eleven straight 1,000-yard seasons for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers?

Mike Evans tied Jerry Rice for the longest such streak in NFL history and picked up a Super Bowl ring with Tampa Bay along the way.

Tradition says the first Reveille joined Texas A&M in 1931 after cadets returning from a party did what?

They hit her with a car, smuggled the little stray into their dorm, and named her after the bugle call she barked at the next morning.

At the Texas A&M Bonfire Memorial, each of the twelve portals around the ring is oriented toward what?

A victim's hometown lies beyond each portal, one for each of the twelve Aggies killed when the stack collapsed during construction in 1999.

Which 1943 Hollywood film featuring a young Robert Mitchum as a cadet was shot on the Texas A&M campus?

We've Never Been Licked showcased many of the school's traditions, and its credits list the future star as plain Bob Mitchum.

Texas A&M's business school is named for Lowry Mays, the founder of which radio broadcasting giant?

Clear Channel started life in 1972 as the San Antonio Broadcasting Company, which Mays founded with his partner Red McCombs.

Which school left its old conference alongside Texas A&M and joined the SEC with the Aggies in 2012?

Missouri was announced as the SEC's 14th member in November 2011, weeks after Baylor's president had threatened legal action to block the Aggies' exit.

Which custom-made item of uniform, a rite of passage, may only seniors wear in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets?

Tall riding boots in brown calfskin hark back to the cavalry officer's uniform of the 1910s, and cadets first pull them on after Final Review at the end of their third year.

The record football crowd at Texas A&M's home stadium, 110,633 in 2014, saw the Aggies lose to which SEC opponent?

Ole Miss won 35–20 that October, in a stadium whose rebuilt capacity of 102,733 makes it the largest in Texas.

Which city next to Texas A&M's hometown is the county seat and comes first in the metro area's two-city name?

Bryan has been the county seat since 1866, when it took the title from Boonville, and the twin cities' metro area passed a quarter of a million people at the 2020 census.

What burnt-orange structure traditionally sat on top of the finished Aggie Bonfire?

An outhouse labelled as a rival fraternity house crowned the stack, and the Aggie Band took over building it, which ended the custom of stealing Bonfire's parts.

Which Texas A&M basketball venue was opened as a shelter for hundreds of hurricane evacuees in 2005?

Reed Arena took in more than 200 people from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, then reopened less than three weeks later for those fleeing Hurricane Rita.