This weekend is the official kickoff of the college football season.
For Texas Southern and Prairie View football, we know what that means — or what it used to mean. After the initial game in 1985, the Labor Day Classic had been one of the most enduring Houston traditions as the two HBCU programs renewed their rivalry in the first week of the season.
But not this season.
Instead of coming out of the gate with the rivalry that crosses family, friendship, and sometimes household lines, Prairie View and Texas Southern will be kicking off their seasons this weekend, not sharing the same field as had become a tradition. Of course, this isn’t unprecedented, since the season-opening tradition was moved back in both 2017 and 2018.
Prairie View, fresh off its SWAC Championship and Celebration Bowl campaign, is traveling to Stephenville, Texas, to take on the FCS’s fifth-ranked Tarleton State Texans in an 8 p.m. nationally broadcast ESPN2 game. Texas Southern will host North Carolina Central at “home” at Aldine School District’s Thorne Stadium.
Don’t worry, the Labor Day Classic isn’t off. It’s just delayed a week and a day after the NCAA agreed to allow FCS programs a Week Zero game, and both Prairie View and TSU took advantage.
“This year is something different, which is great. Different is good,” said TSU coach Cris Dishman, whose program is coming off its first NCAA-recognized winning season in 25 years. “We open up with North Carolina Central, and it’s going to be a hard-fought game.”
The truth is that TSU made a business decision to add a Week Zero game after Prairie View, looking to capitalize on last season’s success and hoping to get in on the elite FCS stage decided to take advantage of the opportunity by accepting the challenge of playing its Texas A&M system sister school in the season opener.
The Texans are definitely elite in the FCS, and the crowd the Panthers are walking into will be anything but friendly on Saturday night. But it all fits into the larger plan of second-year coach Tremaine Jackson and athletic director Anton Goff to establish the program outside of the confines of SWAC and HBCU football.
Jackson has talked about his preference to move away from opening the season against Texas Southern, given how important the game now is to both programs’ seasons. I asked Jackson during this week’s SWAC Football Media Call about his feelings about playing someone other than Texas Southern, already kind of knowing his thoughts based on previous conversations.
“Terrance, you’re trying to get me fired,” joked Jackson, referencing the old line of thinking that it was better to play this game early before each base found out how bad their teams were. “Here is what I will say to you. I totally understand the reason why both teams played so early. That’s not the reason anymore. So we have to get out of doing the same thing that we’ve always done because it feels good to everybody and do what’s best for the two programs, which I don’t know what that is.”
Still, it’s going to seem odd for the tradition this city has known since 1985 not to happen during the opening week. But Jackson, who played football at Texas Southern, doesn’t see it as odd at all.
He believes both programs have earned the right to play this rivalry game, which now has a significant impact on the SWAC West Division title race later in the season.
“For us, I think it’s asinine that you open up with a conference rival game,” said Jackson, whose team plays eight of its 12 games on some television platform this season. “I think that’s crazy. That’s not college football. In college football, rivals happen in the end. But people above my pay grade made that decision.”
For the first time in a long time, Prairie View and Texas Southern will enter the Labor Day Classic with up-to-date information on each other, as there will be film to break down from their season openers. That might make for a cleaner rivalry game.
It could also be the first step in placing a rivalry game with so much history, and now with so much more meaning in the SWAC West standings, in its rightful place later in the season. The SWAC West division title is shaping up to come through the Houston area, and there’s no way that picture should be shaped so early like it was last season when PV won on a run-off touchdown.
Not to mention, kicking off the season against unknown opponents adds a certain excitement to the start for both programs. The Panthers have bitten off a huge chunk of an apple against an FCS juggernaut.
“I’m super excited to be playing in Week Zero,” Jackson said. “I think everybody should play in Week Zero. That’s just my personal opinion. But we wanted to get on the grass as soon as we could to find out or get a glimpse of what we have an opportunity to be so that we can hurry up and get to work on what we need to do next, win, lose, or draw.
“The way the Labor Day Classic falls, it is whenever it is now. We are worried about TSU at Tarleton State. That’s the new classic for us. It’s for a trophy; they are in our system. Anytime we play for a trophy, we want to win the trophy.
“I think our kids are excited about that. We are away,” Jackson continued. “It should be a really good environment, and again, it’s on national TV where everybody can see us. So we are getting ourselves ready and ramped up for that.”
The TSU-North Carolina Central Eagles game, meanwhile, offers a traditional SWAC-MEAC clash that will give the winner of either HBCU conference bragging rights.
“They have a very good reputation over there. I really follow the coach,” Dishman said. “I know we have to be on our P’s and Q’s in order to beat North Carolina Central.”
And for those traditionalists who want PV to open up the season against Texas Southern, Jackson has an answer for that.
“At the end of the day, I don’t care. I’m worried about Tarleton State. That’s the TSU that we’ve got to play first,” he said. “For us to be us to be able to play a Top 5 in the FCS opponent on national TV, which is exactly what we said we wanted to do when we got here. Now we’ve got to be ready to go as we make this trip.”
