Baker Mayfield not about to let Texas flag-planting mockery get by without comment

It's know secret that when Oklahoma and Texas meet up every year in one of college football's classic rivalry games it is a grudge match in every sense of the word. These two teams flat out don't like each other, and the fans and current and former players of both schools feed off of that.

Emotion runs high and social media is on fire every second Saturday in October when the full attention of college football fans in the two neighboring states is on OU vs. Texas in the Red River Rivalry.

This is a rivalry where bragging rights run deep, on both sides of the Red River. And the postgame celebrations with the Golden Hat and jawboning within and without the Cotton Bowl stadium by the victors is exhilarating if you're on the winning side; not so much, of course, if you're on the opposite end of that continuum.

Former Sooner quarterback Baker Mayfield played in this game three times and donned the Golden Hat twice in games against his home state Texas Longhorns. It's been seven years since the OU All-American and Heisman Trophy winner played in his final game against Texas, but he believes he is still in the head of the Longhorns. The Sooners are 5-3 against Texas since Mayfield's college career ended, including an embarrassing 34-3 loss on Saturday.

During the postgame celebration on Saturday, Longhorn players took a Longhorn flag and planted it defiantly at midfield. But that was just half of it; they planted the flag through an Oklahoma jersey, one bearing the No. 6 worn by Mayfield while he was at OU.

Texas linebacker Anthony Hill posted a picture of the impaled jersey on social media with the caption, "Texas fears nobody." That was in response to an earlier pregame speech by standout Sooner linebacker Danny Stutsman, during which Stutsman was videoed wearing a T-shirt with the inscription in the back: "Oklahoma only fears God, and Texas fears Oklahoma."

Not surprisingly, none of that set well with the Texas players, who still are reminded of all the rantings and taunting of Mayfield toward the Longhorns and this rivalry over the years.

Mayfield was asked on Sunday about the flag-planting incident after the former Sooner had led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a 51-27 win over the New Orleans Saints, quarterbacked by another former Sooner, Spencer Rattler. Mayfield told Jenna Laine of ESPN: "Just a kid from Austin, Texas, that went to Oklahoma and won his last Red River games and being rent free in their heads for almost a decade."

Asked by reporters why he did what he did on Saturday, Texas' Hill said, "I just felt it was the right thing to do" (for both him and his teammates. "I'd seen all the stuff they (Oklahoma) posted last year (in a thrilling come-from-behind 34-30 Sooner victory), so I felt like it was right for me to get a little touch of something on them."

In the three games Mayfield was the quarterback for the Sooners in the annual rivalry game with Texas (2015-17), he threw for a combined 803 passing yards and accounted for seven touchdowns.