While it sucks that Arky bailed on us, there might be a chance to turn this lemon into lemonade. Keep in mind that the date in question, September 12, 2009, would be Texas’ season opener. The 2009 season is one where things line up nicely for an MNC run. Both from a personnel and schedule perspective, that will probably be a very exciting year to be a Longhorn football fan. But, like in 2005, a big out-of-conference win would really catapult Texas to the driver’s seat to get to that title game.
Based on a brief web search of future schedules, here is a list of teams that appear to have an open date (or at least no one officially booked that I could find) for the date in question and would be an exciting match up, from both a local and national perspective:
Georgia Tech
Virginia
Rutgers (I know its Rutgers, but this would put Texas in the middle of the NYC media market which never hurts; think: start of the Colt Heisman campaign?)
Michigan State
Arizona
I did eliminate teams that are already playing another Big 12 team OCC (I doubt they would want two) or teams that are already playing a “big” OCC team in 2009 (assuming they wouldn’t want two in the same year, excluding other regular to semi-regular rivalries, e.g Georgia/Georgia Tech, etc). Although I didn’t dig very deeply on finding out if in fact all of these teams really do have open dates, I think Texas is a big enough draw to swoop in at the “relative” last minuet and ask if a team would like to schedule a game, even if there were talks with another warm up school aka North Texas/ULala/etc.
Of these, I think Rutgers or Georgia Tech look the most appealing.
FYI, Minnesota (as mentioned by a previous poster) plays Air Force on 9/12/09, so that school is out.