AUSTIN, Texas — The Big 12 Conference is cracking down on the “Horns Down” gesture, it announced at Big 12 Media Days Thursday. Big 12 Coordinator of Officials Greg Burks said opponents of the Texas Longhorns will most likely receive a foul if they throw the sign.
“If you do a Horns Down to a Texas player as an opponent, that’s probably going to be a foul,” Burks said.
Burks said if an opponent turned to the crowd to make the gesture though, it would “probably” not be a penalty. The “Horns Down” symbol is an apparent diss to the Longhorns' “Hook’em Horns” hand symbol.
The 2021-22 college football season is 44 days away.
Former UT Football player and Fox Sports analyst Emmanuel Acho denounced the decision in a tweet Thursday afternoon.
“We ain’t no punks around here,” Acho wrote in his tweet. “Let em throw the Horns down if they wish and suffer the consequences!”
Whether or not the “Horns Down” gesture should result in penalties has been a discussion for years. In 2019, the University of Oklahoma said it would not use the symbol when playing UT in football.
But, in 2018, the Sooner’s head football coach Lincoln Riley had to reach out to the Big 12 to see if his team would be penalized for the gesture after the West Virginia Mountaineers were.
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