The way it fell apart deserves to be retold.
The Ags won the SWC three years in a row. When SMU got the death penalty, their boosters hired PIs to investigate the other schools, listing every possible violation. Texas got pegged with minor stuff, and cooperated with the NCAA, even self-reporting violations discovered in the internal investigation that the NcAA knew nothing about.
The Ags resisted. They reported their internal investigation showed everything was on the up and up. Mind you- Sherrill was HC and also the AD. The NCAA hit them with penalties more severe than Texas’.
A year later, a former player for the Ags, a FB from Georgia, named George Smith, told the Ags that he needed money, and if he didn’t get it, he would talk. The Ags sent a FedEx envelope to him with $20k cash. He opened that envelope in the presence of a Dallas Morning News reporter.
The Ags responded to the scandal by flying Smith to B/CS, where he recanted (he later said he was paid for that, too). The NCAA threw their hand up and said they could not tell fact from fiction.
TAMU had a president, William Mobley, who was not an Aggie. Mobley, with the aid of UT, was trying to get TAMU into the prestigious AAC. Mobley convinced his Board that Sherrill had to go, that if he wasn’t fired, Mobley would resign.
They let Sherrill go, something the hard core Ags have regretted ever since.