Inside the Texas A&M towel heist at the 1988 Cotton Bowl

TIM BROWN IS part of an elite fraternity. He’s one of 10 men inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a Heisman Trophy. Warren Barhorst is part of a select group as well. He’s one of 90 people inducted into the Nationwide Insurance Hall of Fame.

The two could’ve crossed paths anywhere. But the most unlikely place might have been where they actually did meet: in the 1988 Cotton Bowl during the first-ever meeting between Texas A&M and Notre Dame.

Brown was Notre Dame’s seventh Heisman Trophy winner, a golden-domed superstar playing for one of the greatest programs in college football history, averaging 14.2 yards per touch receiving, rushing and returning kicks en route to 1,847 all-purpose yards in 1987.

Barhorst, too, represented his school, but he wasn’t the subject of any recruiting battles. Instead, he started his college career at Stephen F. Austin before transferring to Texas A&M, eventually trying out as a walk-on in hopes of one day living his dream of playing on Kyle Field.

Brown was a nationally coveted recruit. Barhorst was another dreamer at the school where a walk-on named E. King Gill suited up to help his team in another bowl game in Dallas in 1922, inspiring the 12th Man tradition in College Station, where students stand the entire game to represent their willingness to help their team, like Gill did during an injury-riddled Dixie Classic.

Brown was riding high coming into the game. But by the time the Cotton Bowl rolled around on Jan. 1, Barhorst, a senior, had just barely made it through his final season as a student and tackling dummy in practice.

“I’m getting tired, I’m beat up,” Barhorst said. “[I thought,] ‘I’m going to quit football.’ And a guy named Dennis Mudd tells me, ‘Hell, Barhorst, don’t quit. Someday you’ll make a play that could change your life.'”

Mudd, like Barhorst, was a member of Jackie Sherrill’s famed “12th Man” kickoff team, made up of all walk-ons who did nothing but cover kickoffs. Notre Dame had Rudy. The Aggies had an entire platoon of Rudys. The group, started in 1983 in Sherrill’s second year in College Station, was known for its reckless abandon. And all the focus leading up to the Cotton Bowl was on how those walk-ons would fare against Brown.

“Being that I was born and raised here in Dallas,…