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Some aggregation from the Farmers and the Tar Heels had met nearly every year since A&M's first year of intercollegiate football in 1893. The Red and White (then Pink and Blue) of A&M met a picked team from UNC twice in 1893, splitting the games. In the following 12 years, the Aggies and the Tar Heels' Varsity teams had met twelve times; From 1894 to 1901, the two teams met every year except 1896, when A&M banned intercollegiate football, and 1900, when the Farmers joined the nascent North Carolina Athletics Association, whose rules UNC deemed too stringent, thereby preventing the two teams from meeting. In that period, the Aggies were outscored 11-284, scoring all 11 of their points in an 11-11 tie on the two teams' second meeting of 1899.

After 1901, however, the tide rapidly changed. From 1902 to 1905, the Farmers and Tar Heels met only three times after UNC refused to face the Aggies in 1903 due to a dispute involving gate fees. In that period, the teams tied every time they faced, sharing a 6-6 record after the 1902 and 1905 games were scoreless. Obviously, the Red and White were rapidly ascending to the point at which they could challenege the Tar Heels' nearly-uninterrupted claims towards champion of the state, or even the South.

Since 1904, the teams had met annually in early November. The Tar Heels saw the game as an excellent opportunity to prepare for their Thanksgiving Day game against Virginia, the only team that could challenge North Carolina's stranglehold on athletic dominance in the South. The meeting in 1906 was planned to be no different.

There was, however, a few big differences. First and foremost, the Tar Heels were en route to finishing their season with their worst record since 1891, when the Heels went 0-2. In the years following 1891, the Tar Heels dominated their opponents, posting losing records only twice: in 1893 (3-4, 42.85%), and in 1896 (3-4-1, 43.75%). Otherwise, though, the Tar Heels were a force to be reckoned with. Going into the game against A&M, the Tar Heels had just one win: a 12-0 victory over the same Richmond team A&M had tied 0-0. Otherwise, the Chapel Hill boys had tied Davidson (0-0) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (0-0) and lost to Pennsylvania (11-0), Lafayette (26-8), and Georgetown (4-0).

Fans from Chapel Hill will point out that this lackluster performance was caused by the adoption of new, stricter eligibility rules. This included, among other rules, an early version of the 4-year eligibility rule (The Tar Heel, April 19th, 1905, p. 1). Because of this, the Tar Heels had only four players eligible to return from their previous year's team; that number was cut to two after Parker and Traylor elected not to return to college. The Tar Heels were further crippled by the fact that Thompson, one of the two remaining returners, had his knee injured in the Tar Heels' game againt Richmond (News and Observer, October 19th, 1906, p. 4).

The sudden interest of UNC in athletic purity is, frankly, ironic. Among other rules, the 4-year eligibility requirement was one of the main reasons Chapel Hill refused to join the North Carolina Athletics Association in 1900, and had frequently disrupted planned games against Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SIAA) teams. One such example of such a cancelation was mentioned in a December 1904 write-up of football in the South: North Carolina was forced to cancel her game against SIAA-member Vanderbilt after it was discovered that three of her players--Carpenter, Bear, and Sitton--had played for over four years (The Washington Post, December 25th, 1904, p. 7). Carpenter, in particular, made UNC's claims rather spurious, as his time at Chapel Hill marked his sixth year of competition, including five at VPI--three as a student, one as a graduate, and one as an instructor.

Following the disputes between A&M and Georgia and Clemson regarding player eligibility, North Carolina contacted A&M to ask that the Aggies bar "Babe" Wilson from the contest, stating outright that there would be no game unless Wilson was kept out of the Farmers' lineup. A&M's Faculty Board forwarded the decision to the athletic committee, who decided that Wilson was eligible (Beezley, p. 19; Mumau, p. 31). Once it was decided that Wilson was eligible, Chapel Hill was sent the following terse reply: "Our faculty has decided that Wilson is eligible. We understand that you have cancelled the game." The grounds on which the faculty made this assertion were threefold: first, that Wilson had played in every game so far this season (and planned to play in the season-closing game against VPI) without issue; second, that Virginia had a player who had been playing for longer without protest; and finally, that one of Wilson's excess years was actually spent in the "preparatory department" and not as a full-time student, meaning he had not spent four years as a "regular student" (The Raleigh Times, November 6th, 1906, p. 1).

The Tar Heels, however, had a different take on the situation. UNC credited A&M with the cancelation of the contest, writing, contrary to Raleigh sources, that the Farmers had admitted Wilson was ineligible but refused to play without him anyhow. The paper went on to note that Wilson had played for two years at Knox College, in Illinois, and had played at A&M the two past seasons, making this his fifth year*[1] of collegiate football competition (The Tar Heel, November 8th, 1906, p. 1). The Tar Heel called A&M's actions "anything but... sportsmanlike" and added that this spat was nothing more than a continuation of "the semi-annual wrangle that has preceded every athletic contest that Carolina has ever held with A. & M." The editorial closed by asking that athletic relations between the two schools be severed (The Tar Heel, November 8th, 1906, p. 2).

UNC primarily blamed A&M's insistence on playing Wilson on the recent injuries of Hardee and Beebe, concluding that the Farmers chose to withdraw from the contest because they had no chance of winning without three of their best players, and that the Farmers had planned to play without Wilson before the injuries to two of their long-time starters. The article went on to mock the Farmers for their cowardice, noting that UNC had never once canceled a match due to being handicapped by injuries. In response, A&M noted that the injuries of several star players were nothing other than an unfortunate coincidence, and that the Tar Heels were not honoring their end of a previously-signed contract. One part of A&M's rebuttal to this claim, though, was particularly amusing:

"This college played for eight years [ed. note: 1892-1900] when it couldn't beat a decent high school, but it never flinched and never showed a white feather. It has gained in the last five years to a position in Southern athletics that has taken some of her rivals a hundred years to reach."

While UNC made no effort to dispel A&M's claim that one of Wilson's five years of schooling was as a prep student, A&M's claims that they could play without Wilson and that the Tar Heels were the ones who backed out of the contract are emboldened by an article in Red and White which claimed the Farmers would play VPI without their captain (a concession which, in the end, proved unnecessary) and that UNC had refused to play Washington & Lee for "no good reason"--the assumption being that UNC spurned the Lexingtonians' requests for a game due to the strength of W&L's team that year (Red and White, Vol. VIII No. 3 (November 1906), pp. 117-121).

The issue was further marred by the fact that UNC attempted to poach A&M's season-ending, Thanksgiving Day game against VPI for herself. Following the creation of their new, stricter athletic rules, UNC had ruled out her traditional Thanksgiving Day rival of Virginia as early as May 1906 (Daily Industrial News, May 19th, 1906, p. 6). Without her regular year-ending rival, Chapel Hill attempted to steal A&M's year-end finale, calling on VPI to "stand by [the University of North] Carolina in her demand to rule Wilson out" and play UNC instead.

The ugly sequence of events indeed led to a break in athletic relations, as UNC's editorialist had opined for. NC A&M and North Carolina would not meet again for over a decade, though plans to bring the two teams back together were constant in the intervening years. The two teams nearly reconciled their differences in time for the 1913 football season: after years of steadily-improving relations, the two institutions set aside their differences and jointly helped form the South Atlantic Intercollegiate Athletic Association (SAIAA) with Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, among other schools (Charlotte Daily Observer, February 11th, 1912, p. 2).

This reunion was further helped, ironically enough, after a disagreement arose between A&M and VPI in 1911. Virginia Tech complained that three of A&M's players were ineligible because they had played summer baseball professionally; though the teams still met in 1911, athletic relations were temporarily severed until 1914, by which time each colleges' tempers had cooled. When the Tar Heels and Virginians tried to meet in Raleigh as a neutral site in 1912, the row with VPI was more recent in the minds of A&M's faculty, who told Chapel Hill that they were welcome to play any other team in Riddick Stadium, but not VPI. As such, the UNC-VPI game was forced to be played in a make-shift stadium at the State Fair Grounds. State students showed up to the game en masse, and even rooted for Chapel Hill*[2] (News and Observer, November 5th, 1911, p. 1; Charlotte Daily Observer, October 23rd, 1912, p. 6).

Unfortunately, the warming of relations in 1913 proved to be an Indian summer; relations rapidly re-cooled after yet another eligibility dispute emerged. The teams would not meet again until 1919, after the furor of the First World War made petty squabbles regarding football pale in comparison.