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| ISBN-13: | 9781623689971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Series: | 100 Things...Fans Should Know Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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100 Things Oklahoma Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
By Steve Richardson
Triumph Books
Copyright © 2014 Steve RichardsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62937-007-1
CHAPTER 1
Bud Wilkinson
The true Sooners tradition began with Bud Wilkinson in 1947. He laid the foundation for perhaps the greatest dynasty in college football history, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, and created the Midland saying "Oklahoma and the Seven Dwarfs" in reference to OU's supremacy over its conference.
Such had been OU's domination of first the Big 7, from 1948 to 1957, and then the Big 8 Conference that the Sooners went from 1947 — Wilkinson's first season as OU's head coach — until 1959 without losing a league game.
One of the reasons Frank Broyles left Missouri for Arkansas after coaching in Columbia, Missouri, for just the 1957 season was the fact he saw little hope other teams in the league could compete with the juggernaut in Norman. While this ultimately proved not to be the case, when OU began to decline in the early 1960s under Wilkinson as Missouri and Nebraska flourished, Broyles' initial fears certainly were not unfounded. Missouri, as an example, went from 1946 until 1960 without beating the Sooners.
Wilkinson's program was astonishingly consistent and well-detailed. And his players served him with unquestioned loyalty. In Oklahoma he was king, having delivered the state from the throes of the Depression and Dust Bowl and into post–World War II football heaven. One wife of an early 1960s OU football player remarked years later, "When Bud walked into a room, everybody just stopped. He was the king."
"You never questioned Wilkinson," said OU's star halfback of the mid-1950s, Tommy McDonald. "He was so big. You never thought about questioning Bud Wilkinson. You would never put that in your mind at all. What Bud said, that was it."
Wearing a gray suit, a tie, and a fedora, Wilkinson was the forerunner of the Dallas Cowboys' Tom Landry sideline look. And the former quarterback and guard modeled himself after his college coach, Bernie Bierman of Minnesota, in the early 1930s.
"He was the most organized coach I ever worked for," said OU's 1953 Outland Trophy winner J.D. Roberts, who was a Wilkinson assistant coach, then an assistant for several other prominent coaches at other schools, and finally head coach of the New Orleans Saints. "Our practices were totally organized, there would be so much time for this, and that, and on down the line.
"I remember during this one meeting he said, 'Football is complicated and it is always easy to omit something in planning.' So he wanted really everyone to think ahead and be prepared and make sure we didn't omit something we needed to get done."
Wilkinson's OU teams claimed three national titles, won six of eight bowl games, and finished first in the conference every year from 1946 to 1959. His teams produced a 47-game winning streak — the longest in college football history — from 1953 to 1957. While what he said was gospel, he rarely had to raise his voice to inspire his players.
"These guys didn't just adore Bud, Bud was their life," said Steve Hatchell, one-time team manager and scout team scrub for Colorado coach Eddie Crowder, Wilkinson's former player at OU. "And so when those guys started to talk about what it meant to be part of that system, [it was something]. I haven't been around every football program in the country. But there's nothing compared to what it meant to that state. It wasn't a state until 1907. ... Everybody looked down on it. It was nothing but a truck stop."
During his final four seasons (1960 through 1963), Oklahoma won only one Big 8 title, in 1962, and Wilkinson failed to beat Texas the last six times he played the Longhorns. He retired from college coaching after the 1963 season, then failed in his 1964 bid for a U.S. Senate seat. He went into sports commentating for ABC and did many of the big games of the era, including the 1971 Game of the Century between Oklahoma and Nebraska.
Inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1969, Wilkinson later became coach of the St. Louis Football Cardinals in 1978, but lasted less than two seasons and returned to broadcasting. He passed away in 1994 at the age of 77.
CHAPTER 2Barry Switzer
The Barry Switzer coaching era in Norman was separated by a decade and three coaches from Bud Wilkinson's button-down regime. Wilkinson and Switzer were light years apart in their approach to the game and personal temperament.
Despite their different approaches to coaching, Switzer would produce three national title teams (1974, 1975, and 1985), just as Wilkinson did (1950, 1955, and 1956). And their overall records at the school were quite similar — Switzer was 157–29–4 in 16 seasons, and Wilkinson was 145–29–4 in 17.
Wilkinson's father owned a mortgage company. He attended military school before he played guard and quarterback for Bernie Bierman's national championship teams at Minnesota from 1934 to 1936. He even wanted to be an English teacher at one time. Switzer had a poor and sometimes tragic family background in Arkansas, as related in his book Bootlegger's Boy. He played under Coach Frank Broyles at Arkansas as a center and linebacker and was captain of the 1959 team that won the Southwest Conference and beat Georgia Tech in the Gator Bowl.
"He hugged all the kids," said Donnie Duncan, an assistant coach at OU from 1973 to 1978 and later Switzer's athletics director. "He loved them. I was recruiting a kid over in Greenville, Texas — Richard Murray. He was raised by a momma and two aunts. His father had been killed in an automobile accident. His mother's name was Irene. We go to the [Murray] home. Switzer picked her up and started swinging her around, and she said, 'Coach Switzer, put me down!' He was saying, 'Good night, Irene. Good night, Irene.'"
Wilkinson could have coached ballet with his etiquette on the sideline. Switzer was often impromptu and theatrical in his gestures and actions — he would call recruits at halftime, scream at officials, and allow his players to lounge on the sideline in routs of the Big 8's downtrodden. But he always seemed to know just what to say to inspire great players to even greater heights.
"I think it was what defined him," said Dean Blevins, an OU quarterback in the mid-1970s. "While he is better at Xs and Os and coached better than most people realize, there was a magic about him. He was motivational. ... He was positive. He would say, 'Wehave got little Joe [Washington]. He will have a big game today. ... You, 'Little Joe,' are going to dazzle them. Go out and get 150. Steve [Davis], get the ball out to Tinker [Owens]. Nebraska is not going to move the ball on you, Rod Shoate. Nobody is going to move the ball on you, Randy Hughes.'"
It all seemed to work during the free-wheeling 1970s and later in the 1980s. After the Sooners installed the wishbone in the early 1970s, when Chuck Fairbanks was still the head coach, Switzer took it and ran the Sooners into national prominence once again. Bootlegger's Boy recruited well and understood an entire new generation and ethnicity of players. Barry had style. And the wishbone was stylish. And his players had style.
"One, I think he understood African American kids," said Steve Hatchell, who was an associate commissioner in the Big 8 Conference office from 1977 to 1983 and later was the Orange Bowl's executive director. "And I think he just understood kids to begin with, whether they were black or white, what they wanted to do, how they wanted to play. Jimmy Johnson was a little bit of the same way — he knew when to turn on the pressure and when not to. It was emblematic of a change from the heavily regimented looks to a Switzer-type of thing."
Switzer's teams won or shared 12 Big 8 Conference championships and competed in 10 New Year's Day bowl games, including nine Orange Bowls. His 16 teams had 109 All–Big 8 Conference selections and a galaxy of stars, including Heisman Trophy winner running back Billy Sims (1978), Outland Trophy winner defensive tackle Lee Roy Selmon (1975), two-time Butkus Award winner linebacker Brian Bosworth (1984 and 1985), and Lombardi Trophy winner nose guard Tony Casillas (1985).
The 16-year run at Oklahoma ended for Switzer, who resigned in June 1989 after three serious law-breaking off-the-field incidents involving five Sooners football players. The program was also serving a three-year NCAA probation at the time of his resignation. But Switzer eventually wound up as coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1994 and a year later coached them to a Super Bowl title. Switzer was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2001.
CHAPTER 347 Straight
Like Joe DiMaggio's unmatched 56-game major-league hitting streak, Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in college football is almost mythical in its enduring nature. It has been 57 years since it ended in 1957, and no college team has really come close to matching it.
The closest have been 1) USC winning 34 straight from 2003 to 2005, and finally losing to Texas 41–38 in the 2006 Rose Bowl; and 2) Miami (Fla.) also matching that figure from 2000 to 2002, ending in a controversial 31–24 double overtime loss to Ohio State in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl. But those clubs were still 13 victories short of even tying Bud Wilkinson's squad's streak.
Wilkinson's 1953 team opened the season with a 28–21 home loss to Notre Dame and a 7–7 tie at Pittsburgh.
"Against Notre Dame, we had a lot of sophomores playing," said former OU lineman J.D. Roberts, who won the Outland Trophy that season as a senior. "We actually played fairly well. ... It was a day game, very hot ... we held them to less yards rushing than they had against anyone else all year ... we had a chance to tie it at the end and we dropped a pass. We moved the ball pretty well."
But at Pittsburgh, the offense was bogged down. There was no reason to believe the next week, against Texas, a 47-game winning streak would begin.
"We did know one thing," Roberts said. "We had a damn good freshman class. ... We would scrimmage them some, and they had some fine football players ... Jerry Tubbs, Jimmy Harris, Tommy McDonald."
Without those freshmen (who were not eligible to play) in 1953, the streak started with a 19–14 victory over the Longhorns when OU jumped out to a 19–0 lead. The Sooners' Merrill Green returned a punt 80 yards for a touchdown, and Oklahoma withstood two late Texas scores. The Longhorns couldn't overcome five fumbles. OU shut out five opponents the rest of the 1953 season and upset already-crowned national champion Maryland 7–0 in the Orange Bowl.
In 1954 halfback McDonald, linebacker-center-fullback Tubbs, and quarterback Jimmy Harris took over and posted a 31–0 record during their three seasons. Oklahoma finished 10–0 in 1954 but behind No. 1 Ohio State and No.2 UCLA in both major polls. The Sooners won back-to-back national titles in 1955 (11–0) and 1956 (10–0). And while these were well-oiled offensive machines, the Sooners shut out 11 of 21 opponents over those 1955 and 1956 seasons.
Even with Harris, McDonald, and Tubbs gone, Oklahoma was still formidable. The Sooners won their first seven games of the 1957 season before playing host to Notre Dame on November 16 in Norman. Second-ranked Oklahoma had scored in 123-straight contests, was averaging 300 yards rushing a game, and was favored by nearly three touchdowns.
Oklahoma moved down to the Irish 13 on its first possession, was thwarted, and never got any closer to scoring for the rest of the game. The Sooners managed just 98 yards rushing, and OU coach Bud Wilkinson said he was prepared to accept a 0–0 tie when the Sooners couldn't get anything going in the third period. In the fourth quarter Notre Dame went on a 20-play, 80-yard drive and scored on a fourth-down, three-yard run by Dick Lynch on a pitch from quarterback Bob Williams with 3:50 left.
Williams intercepted an OU pass in the end zone with less than a minute to go to wrap up the victory for Notre Dame, which had lost to OU 40–0 the previous season in South Bend.
"We prepared for them in detail," said Fighting Irish coach Terry Brennan after he had been carried off the field on a couple of his players' shoulders. "We didn't have a whole lot of speed, and we tried to be as basic as possible. There were only four or five basic plays [for Oklahoma's offense] — and if you stopped them, you had a chance to win. The big thing was to stop their running game."
Fans cried in the stands. Many in attendance rose in appreciation to give the Sooners a standing ovation at the game's end. Many just stayed in their seats in stunned disbelief long after the game. "It's just like death," said OU tackle Doyle Jennings. "But after it has happened, there is nothing you can do about it, so you might as well forget it."
McDonald, with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1957, gave his reaction when he found out about the end of the streak: "Stunned. I can imagine what he [Wilkinson] might have said, 'Now, do you see what you have done to yourselves? You have done it, are you happy?'"
The 47 Straight Victories
1953 (9–1–1)
Notre Dame / L / 28–21
at Pitt / T / 7–7
Texas / W / 19–14
Kansas / W / 45–0
Colorado / W / 27–20
Kansas State / W / 34–0
at Missouri / W / 14–0
Iowa State / W / 47–0
at Nebraska / W / 30–7
Oklahoma State / W / 42–7
Maryland / W / 7–0 (Orange Bowl)
1954 (10–0)
at California / W / 27–13
TCU / W / 21–16
Texas / W / 14–7
at Kansas / W / 65–0
Kansas State / W / 21–0
at Colorado / W / 13–6
at Iowa State / W / 40–0
Missouri / W / 34–13
Nebraska / W / 55–7
at Oklahoma State / W / 14–0
1955 (11–0)
at North Carolina / W / 13–6
Pittsburgh / W / 26–14
Texas / W / 20–0
Kansas / W / 44–6
Colorado / W / 56–21
at Kansas State / W / 40–7
at Missouri / W / 20–0
Iowa State / W / 52–0
at Nebraska / W / 41–0
Oklahoma State / W / 53–0
Maryland / W / 20–6 (Orange Bowl)
1956 (10–0)
North Carolina / W / 36–0
Kansas State / W / 66–0
Texas / W / 45–0
at Kansas / W / 34–12
at Notre Dame / W / 40–0
at Colorado / W / 27–19
at Iowa State / W / 44–0
Missouri / W / 67–14
Nebraska / W / 54–6
at Oklahoma State / W / 53–0
1957 (10–1)
at Pittsburgh / W / 26–0
Iowa State / W / 40–14
Texas / W / 21–7
Kansas / W / 47–0
Colorado / W / 14–13
At Kansas State / W / 13–0
At Missouri / W / 39–14
Notre Dame / L / 7–0
at Nebraska / W / 32–7
Oklahoma State / W / 53–6
Duke / W / 48–21 (Orange Bowl)
1956 National Title Team
Entering the 1956 season, the Sooners were riding a 30-game winning streak and holding the No. 1 ranking in college football. And this perhaps was the most dominating season in Oklahoma football history. Oklahoma dropped out of the No. 1 spot twice during the regular season but regained the top spot late in the season and held off all challengers.
The 1956 campaign, with halfback Tommy McDonald and center Jerry Tubbs returning for their senior seasons, got off to a rousing start with a 36–0 walloping of North Carolina in Norman. The Sooners had managed only a seven-point victory over the Tar Heels the previous season. Wilkinson's best team followed that up with shut outs of Kansas State (66–0) and bitter rival Texas (45–0). That Longhorns loss was UT coach Ed Price's final appearance at the Cotton Bowl.
As good an offensive team as the 1955 OU squad was, the 1956 team was even better. Once again, Oklahoma led the nation in total offense (481.7 yards a game), 71 yards better than 1955. Once again, the Sooners were the best rushing team in the land (391 yards a game), more than 62 yards better than the previous season. And once again, OU topped the country in scoring (46.6 ppg), about 10 more points a game than in 1955. End Ed Bell, back Clendon Thomas, tackles Ed Gray and Tom Emerson, and guard Bill Krisher were other stars of that team.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 100 Things Oklahoma Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Steve Richardson. Copyright © 2014 Steve Richardson. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xv
1 Bud Wilkinson 1
2 Barry Switzer 4
3 47 Straight 7
4 1956 National Title Team 11
5 Bob Stoops 14
6 Billy Vessels 16
7 The Selmons 20
8 Billy Sims 23
9 Game of the Century 27
10 Joe Washington 30
11 1955 National Tide Team 33
12 Oklahoma-Georgia Lawsuit 36
13 1974 National Title Team 38
14 2000 National Title Team 41
15 Bennie Owen 43
16 Sam Bradford 45
17 1975 National Title Team 48
18 1985 National Title Team 50
19 Prentice Gautt 53
20 1950 National Title Team 57
21 Jason White 59
22 Joe Castiglione 62
23 Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium 63
24 Keith Jackson 66
25 Tommy McDonald 69
26 Bedlam 73
27 Sooner Magic 76
28 Greg Pruitt 77
29 Stoops' Record 79
30 Oklahoma-Nebraska Series 80
31 Steve Owens 85
32 Jim Weatherall 87
33 Staying in the Big 12 89
34 1971 Sooners 91
35 Cleaning Up After Barry 93
36 Roy Williams 95
37 Oklahoma! 97
38 J.D. Roberts 99
39 OU's Orange Bowl Legacy 102
40 Mascots, Colors, Names, and Trophies 104
41 Jammal Brown 107
42 Keeping the OU-Texas Game in Dallas 109
43 "Spot" Geyer 111
44 The Boz 113
45 Chuck Fairbanks 116
46 OU's Dark Side 118
47 OU's First Bowl Team 120
48 Claude Reeds 123
49 OU's 1948 and 1949 Teams 124
50 Landry's Shootouts 126
51 The Kick 128
52 Bummer Sooner (USC Belts OU in BCS Title Game) 130
53 Jerry Tubbs 132
54 A Change at Quarterback 134
55 Darrell Royal 137
56 Torn Osborne 139
57 Paul Young 141
58 2008 BCS Controversy 143
59 Wilkinson vs. Royal in 1958 145
60 The Bomb Game 148
61 Headington Hall 149
62 2002 Rose Bowl Team 151
63 1963 Oklahoma-Texas Game 153
64 Othello's Table of Truth 155
65 Adrian Peterson 157
66 Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame 160
67 Officiating Controversies 162
68 Riverboat Gambler Bob 165
69 Jim Owens 167
70 Sooner Schooner 169
71 RUF/NEKS 171
72 Jack Jacobs 172
73 Barry Switzer Center 174
74 Bud's Strategies 176
75 Pride of Oklahoma Band 178
76 Spy Game 181
77 Peter Gardere 183
78 Troy Aikman 185
79 OU-Texas at the State Fair 187
80 Eddie Crowder 189
81 Walter "Waddy" Young 192
82 Harold Keith 194
83 Bob's Steak & Chop House 196
84 Quarterback Shuffle 198
85 Transition Years 200
86 Port Robertson 203
87 Bob Kalsu 204
88 OU's Cradle of Coaches 206
89 Oklahoma's Lost Gator Bowl 209
90 Developing Linemen 211
91 OU's Great Two-Way Players 213
92 Top OU Running Backs 215
93 Top OU Quarterbacks 218
94 Bedlam in 2013 221
95 Top OU Linebackers 223
96 Top OU Receivers 226
97 Top OU Defensive Backs 228
98 Top OU Defensive Linemen 231
99 Top OU Offensive Linemen 235
100 Sweet Sugar Bowl Redemption 237
Sources 239