I Love Texas/I Hate Oklahoma

—

To the memories of my parents, Ray and Doris Davis, former Texas residents, for allowing me to pursue any path I chose. Also to Dad for sitting me down in front of the TV to watch the 1969 Game of the Century between the Longhorns and Arkansas. His Razorbacks lost, but the memories and lifelong attachment I have to the old Southwest Conference still remain.

—P.D.

Contents

I Love Texas

Introduction

1. We Love Licking The Sooners

2. We Love Licking Everyone Else, Too

3. Longhorns We Love

4. We Love Longhorns Coaches (Well, Most Of Them)

5. We Love Texas Tradition

6. We Love Longhorns Lore

7. We Love Austin And All Of Texas

I Hate Oklahoma

Introduction

1. We Hate Losing To The Sooners

2. We Love To Hate Oklahoma Players

3. Oklahoma Oddities (Besides Their Offspring)

4. We Hate Oklahoma Coaches

5. We Hate the Titles the Sooners Have Won (but Love the Ones They’ve Blown)

6. We Hate Norman, Everyone Named Norman, And All Oklahoma Fans

About the Author

Sources

Acknowledgments

Introduction

WHY TEXAS vs. OU IS a BIG DEAl

everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes the state’s favorite college football team and its mascot. The Texas Longhorns have been the focus of fandom for real Texans since 1893.

The University of Texas at Austin is the largest college in a state full of big schools. Its graduates are spread throughout the world, and the school’s burnt orange and white colors are displayed by fans everywhere when fall and football return. The sport is worshipped in Texas, from peewee leagues to high school all the way up to the NFL. But nothing grabs the attention and the spirit of the Lone Star State like the Texas Longhorns. Saturday afternoons and nights are like fervent religious revivals, complete with big tents and fine eats. Nobody parties like a Longhorn! And since 1900, the biggest party/game on the schedule, year in and year out, has been what is known as the Red River Shootout with the Oklahoma Sooners. The politically correct crowd has tried to call it the Red River Rivalry since 2005, but we know what it is and what it will always be called. Fans of the Longhorns want to hold on to their tradition—and their guns.

There is nothing sweeter for a Texas fan than watching UT beat up on the Okies.

Why is this game so important? To start, Longhorns and Sooners have to mix with each other all year. They work together, go to church together, and in some homes in which family loyalties are divided between the two schools, they even sleep together! In fact, for some families, seating arrangements at holiday meals must be carefully planned to avoid incidents, as when a joke like this is made at one school’s expense: What do OU graduates call UT grads? Boss. That one joke has led to more domestic disputes and confusion than Father’s Day in Norman.

The two fan bases even mingle in prison, but only when the guards bring incarcerated Sooners their three square meals a day or stop them from taking shivs and shanking each other in the shower.

Neither of these teams has ever lost this game and gone on to win the national championship. Talk about winner-take-all.

Only two other college football games across the nation are similar to this rivalry in that the contest is played at a neutral site and the tickets are split between the two universities: the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville and the Army-Navy game in Washington, D.C. If the Gators-Bulldogs game is known as the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, then the Red River Rivalry has to be the World’s Largest Barbecue Cook-Off.

USA Today once posited the opinion that the Texas-Oklahoma game is better than the Cocktail Party because it is held in a better city (Dallas) and has a greater tradition. (And fewer fans wearing jorts.) Dallas is so great, it beat out a city with a beach!

The Texas-OU game has become so huge that Jay Leno of NBC’s The Tonight Show even sent his entertainment reporter/monkey Ross the Intern to cover the game, as well as the Texas State Fair, which is held next to the Cotton Bowl. He was extremely impressed by two things during his visit: playing drums with the Pride of Oklahoma Marching Band (although for the life of me, I don’t know why that’s so impressive) and the sheer monstrous obesity of the average Sooners fan.

Enough corn dogs are consumed during this fair to circumnavigate the earth five times over. For you Oklahoma students, just look up the word circumnavigate in the dictionary. You can borrow one from your neighbor flying the UT flag.

The two teams opened up the 20th century with their first meeting in 1900, which was easily won by Texas, 28–2. Thus began over 100 years of fierce battles. Every year, fans of both teams line up to verbally abuse each other. On the 365th day, they actually play the game, too.

Read on and you will discover surprising, bizarre, and useful truths about our beloved Longhorns.

DID YOU KNOW?

* The team colors of Texas were once orange and maroon!

* Texas once had a coach who sleepwalked to his death.

* UT had seven head football coaches during their first seven seasons.

* UT players used to wear britches made from moles.

* UT once fired a coach who had lost only one game during his entire career.

* One UT head coach preferred watching a bullfight over coaching.

* Another coach played with the team, then disappeared with the players to Mexico.

* Texas once lost a game after the other team scored a touchdown, but the final score was 4–0.

* Texas once went seven seasons without kicking a field goal.

* The Longhorns once had a New York City lawyer as head coach, as well as a coach who was a professor from Germany.

* One Texas head coach won one for the Gipper as a player for Knute Rockne, then later died fighting the Japanese in World War II.

* One Longhorns head coach once coached at Texas A&M and LSU…at the same time.

1. We Love Licking The Sooners

In 1992 a blue-ribbon committee (likely named after the beer they drank at the meeting) decided to celebrate the first century of Longhorns football by picking the top games in the storied history of the Texas-Oklahoma gridiron war. They came up with what they called the best and greatest games of the Red River Rivalry—or, as real men call it, the Red River Shootout.

We’ve added the great games since 1992, as well, of which there have been many.

October 11, 1958

Texas 15 | Oklahoma 14

According to the aforementioned PBR committee, this was the first great game at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

Oklahoma was ranked second in the nation at the time, while Texas was just 16th and a 13-point underdog. The Bud Wilkinson– led Sooners had dominated the previous six meetings, as well as nine out of the last 10.

But this time, things were different from the start. Halfback Rene Ramirez hit George Blanch with a 10-yard touchdown pass to open the game for Texas. A surprise two-point conversion then brought the score to 8–0, and that score held until the third quarter, when Oklahoma brought it to 8–6. During the fourth quarter, Longhorn Mike Dowdle fumbled and Sooner Jim Davis (not the Jim Davis who draws the comic strip Garfield) grabbed it and ran 24 yards for the go-ahead touchdown, bringing the score to 14–8, OU. Things looked bleak for Texas, which hadn’t had a first down in the second half, when it got the ball on its own 26 with just 6:50 left to play.

Quarterback Vince Matthews, who had replaced Bobby Lackey, drove the Longhorns down to the 7-yard line. At that point, Coach Darrell Royal put Lackey back in the game, who promptly got the ball to Bobby Bryant with a jump pass, and the game was tied. Lackey added the extra point to give the Longhorns a 15–14 lead with three minutes to go, then iced his status as the hero of the game by intercepting an OU pass to seal the victory.

The win sparked a state-wide celebration so fierce that the plane carrying the team back to Austin had to circle the landing field for 15 minutes as police pushed the revelers back to safety. Charles Lindbergh, eat your heart out.

October 12, 1963

Texas 28 | Oklahoma 7

This second momentous clash occurred five years later. This time UT was ranked No. 2 and OU No. 1.

Running back Tommy Ford led Texas to a 14–0 halftime lead, and they never looked back, easily taking a 28–7 win on their way to their first ever national title while preventing Oklahoma from winning their fourth. Coach Royal was named UPI Coach of the Week and Scott Appleton was named AP Lineman of the Week for his 18 tackles. It was also a coming-out party for sophomore linebacker Tommy Nobis, who would later become the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft and a legendary player for the Atlanta Falcons.

Asked about 5’9" tailback Ford, Royal was quoted in Sports Illustrated magazine as saying, If he didn’t ram in there so hard, he might be six feet tall. So maybe not everything is big in Texas. But it’s still excellent.

October 12, 1968

Texas 26 | Oklahoma 20

A five-year interval passed before the next truly memorable Red River Shootout in Dallas, at least from UT’s perspective—and what other one is there? This one might be called The Wishbone Game, because it was here that the new offense—which up until then had had only mixed success, with a 1–1–1 record—became the signature of Longhorns football (before OU copied it, of course).

Texas had put in the wishbone offense after three lackluster offensive seasons. Coach Royal put defensive coach Emory Bellard in charge of coming up with a new offense to surprise opponents. What he invented changed the game.

Both Royal and Bellard had been impressed by the option offense run by Texas A&M Coach Gene Stallings in the Aggies’ bowl win over the Crimson Tide after the 1967 season. Bear Bryant himself would make the switch to the wishbone offense—with great success—just a few years later.

After an off-season of tinkering with the offense—sometimes using family members as stand-in players—Bellard came up with a plan. First of all, he would need a bigger family. And better medical insurance.

The wishbone offense made its first appearance in the season opener against Houston. Sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz took one look at the Y formation and said it looked like a wishbone. The name could have been worse—one reporter wanted to call it the pulleybone. That reporter went on to obscurity.

In the wishbone formation, the quarterback basically makes quick, sometimes dangerous decisions about where the ball will go and who will get it on the fly. He can keep it himself, give it to the fullback, toss it to a tailback, fake it to one or both of them, fall down and cry, or throw it downfield. And with the defense concentrating most of their firepower trying to stop the running game, this strategy frees up the receivers to face only man-to-man coverage.

All this happens while the quarterback is running down the offensive line, looking to see how the defense is reacting. This may seem like a lot for a QB to think about in a split second, but imagine how confusing it was to someone trying to defend against it when it was brand spanking new. To defenses, it looked like an octopus with eight footballs. It was as if the Longhorns had taken 80 years of college football tradition and chucked it to the side like, well, like a wishbone quarterback tossing a football to a tailback. It was so revolutionary, Sam Houston would have loved it.

Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal (left) confers with assistant coach and wishbone innovator Emory Bellard after Texas scored a touchdown to go ahead of Oklahoma late in the fourth quarter in 1968, holding on to win 26–20.

Texas, coming off a 31–3 wipeout of Okie State, entered the game against the Sooners looking to continue their new offense’s success. But it was hit and miss for the first three quarters, and with just 2:37 left in the game, the Longhorns found themselves down 20–19 on their own 15-yard line. James Street stepped under center and immediately completed four straight passes, placing Texas at the Oklahoma 21 with only 55 seconds left.

That’s when fullback Steve Worster took over the game. He ran 14 yards on the next play, then seven on the next for the winning touchdown. The wishbone had arrived, and Texas had beaten the Sooners 26–20.

The Longhorns would go on to win their next 28 games in a row, and 30 altogether.

Royal would run the wishbone offense until he retired in 1977, after two more national championships and six straight Cotton Bowl appearances. It would lead to a record of 80 wins, 19 losses, and two ties for the Longhorns under Royal since installing the wishbone. Bellard would later use it during his exile as head coach at A&M and Mississippi State, as well.

Coach Royal would describe it as an offense always running downhill at the defense, and the only way they could stop it was to come up and have one hell of a collision.

October 8, 1977

Texas 13 | Oklahoma 6

This game, when the No. 5 Longhorns faced the No. 2 Sooners, marked the end of a six-game winless streak against Oklahoma, and it was also the first season during which a Longhorn won a Heisman Trophy. The game got off to a horrible start for Texas when both starting quarterback Mark McBath and his replacement, John Aune, suffered season-ending injuries. In stepped junior Randy McEachern, who wasn’t even listed in the UT media guide before the season.

But McEachern wasn’t fazed, immediately driving the Longhorns 80 yards for a touchdown just before the half for a 10–3 Texas lead. (Russell Erxleben had kicked a 64-yard field goal for their first three points.)

Erxleben then hit a 58-yarder to put them up 13–6 with a little over eight minutes remaining. OU then began a 76-yard drive that stalled on the Texas 4-yard line when quarterback Thomas Lott was stopped on fourth down by All-Americans Johnnie Johnson and Brad Shearer. But the Longhorns could only gain two yards on their own possession, and Erxleben had to punt from his own end zone.

Russell came through again by belting a 69-yard punt that saved the day and a 13–6 Texas victory. Running back Earl Campbell helped build his Heisman-winning résumé with 124 yards rushing on 23 carries, including one on a 24-yard rumble for the Longhorns’ only touchdown.

October 14, 1989

Texas 28 | Oklahoma 24

This time around the Longhorns were trying to end a streak of losses to the Sooners that stretched all the way back to ’85.

The prospects of ending that skid didn’t seem good in Cotton Bowl Stadium that day against the 15th-ranked Sooners. A halftime lead had evaporated, and suddenly Oklahoma was up 24–20 with 3:42 left.

What happened then was reminiscent of James Street’s four completions with the game on the line in 1968. UT freshman quarterback Peter Gardere started at his own 34-yard line and completed four passes down to the OU 25 with a little over two minutes remaining. Gardere then hit Johnny Walker (what a great name) with a 25-yard missile for the winning touchdown and a 28–24 victory.

Wayne Clements added two field goals, Mical Padgett picked up a fumbled punt and ran 44 yards for another score, and Tony Jones also caught a touchdown pass.

Gardere would go on to become the first QB in Longhorns history to beat the Sooners four times. His photo could be found in post offices throughout Oklahoma after that performance.

October 13, 1990

Texas 14 | Oklahoma 13

For the second straight year, a fourth-quarter victory drive was the modus operandi of the Longhorns as UT faced No. 4 Oklahoma. (For you Sooners, modus operandi is a Latin phrase, but don’t worry yourselves about it—y’all have enough trouble with English.)

Texas took over at its own 9-yard line with 7:12 remaining, having not made much of a dent in the OU defense throughout the game.

Freshman Butch Hadnot was the main cog in a 12-play drive that took UT down to the 16-yard line, where they faced a fourth-and-seven. Gardere was saved from a sack by a great block by halfback Phil Brown, which allowed him time to complete a 16-yard touchdown pass to Keith Cash. Clements then hit the extra point for the lead with two minutes to go.

But the Sooners didn’t give up, driving all the way down to the Texas 29-yard line before R.D. Lashar missed a 46-yard field-goal attempt wide left. He was subsequently left off the team bus.

October 8, 1994

Texas 17 | Oklahoma 10

Redshirt freshman quarterback James Brown (gotta love a QB named after the Godfather of Soul) began an incredible career by going 17 of 22 for 148 passing yards and throwing a touchdown in this contest between 15th-ranked Texas and 16th-ranked Oklahoma. He also ran for 51 yards and a score. Brown would go on to become the all-time passing leader at UT.

Once again the game came down to the final drive, but this time it was OU driving.

The Longhorns were up 17–10 with 43 seconds left when the Sooners lined up for a fourth-and-goal play at Texas’ 3-yard line. Oklahoma signal-caller Garrick McGee appeared to start an option play to the right, but then surprised everyone by instead handing off to running back James Allen, who headed left.

Allen sprinted for the corner of the end zone and seemed sure to score when suddenly he was confronted by linebacker Robert Reed. (Not the Robert Reed who played the father on The Brady Bunch.) Reed turned Allen back inside after sensing the play was coming his way, making the right decision to stand his ground. This