Perspective Piece: Texas-Oklahoma

“Losers walk the field.” The taunt rings out when remembering my youth. In a pick-up football game, if your squad surrendered a touchdown, it required you to walk in shame to the other end of the field to receive the kick-off. Sometimes childhood games revisit us as adults: no matter the victor in the Texas-Oklahoma game, the loser makes the drive home depressed.

The road travelled intensifies the woe. Interstate 35 is an inadequate stretch of highway, especially going south. The final gun at the Cotton Bowl unleashes a complete mobile division of exhausted and pissed-off college football mercenaries that would make George Patton proud.

For Sooners and Longhorns alike, sending the other guys home as discouraged losers is schadenfreude writ large. Nothing short of the national title makes us feel better.

And it’s never been better than it is right now. Not only are the Bob Stoops and Mack Brown administrations playing the modern game at an exceptionally high level, but the game setting still represents the best of old world football. The Cotton Bowl, even expanded and (allegedly) improved still towers over the Texas State Fairgrounds an art deco colossus, built before the age of modern conveniences: adequate restrooms for example. It’s dank and dark, crowded and claustrophobic. But to break the threshold of the spectator tunnels and take in that stunningly intimate expanse of green is an immersion in college football history of the first rank. The fans are split down the middle at the fifty-yard line, not on the sides; there is no polite mingling in the end zone and the noise thunders. The close quarters and taxing physical demands of the seating arrangement (forget leg room, this is not first class) leaves the game as a fan’s only creature comfort. The game is enough.

When Texas/Oklahoma moves to more modern quarters, and when Brown and Stoops move on down the road, we will remember these games as a remarkable end to a great era.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand my history—particularly from the Texas side (where we refer to it as “Texas/OU;” the Sooners call it “Oklahoma/Texas,” not much different than the Union and Confederacy insisting on separate names for various battles, exactly the same, actually). The game has been littered with national champion squads, hall of fame coaches and a half dozen Heisman winners. Nevertheless, today’s fans live in a true golden age of the Red River Shootout. I mean Rivalry. I mean Rivalry sponsored by Dr Pepper; check that, AT&T. You know what I mean.

The modern rivalry traces back to 1947 when Oklahoma hired a man named Bud Wilkinson to take over the reins. Texas dominated the series in the early century, 27-11-2 (the count since is 30-29-3, Texas), but the 31-year-old Wilkinson would change all of that. From 1948-1958, the Sooners went a preposterous 107-8-2, including a shared national title in 1950 and an NCAA record 47-game winning streak from 1954-1957, with national titles in 1955 and 1956.

Wilkinson took nine of ten from the Longhorns during one stretch, with the largely unranked Longhorns scoring only two touchdowns between 1954 and 1957. Having seen enough, Texas needed its own genius and turned to the 32-year-old Wilkinson protégé, Oklahoma native Darrell Royal. In one of the historical turning points in the series, Royal upset the second-ranked Sooners in 1958 to establish his new regime. Texas owned Oklahoma in the Royal years, going 12-1 during one stretch. National titles came in 1963 and 1969, sharing one with Nebraska in 1970.

The rivalry then took an ugly turn. The Bootlegger’s Boy himself, Barry Switzer, took over in 1973. Switzer quickly took the Sooners to titles in 1974 and 1975 and engendered hatred among Texas fans previously reserved for Santa Anna. “Will Rogers never met Barry Switzer,” the bumper stickers read. Switzer and Royal openly despised each other. Royal’s last game against Oklahoma in the 1976 season, an ugly 6-6 tie in an atmosphere poisoned by cheating allegations, literally made him ill.

Royal left the cupboard full for successor Fred Akers. Though Akers rarely gets credit for it, he put a few dents in Switzer’s armor, winning four out of five from 1977 to 1981. The Horns barely missed out on national titles in 1977 and 1983 before the bottom fell out of the Texas program. Switzer re-asserted the Sooner dominance and added another national title in 1985. The Longhorns closed out the decade barely registering an AP ranking.

By 1989, both teams were fading fast. Oklahoma never emerged as a national power under Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger nor John Blake. Texas walked in their own wilderness under David McWilliams and John Mackovic, whom the Orangebloods disliked almost as much as Barry Switzer.

In a bizarre four-season stretch, unranked Longhorn squads defeated nationally-ranked, though suspect, Sooner teams. The college football world barely noticed. Texas mustered only two ten-win seasons in the 1990s, both of which ended with ugly bowl losses and neither of which led to a sustained level of excellence. Oklahoma never finished better than 9-3 during the decade; the Blake era was particularly horrendous.

We can all thank two men for putting an end to that. Mack Brown quickly made Texas a winner, arriving in 1998 and convincing Ricky Williams to stay on for a Heisman-winning senior season that restored past glories and filled the coffers back to the top with merchandising and ticket revenue. Bob Stoops arrived the next season, taking his lumps through 1999 with a talented but underperforming bunch that would become the nucleus for an astonishing national title run in 2000.

The Texas/Oklahoma game in 2000 marked the first time in six years that both teams had come into the game nationally ranked. In another turning point in the series, the 63-14 Sooner carpet bombing left no doubt that Stoops was the rising star in the college coaching ranks. His Sooners would win the next four, including an ugly 65-13 afternoon in 2003. But just when Texas fans were convinced Mack Brown would never figure it out, the 2005 Horns found a redemptive killer instinct, trouncing a rebuilding Oklahoma 45-12 on the way to their own national title. Texas won the next season as well, even without Vince Young, despite the Brown detractors’ insistence that this was impossible. The 2007 game was total war, with the Sooners emerging 28-21.

The contrast of coaches provides perfect melodrama. Oklahoma fans have long despised the elitist provincialism of the Texas flagship. In Brown, the ultimate CEO coach, sporting a nice guy persona with a side of thin skin, they have their perfect foil.

For Texas fans, the relationship with Stoops is more straightforward. We hate his guts. He’s Barry Switzer boorish and Steve Spurrier smug; we haven’t had this much fun hating the opposition since Arkansas left for the SEC.

Both men are unquestionably at the top of their game. In contrast, Royal never really saw the best of Wilkinson and Switzer barely saw the best of Royal. The Akers/Switzer years come closest to great-on-great: seven years out of eight, both squads were ranked in the top dozen. Brown and Stoops have had both of their teams among the top 20 for eight out of the last nine. More to the point, since 1947, there have been ten games where both teams ranked in the top five. Four of them will have been played in the last eight years, including Saturday’s game.

Never before have both of these programs been national champions in the same decade. Not since the 1970s have both programs won as consistently as they have under Brown and Stoops. Putting those facts aside, one consideration rises above the rest in the historical context.

This is a conference game.

In poker parlance, Stoops and Brown are now “all in” in a way that Wilkinson and Switzer, Royal and Akers, never experienced. Indeed, nine times during the past rivalry, both Oklahoma and Texas left Dallas and emerged as conference champions, an impossibility today.

In this decade, no other team in the Big 12 South has even played for the conference title, making Texas/Oklahoma a de-facto playoff game. The conference title count represents the biggest question mark in Brown’s sterling career. Stoops leads five to one. Particularly galling to the Texas faithful, Oklahoma won the 2006 title even after losing to Texas. Texas had the same opportunity in 2001, backing in after an early loss to Oklahoma, but failed to close the deal in a disastrous outing against Colorado.

On Saturday, Brown’s Cotton Bowl legacy comes to a crossroads. A Texas upset leaves his personal record against Stoops at 4-6, but with wins in three of the last four. A loss, of course, and the ledger is 3-7, not quite John Cooper territory, but a sign that Stoops may have pulled up a comfortable chair in Mack’s kitchen.

Brown seethed at the lackadaisical play of his charges to close out 2007. His re-commitment to excellence showed in the Holiday Bowl against Arizona State and with the hire of the combustible Will Muschamp, who, quite frankly, resembles a young Bob Stoops in many ways. For his part, Stoops speaks in the clipped, confident tones he has always favored. He’s riding an awesome offensive machine and an aggressive defense into the next chapter of a series in which he holds the upper hand. However, losses in high-profile bowl games and the diminishing of the “Big Game Bob” reputation must grate on him.

Saturday will be the best game of the Stoops/Brown era. For my money, it’s never been any better than this.

Adam Jones is the author of Rose Bowl Dreams: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Football. He writes about college football every Monday at www.jonestopten.com.