NORMAN — Sometimes you have to see something at its absolute worst before you can really appreciate Oklahoma football.
I don’t have any doubt that September of 1996 was the absolute worst it could get for OU football. John Blake’s first season started with four straight losses to TCU, San Diego State, Tulsa and a thumping from Kansas to start the Big 12 Conference’s first season.
I was a student at OU then. People were wondering if OU would ever be a football power again, with good reason. There wasn’t one single thing the Sooners did well. It was almost embarrassing to watch.
Then the Texas game rolled around.
The cliché is that an OU football coach can get away with winning only one game a year, as long as it’s against Texas. No OU coach has ever tested that theory, but Blake came as close as any, going 3-8 in his first season.
But one of those wins happened to be a 30-27 overtime win against Texas at the Cotton Bowl.
That win came so far out of the blue, I don’t believe even players and coaches saw it coming. The celebration was national championship-like. Campus went wild. Classes were canceled the following Monday. Winning that one game erased all the memories of what had happened before it.
To me, it showed the true power of what I believe is the greatest rivalry in college football.
What happens that October afternoon in Dallas, can change minds and make people forget everything that preceeds it. After that game there was a real sense OU had made a good choice in hiring Blake.
That, of course, wasn’t the case. The 73-21 loss at home to Nebraska a few weeks later made that very obvious.
But every October, that Texas game is shown on ESPN Classic. I still watch it. I don’t even care about the plays. I just want to see those crowd shots. If you’re around OU long enough, you know winning is expected. That’s the one game I remember when no one expected it and it happened anyway.
