COLUMN
Can’t tell if I’m up early or up late at this point, but for whatever reason, probably around 3 or 4 a.m., I started watching OU’s 2012 win over Texas.
You remember. The big one, 65-21.
First of all, what an absolute unit Blake Bell was. He seemed like a giant when I met him in high school, and he just got bigger and bigger until Texas had no way to stop him. And Trey Millard bouncing off Longhorns like they’re still in elementary school? That wasn't fair at all.
That OU team had swagger — on offense and defense.
Of course, that YouTube rabbit hole led me down a dozen others and now it’s 6 a.m. and I got things to do. What a life.
Today’s game — no wait, yesterday’s; I guess like a lot of the Oklahoma-Texas weekends since I joined the Sooner press corps in 2004, I don’t think I’ve slept. Apparently, some kind of odd, euphoric state is ignited in me when Bevo and Boomer and Sooner are in the same building.
So, this may be coherent, or it may not. Just saying.
Anyway, the game itself was an absolute riot. Again, for whatever reason, what stood out to me were some incredible plays going into the left corner of the south end zone — the OU end — most notably where Peyton Bowen finished off his pick six early in the fourth quarter that put Oklahoma in front 24-17 in what became a 27-24 OU victory.
That reminded me of so many other amazing moments I’ve been fortunate enough to cover in person over the previous 22 seasons.
Like Nic Anderson’s game-winner from Dillon Gabriel in 2023, or Kennedy Brooks’ game-ender in ‘21, or Demontre Hurst and Jamell Fleming’s defensive TDs in a 55-17 blowout in ‘11 (David King’s scoop and score went the other direction), or DeMarco Murray’s hurdle over Joe Jon Finley for a 65-yard TD in ‘07. There were others, I know.
(While I'm thinking about it, I guess I’m still waiting for someone with the City of Dallas to formally rename the Cotton Bowl end zones in Jermaine Gresham’s honor. The guy practically lived there for three years. Both ends. But that’s for another column.)
This year finally ended my streak of being at Fair Park to watch and write and talk about the Red River drama and how it unfolded. For 22 years, I was ringside for every one of these heavyweight classics.
This year, I stepped back. This year, I merely helped with our coverage from my home in Tulsa County. Watched the broadcast on my big Samsung TV, wrote the OU Stock Report, proofread as many stories as I could get to, formatted and uploaded videos, helped with whatever game coverage wherever I could. Just me, my laptop and a Red Bull, parked for 11 uninterrupted hours.
Hey, some things never change.
(Although at some point after halftime, Mrs. Hoover brought me a delicious pot pie from some chicken joint outta Kentucky, which I inhaled during an upload.)
Big picture: I’m still almost in shock that it was me was in the press box for each of the previous 22 Red River Shootouts/Blowouts. Me? OU writer at the Tulsa World? The Franchise? On SI? No way. I had big dreams as a kid, but nothing this big.
(OK, the astronaut one and the NFL wide receiver one and the rock star one were bigger, but hey, I was just a kid. And you know, maybe I haven’t given up on the last one just yet.)
From Adrian Peterson’s breakout to Ryan Reynolds’ heartbreak, from Baker Mayfield’s throw to Mark Andrews that sent the Texas cheer squad into an Edvard Munch painting to the physics-defying, utterly impossible magic between Caleb Williams and Marvin Mims, I feel like I’d seen everything.
Until yesterday.
I picked a great one to step away from, eh? What a game. I’ve never been good at guessing. Probably why my college football picks have never been worth much in actual U.S. currency.
But let’s just say it: What a gutsy performance by Brent Venables’ defense, and eventually his offense, and certainly his special teams. They did what very few of us thought they could do: rally the TEAM — the whole team — to an unforgettable win over their hated (and No. 1-ranked) rival. How good would that feel as a competitor?
Nothing but respect for the way BV continues to stare down adversity, like it’s crossing the street, wearing a dark hoodie, walking right at him. He just sets his jaw, clenches his fists and says, “Come get some.” Brent is a menace to hard times. He thrives as an underdog. More of us who pretend to predict game scores should have recognized that by now. Don’t ever write him off. In retrospect, was Texas primed for an upset? Against an OU squad backed into a corner? Hell yes.
I would have once again enjoyed the sights and the sounds and the smells of the State Fair of Texas (most of them, anyway), and certainly the spectacle of how the game unfolded inside Cotton Bowl Stadium. It was pure cinema.
Of course I would have enjoyed it. Lately I’ve become very intentional about not having a bad day. And covering a game? Come on. Pure bliss, this job is, I don’t care or how long you’ve been doing it, or how hot or how cold it is, or how far you’ve got to drive — although I do take issue with today’s airline travel.
(Which is why I recently drove 3,800 miles and spent 22 nights in hotels between Ann Arbor and Athens — with detours to Lake Huron, Cleveland, Niagara Falls, Pittsburgh and an auto repair shop in suburban Atlanta — and loved almost every mile of it.)
This job is physically taxing, sure. After 42 years, my body and my mind are feeling every rental car, every hotel bed, every airport, and certainly every pothole and construction crack on the Turner Turnpike.
Just to cover OU-Texas: after driving (from Tulsa) to DFW and getting broken hotel sleep, you face an entire day trudging through DFW/game day traffic from your hotel to the heavily guarded Fair Park gates to your designated media lot through the fairgrounds peripheries through the crowds of both thrill-seekers and college football fans (and haters of Longhorns or Sooners), then grinding your sports writer grind for a minimum of 10-12, highly focused, sometimes unbroken hours of injury news and radio hits and actual football and postgame interviews (not all of them pleasant) and video uploads and podcasts, only to then trudge back to your car and, if you’re lucky, exit Dallas on a Saturday night still among the living, drive home (to Tulsa) that night, usually arriving between 4 and 7 a.m., depending on what time the game kicked off.
Which is apparently why I’m still awake and wired from Saturday afternoon. Apparently OU-Texas Saturday has become part of my DNA. (I swear, it was just one Red Bull.)
But this is no call for pity. If anything, this would be more of a boast. This job rocks. I love it. Always have. I never seriously considered another line of work since I was 15 years old and joined the high school paper. If you love it like most of us do, you wear it proudly. All of it. The good and the bad. (There's so little bad.)
The whole day taken together, an OU-Texas Saturday simply drenches you, seeps into your pores, into your very soul, or at least your nose, like the smell of stale beer and funnel cakes and fresh cut grass and Bevo — yeah, even Bevo — and, ultimately, around here, we all just call it football in mid-October.
It’s glorious. Certainly more joy from any realistic career than I could have ever expected.
But it’s not just football. It’s college football, celebrated and displayed in its highest form: Oklahoma versus Texas. The Red River Whatever. Let’s get it on.
Then, by the time you’re on the Indian Nations Turnpike, headed back to Tulsa, and it’s 4 a.m. and you’re not sure if your next priority should be to fill one tank first or empty the other, that’s when you realize that all those odors — the sweet, the sour, the pungent, the bovine — and all those sounds — the midway rides, the perfect thud of the opening kickoff, the almost constant roar of the precisely seated 50-50 crowd, even those damn shotguns — have faded from the front of your brain and slipped into where you keep the long-term stuff.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s how the senses work. What am I, a neurologist?
(No. The answer is no. But I recently have gotten to know several neurologists, and they do seem pretty smart.)
But as you relive the game — either in your mind's eye while driving solo into the darkness or talking it out with a carload of colleagues — and you recognize that those sensations have faded, you also realize, sadly, that you won’t get to enjoy that experience again for another 12 months.
Oh there’s always another game, right? Kentucky’s coming to Norman next week. That’ll be fun for all. Welcome, Big Blue Nation and all the former Sooners who now call Lexington home. After that, another SEC first, a trip to Starkvegas to take on Mississippi State and BV’s old pal Jeff Lebby and a few more former Sooners. Trips to Florida and Missouri look like a ton of fun, and the Rebels and Aggies are back in Norman come November.
But let’s be real. There’s nothing like OU-Texas. Not on any level of football. Me, I love the fair, the food and the football — the contemporary stuff, of course, but I’m a sucker for college football history, and nobody does it better than the Sooners and Longhorns. I have a spread of books three feet wide on my bookshelf dedicated to OU football, and every one of them is steeped with immortal tales of Red River hatred.
You almost feel bad for fans of the other rivalries, that they'll never quite comprehend this thing.
I was literally thrilled yesterday for my Sooners On SI staff of Brady Trantham, Ryan Aber, Carson Field and co-publisher Ryan Chapman. To have four staffers in the house for such a monumental game shows how far this little lifeboat has carried me since I jumped on board in March of 2020 — yeah, the very day the pandemic shut down the sports world.
“Oh, you need some sports to illustrate? Well, sorry, we’re turning out all the lights, chaining up all the doors and who knows if we’ll ever come back? Good luck!”
We survived, we thrived, and we grew. Now we’re in a place where I can miss an OU-Texas game (even a classic!) and, despite being a bit of a control freak, not have a panic attack that the whole thing will go up in flames without me. Not with these guys on my team.
When I got very lucky and connected this staff together last year, Brady added a new voice and a fresh, new way of looking at the beat we’d not had before. Ryan Aber brought an intimate knowledge of the beat and a calm expertise after a dozen or so years covering OU at The Oklahoman. Carson’s enthusiasm, work ethic and skills as a writer, photographer and videographer are unsurpassed. And Ryan Chapman has become the glue that holds the whole thing together as well as our compass.
Me, I’m still the boss. Still the publisher. But I’m in a place now where I no longer feel compelled to be at every game, every press conference, every practice. Generals don’t need to stand on the front line when they’re surrounded by an army this good.
The old me missed being in Dallas yesterday. I mean, damn, what a game. But the new me has accepted what is and what will be.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not going anywhere just yet. Like I said, I’m still the boss. There’s still half a football season to play. Way too much work to do just yet.
Fact is, this started out as a tweet about 3 1/2 hours ago. Now it’s a full-blown personal column. So, if you're still with me after 2,100 words, I'm really sorry about that. I should have stopped at 280. Just know that I am grateful.
Maybe it’s because I’m so wordy — a fact I learned the red-letter way as a freshman in both Comp 1 and Mass Communications.
Or maybe I’m just enjoying another post-OU-Texas manic Sunday at now 9:30 in the morning. If you are still reading, maybe that's what you're experiencing, too. I get the feeling a lot of folks north of the Red River — even crusty old sports writers — are feeling a similar buzz.
But seems like, no matter who wins or who loses, it happens to me every year — apparently, whether I’m in the stadium or not.
This year, I just had a little extra time to write about it.
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