In reality, the Red River Rivalry has not been a series of games. It is one game.
Each contest is a continuation of the year before — another engagement in a border war that has been waged for 107 years.
A run here. A pass there. A big play. A turnover. A kick.
They are jabs and cuts and headbutts in a slugfest to gain the momentum. To battle for the lead. To go at it with reckless abandon for 60 minutes in order to gain the lead on the scoreboard, followed by a 364-day time out, then followed by another four quarters of the same struggle.
And it is the way it should be — the best rivalry in college football.
Oklahoma Athletic Director Joe Castiglione best summed up the state of the Oklahoma-Texas game.
“There are just some things that are meant to be,” he said last year, during all the hullabaloo stirred up by talk about the talk of possible Big 12 dissolution.
Turned out all that talk about the Big 12 dying was baloney. People realized this rivalry is at the heart of the conference and the heart beat is pretty strong.
For four generations the Sooners and the Longhorns have done football battle and will tee it up again Saturday in the half crimson/half burnt orange Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas — home of the game since Herbert Hoover was president.
The game has been scratch and claw since the beginning — and we’re talking about the fans here. But, the rivalry has matured somewhat since I first began attending the game in 1978. Sure, there may be some UT hooligan who tosses beer on Sooner fans on the midway of Fair Park. Or, some redneck Okie who discards the wisdom against taunting a larger group of ‘horns in the West End on Friday night and discovers the detrimental consequences.
But the days of mass arrests of drunken college (and older) kids on Commerce Street are over.
That ended about the time the fan rivalry went from a wrestle between distant but hateful teen-aged cousins who try to out-do each other at the annual family reunion, to a continuing fight between a married couple who have built up resentments, sure — but the sex is really, really good.
These programs showed they need each other to have success. They are the gold star programs of the conference that bring in all the money and the attention to the Big 12. Without them, the conference is the ACC.
This year the teams come into the game with one loss apiece. That doesn’t really matter. These teams could come into the game winless and the combat would be just as fierce.
Texas has found a quarterback in David Ash. He has one RRR game under his belt, learned from it and hopes to improve in the area that has hurt the Longhorns in recent Red River Rivalry clashes.
Oklahoma has two quarterbacks in one, in Landry Jones — a good one AND a bad one. Sooner fans can only hope the one that went to Lubbock last week gets on the bus to Dallas on Friday.
Both teams have emerging running games. Texas’ Joe Bergeron has moves and strength. Oklahoma’s Damien Williams does that too, and has shown he can catch a good pass and do something with it.
Defenses are still a bit suspect. Texas’ D hasn’t looked good, but to be fair we’re not sure who would look good against West Virginia’s nuclear powered offense that ran up 48 points on them in Austin on Saturday night.
Oklahoma’s defense dialed up a bunch of different blitzes in Lubbock that bumfuzzled Texas Tech’s Seth Doege. You can count on Mike Stoops to try the same against Ash. But in this game taking those chances could also get Oklahoma burned.
Anyway, we will be there at Fair Park on Saturday at 11 a.m., probably griping about the previous 10-mile, but three-hour, drive from the hotel through the mix-match of downtown streets that can only have been designed by a Texas traffic engineer on drugs.
While stuck in that traffic we might even be mooned again by the Texas frat boy who stuck his butt out a passenger window over in the next lane. Yeah. Lovely.
Heck, this year we might even forget about the last time the Fletcher Corny Dog (introduced at the Texas State Fair in the late 1930s) caused us massive indigestion (everything is big in Texas) and try one again. After all, we’ll have bought $50 worth of those fair coupons in order to get $30 worth of food. Might as well.
It will all be annoying and fun and good and bad and exciting. We would not miss it.
Like Joe said, there are some things that are just meant to be. And continue from year to year.
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