OU-Texas was terrific, but not Big 12's best of 2008
Published: 6/9/2009 11:40 PM
Last Modified: 6/9/2009 11:40 PM
It seemed a simple enough request, made by Wendell Barnhouse of Big12sports.com – rank the top 10 football games involving Big 12 teams from the 2008 season. And it was, too, until I reached the top two slots.
Was the Big 12's best game OU-Texas or Texas Tech-Texas?
My first inclination was to go with Sooners-Longhorns. For three quarters, it was the college game of the year regardless of conference. It had the makings of Red River legend. Great players, notably quarterbacks Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy, made great plays. There was a special teams game-changer, a trick play that nearly turned the tide again, and an endzone interception not quite secured that would have made an OU folk hero out of Lamont Robinson.
The only thing missing? A photo finish. It's my belief that truly great games go down in history for how they end (see: the last two Super Bowl triumphs by the Steelers and Giants). When the Ryan Reynolds-less Sooners ran out of steam down in the Cotton Bowl, so did their epic contest with their archrival.
So I ranked Tech-Texas, despite falling short of OU-Texas for three quarters, number one. The one-two punch of Blake Gideon's dropped interception followed by Michael Crabtree's game-winning touchdown ranks as one of the most shocking I've ever seen, to say nothing of the tiebreaker chaos that sequence set in motion over the next several weeks.
I watched both plays under the west grandstand of Owen Field, in the very back of a mob of OU fans still glued to stadium monitors 45 minutes after the Sooners' victory over Nebraska. When Crabtree eluded the two Longhorns along the sideline and danced through the endzone, it sent the crowd into hysterics.
The only other time I've witnessed that kind of postgame euphoria outside the stadium was Oct. 28, 2000, the day OU beat Nebraska to become No. 1 again.
Reaction around the country probably wasn't quite that hysterical. But to see a game like that end like that, with the stakes as high as they were, had to send a charge through living rooms and bars nationwide. Enough, anyway, to catapult Tech-Texas past OU-Texas as the Big 12 game of the year, even if it wasn't quite as well-played.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
