Sooner fans should thank Ricky Foggie – twice
Published: 10/24/2008 11:10 AM
Last Modified: 10/24/2008 11:10 AM
How different would Oklahoma football look these days if it weren't for Ricky Foggie?
OK, probably not much. Maybe just a number change.
Who is Ricky Foggie, you ask?
"I was Ricky Foggie," says OU quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel. "Guy from Minnesota. Oklahoma fans might remember him. They went up and put it on him a couple times. That was my guy."
Growing up in Aberdeen, S.D., Heupel didn't have a lot of football role models in his own backyard. So he looked to the nearby Golden Gophers of Minnesota, where Foggie had arrived as an option quarterback from South Carolina to play for Lou Holtz. Heupel picked his own jersey No. 14 because it was the same number as Foggie.
"I was running the option in the back yard," Heupel says. "Never came true for me."
Minnesota went 4-7 during Foggie's first year in 1984, but the Gophers finished the year with an upset over Iowa, a team quarterbacked by Chuck Long and featuring a fiery young graduate assistant named Bob Stoops.
The next year, Minnesota hosted a powerful Oklahoma team (it was OU's season opener, on Sept. 28!) and lost only 13-7. Foggie was good in that game, and the Gophers went 6-5 and got to their first bowl game in eight years. Holtz went to Notre Dame that year, but Foggie returned and led Minnesota to another 6-5 bowl season (the return game to Norman was not pretty: Sooners 63, Gophers zilch).
Now fast-forward to 2008, when little kids and grown men and women go to OU games wearing No. 14. They could be just as well dusting off old Josh Heupel jerseys as paying homage to current QB Sam Bradford. Bradford said he chose to wear No. 14 in part because of the success Heupel had at OU in 1999 and 2000.
But Bradford never ran around pretending he was Heupel.
"I remember dropping back and it was more, 'Sam Bradford drops back to pass … Oklahoma Sooners win the national championship!'
"Something like that."
– John E. Hoover
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
