My Favorite College Football Games: Game 18

November 18, 1989: Nebraska - 42 Oklahoma - 25

The sports ticker was born from the stock ticker which was born from ticker tape that in the mid-to-late 1800s transmitted stock prices via telegraph wire. The first true sports ticker debuted on CNN’s Headline News channel in 1992 and was quickly followed by ESPN2’s Bottomline in 1995 before, eventually, every ESPN channel came equipped with a permanently affixed bottom of the screen scroll. Aesthetically, I never liked it, especially back when TVs were smaller, and it seems much less practical, frankly, in the age when everyone has every score of every game in every sport on their phone. The way the pre-omnipresent ticker on the Big Three networks looked, appearing only occasionally, and showing just a handful of scores at a time in font so big it would block half the screen, was not that aesthetically pleasing either (see above). But spiritually, I found it appealing, at least in terms of college football. Scores of Top 25 matchups mingled with unsung ones like Air Force v Hawaii, Columbia v Cornell, Syracuse v East Carolina, allowing me to imagine these faraway places – Honolulu, Ithaca, NY, and wherever in the world East Carolina was. It was evocative of why college football became my preferred sport – it was bigger than I could comprehend, and every game contributed to its rich tapestry. There’s that line in “The Untouchables” when Eliot Ness remarks, “Some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is,” and that’s how I think of college football. You could be watching a Game of the Century, or just the game of the week, but some part of the world still cares what the Colgate / Rhode Island score is.

For a while there in the 70s and 80s, the whole college football world cared about the Nebraska / Oklahoma score. Their game almost always decided the Big 8 Conference championship, occasionally including national title implications, and the one in 1971 is considered by some to be the best game ever played. Quite possibly my personal favorite Nebraska game is their 1991 day after Thanksgiving triumph over Oklahoma in resplendently miserable conditions, rain changing to ice, sending them to the Orange Bowl, crystallized in the image of literal oranges being thrown on the field by fans exhibiting the sport’s supreme nexus between joy and insanity. Then there was the 1989 Nebraska / Oklahoma game, essentially forgotten not only because it did not impact the Big 8 title but because almost nobody saw it. I mean that literally.

Their rivalry sadly burning out in the 90s was the result of two factors. The Big 8 and Southwest Conference morphing into the Big 12 was one, the Cornhuskers and Sooners relegated to opposing divisions, meaning they no longer played every year. Before Nebraska went in the tank for two decades-plus, however, Oklahoma went in the tank for its own ten-year stretch, brought on by probation levied at the end of the 1988 season for improper benefits and recruiting in addition to a host of despicable off-field transgressions. A condition of that probation meant Oklahoma was barred from appearing on television for the 1989 season. There was a loophole, in so much as games could be shown on tape delay, but those only aired late at night and even then, only in Oklahoma or areas of local interest. The only people who saw Nebraska beat Oklahoma in 1989 were in the stadium or the ones who watched it in Lincoln, or Norman, after the fact.

---------------

There’s this phrase you will often hear lobbed at college football teams, and it goes like this: they haven’t played anybody. It is deployed to question the credibility of a team with an impressive record and/or high ranking but bearing suspect qualifications stemming from a schedule of weak competitors. Often these perceptions are borne out, and it’s not that winning and losing doesn’t matter, but it’s also true that in reducing games to mere data points, we miss the forest for the trees. “The existence of the monolithic top-level narrative means that everything is constantly evaluated in terms of this long-game tactical play,” Brian Phillips once wrote of the sport, “which we’ve gotten used to thinking of as the only way football should operate.” In the rush to frame every college football game before us in terms of the big picture, we forget that “the story of a season,” as Phillips wrote, “doesn’t have to be the same story for everyone,” that games are not just steppingstones to a playoff, that each game is an event unto itself.

In 1989, Nebraska didn’t play anybody. Their schedule “appeared to have been arranged by a pastry chef rather than an athletic director,” Austin Murphy cheekily wrote for Sports Illustrated. Their only challenge of true merit was undefeated Colorado in the game that ultimately decided the Big 8 champion, and in losing, Nebraska lost the only game that effectively mattered. When they squared off against 7-3 Oklahoma to conclude the season, no championship was at stake, even a bowl game wasn’t at stake because Oklahoma was forbidden from one and Nebraska’s postseason destination had already been set; nothing was on the line beyond one more piddling little check in the win column. Given all this, it seemed from afar like a nonevent. Yet, when I finally watched the game on YouTube years later, I was surprised to learn that was not how it felt. Nebraska manifests joy that seems to come from the freedom of playing for nobody but themselves. 

The teams combine for over 800 yards of total offense and a host of big plays as Cornhusker quarterback Gerry Gdowski belies his Class A kinda name by amassing four total touchdowns, a 8-yard-run, and a 31-yard, 23-yard, and 38-yard pass, while Oklahoma connects on the biggest pass play of all, an 82-yarder to Sooner wide receiver Arthur Guess who taunts the Cornhusker defensive back before reaching the end zone and gets horse collared as he crosses the goal line (neither of which were called as penalties because back then neither of them were penalties). That ties the game at 7-all, but then Nebraska scores twice and nabs one additional point when a gone-awry extra-point kick becomes an improvised 2-point conversion, providing a 22-7 lead that allows cushion each time Oklahoma makes noise. Nebraska coach Tom Osborne doesn’t deploy a fumblerooski, alas, as the Sooners cheerfully do, but demonstrating that he was never a vanilla play caller as his reputation suggested, more like a chocolate and vanilla twist, he calls three double reverses, and one fake double reverse, and on one majestic drive eschews convention by running a triple option on third and eight that nets nine yards and a first down, and on third and one, eschews convention again by calling for a deep play action pass to the end zone that scores a touchdown. This game might be as old as Travis Kelce, but rewatching it again recently, both those play calls and their subsequent execution made me laugh out loud. At the conclusion, Nebraska fans storm the field and tear down the goalposts, which might seem silly since the game didn’t matter. But that’s the thing, in tearing down the goalposts, they decided that it did matter. 

---------------

We are 10 years into college football’s nascent playoff era and already it has expanded from four teams to 12, and it will undoubtedly expand again soon. That’s good. I might be anti-playoff on the whole, wishing the sport had maintained its unique and festive postseason playoff-less mess, but now that it’s here, there should be no appeasing traditions when the playoff has in and of itself devalued those anyway. Even so, I stress about the sport losing its identity entirely. This, the first season of the 12-team playoff, was an enjoyable jumble with so many teams moving up and down the ladder of prospective entry to the expanded postseason, and because of that, you heard the CFB commentariat – announcers, podcasters, writers – repeatedly effuse that more games mattered. And though it might be asking an infinite amount of the ESPN College Gameday crew to think in existential terms, when you say more games mattered, that demands follow-up, as in, how many games mattered before, and what makes a game matter in the first place? Because thinking a game can only matter if ties back to the question of who’s number one is a maddeningly narrow perspective in a sport with 133 teams.

When Cal defeated Stanford on November 23rd, it was merely a 24-21 victory for a 5-5 team over a 3-7 team, hardly earthshaking, and yet it reduced Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza to tears. “It’s what you play for,” Mendoza said afterwards. What were they playing for, exactly? Nothing more, really, than beating Cal’s chief rival, the only context required to provide meaning, Mendoza and his teammates writing their own story independent of the sport’s overarching one. Indeed, Cal versus Stanford is known as The Big Game and that may as well be a cosmic signifier for every game on every Saturday in autumn. It might be true that in the playoff-era certain games will matter more than ever before, but in this sport, it’s vital to remember that the ones far from the spotlight, the ones you don’t watch, the ones you can’t even see, don’t matter any less.