T is for Tom Osborne's Face

"Hello?"

- Orange Bowl Guy

Hand it to OU fans - they treat their program's YouTube memories like a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The more akward, the more embarrassing, the more pathetic and debasing, the better.

There are at least three videos available on the 1985 Orange Bowl (including a recent Sunday Sermon here) where the Sooners lost to UW after thier horse-and-wagon cost them a field goal.

And here, preserved by Lucky4OU / Jim's Oklahoma Sports Page, is another great moment in football akwardness.

In 1978, the Tom Osborne-led Husker upset #1 OU, with Hiesman winner Billy Sims, in their annual showdown, handing the Huskers the automatic Orange bid for the Big 8, and a showdown for the national title with Penn State. However, NU fell asleep at the wheel the next week losing to Missouri. This sent Penn State to the Sugar Bowl to Face Alabama for #1.

The Orange Bowl then turned around and offered the 'at-large' bid to... OU, setting up a rematch.

The Orange Bowl commissioner - just as General-Buck-Turgeson-straight as a 1978 Orange Bowl Committee chair could possibly be - called OU first to extend the bid and then Nebraska to break the news.

For some reason, and somehow, both ends of both calls were captured on video.

Watch Tom Osborne - every inch as young, dapper and shiny as RFK - react to the news.

OU beat the Husker in the 1979 Orange Bowl, 31-24.

G is for the Godfather of Roll

Its rare to find a 10 second video that lets you say, "You can see the earth shift right... there!" but here it is, the play that won the 1996 Big 12 title game for Texas, and embarrassed No. 1, 21-point favorite Nebraska so badly that their subsequent collapse took the entire Big 12 North with them.

I-35: Quarterback Road

The flatest, loneliest stretch of highway this side of Deadhorse, Alaska is our topic tonight, I-35, the official Interstate of Flyover Country, which perhaps is why footballs apparently spend so much time in the air near it.

C-words from the T-word
25: Percent of the nation's top 12 QBs, by passing yardage, named "Chase"
4768: Yards passed for by nation's leader, Houston's Case Keenum.
3445: Yards passed for by Colt McCoy, 11th nationally.
100: Percent of five above-referenced QBs - Chase, Chase, Chase, Case and Colt - that were born and raised in Texas (all play for Texas colleges, except NMSU's Chase Holbrook, who is from Lubbock).
9: Combined QBs (any name) in top 12 from I-35 states, Texas and Oklahoma.
504: Miles of I-35 across Texas, from Laredo to the Red River, just outside Gainesville.
7: Texans in the top 12.
235: Miles of I-35 through Oklahoma, from Thackerville to the Kansas border, where it becomes a toll road.
2: Oklahomans in top 12
2: Ohio Qbs in the top 12
3629: Yards passed for by Max Hall, BYU, who is from Arizona... and the nephew of Danny White, former QB of the I-35's flagship football team, the Dallas Cowboys.

Sports-Tells-Us-Who-We-Are, and the coastal sportswriters who believe that
thank goodness we have sports experts at such august institutions as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to tell us which geographic region has "conquered in nearly every respect" the game of college football and and where to find Quarterback U

"...you'll just die tired."
20: minimum number of CFB players with Sniper School Slogan stats ("one shot, one kill") for 2008 - 1 attempt, 1 completetion, 1 touchdown.
858.4: Quarterback rating of ThisU's Graig Cooper (yes: rating. and "Graig"), a rating over 100 points better than second place in the nation and the mathematical result of Cooper's single pass attempt in 2008 going for a 51 yard touchdown.

A Pair of Dueces Wild
2,2,2,2: Attempts-completions-TDs-#of players nationally to record that line in 2008. They are: ULL's Richie Falgout and the perhaps-appropriately named Marlon Lucky, who plays for a more mainstream team we'll mention in a moment.
2: Consecutive years Falgout, a WR, has made the Conference Honor Roll at UL-Laf ("you'll laugh"), mirroring his duece's wild line of attempts-completions-touchdowns. Also, his mom's name is "Candy". That's what his bio says.
2.2: Yards/game for Lucky, which is what you get when you divide the 24 yards his 2-2-2 passes went for across the 11 games he played this year for Nebraska, the flagship school of a state bisected by I-35

75: More than twice as big as 35
I would have voted for Tebow, who attends a university located in a town named Gainesville on a major North-South interstate, but not the one just south of Thackerville, OK.
Now, even though I-75 connects by less than two hours the current capitals of college and high school football, UF and Valdosta, GA, that's not why I would have voted for Tebow. I would also not have voted for him because he promised you that you will never see any player in the entire country who will play harder the rest of the season or because you will never see a team play harder than we will the rest of the season.
I would have voted for him because he started that speech, the greatest college football speech ever actually given (I'm looking at you, ND), with "I'm sorry" and, like this post, ended with "God Bless."