Jerry Tagge and Jack Mildren used to have a bet whenever Nebraska played Oklahoma: the loser had to hang the winner’s picture in his office.
Mildren was serving as Oklahoma’s lieutenant governor in the early 1990s when Tagge’s Cornhuskers began their seven-game winning streak.
“For three years my picture was hanging in the Oklahoma Capitol,” Tagge said Tuesday from Omaha, where he owns a financial planning business. “Of course it was probably in the bathroom.”
Mildren chuckled.
“It wasn’t in a prominent place, let’s put it that way,” said Mildren, currently an Oklahoma City oilman.
The friendly rivalry between the two former quarterbacks dates to 1971, when they dueled in what many consider the greatest college football game ever played. On a gray, windswept Thanksgiving afternoon in Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, Tagge’s top-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers outlasted Mildren and the No. 2 Sooners 35-31.
It was billed the “Game of the Century” and, unlike other games that have borne the same tag, this one lived up to the hype.
“At 21, I knew it was an important game but I never thought that we’d be talking about it [nearly] 30 years later,” Mildren said.
The “Game of the Century” is back in the headlines this week because the Huskers and Sooners meet Saturday in Norman to write another chapter in their rivalry’s vivid history.
The Cornhuskers are almost as dominant as they were back in 1971, when they went 13-0 and repeated as national champions. The Sooners swooned in the 1990s but have blossomed this autumn like a wildflower after a prairie rain shower.
Nebraska (7-0) is ranked first in both major polls and the Bowl Championship Series standings. Oklahoma (6-0) is third in the polls and second in the BCS.
“It’s just kind of like we’re taking up where we left off,” former Nebraska publicist Don Bryant said this week from Lincoln.
A lot, however, has changed since 1971. For starters the game is closer to Halloween than Thanksgiving. The Big Eight title is no longer at stake; Nebraska and Oklahoma are in separate divisions in the Big 12 and don’t meet every season.
And the game won’t decide anything, although it may eliminate a national title contender. No matter what happens Saturday, it’s quite likely that the schools will meet again in the Big 12 championship game in Kansas City on Dec. 2.
But Oklahoma-Nebraska still looms large.
“I can always tell when Nebraska and Oklahoma are playing a big game because reporters start calling about the `Game of the Century,'” joked former I-back Jeff Kinney, who scored four touchdowns that day, including the winner with 1:38 to play.
Johnny Rodgers, whose winding 72-yard punt return opened the scoring in the 1971 game, is happy to see the Sooners competitive again.
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“I don’t want them to beat Nebraska, but when I’m not rooting for Nebraska I’ll always root for OU,” Rodgers said from Omaha. “The greater they can be, the greater we can be.”
Tagge said: “Win or lose, this is part of Nebraska folklore. This is more important than the presidential race. If this game were played Nov. 7, nobody in Nebraska would vote.”
Still this year’s contest will be hard-pressed to live up to the 1971 game, a taut affair that featured 14 present or future All-Americans. Oklahoma twice overcame 11-point deficits. The Cornhuskers fell behind for the first time all season. Each team scored four offensive touchdowns, but both defenses turned in stellar plays.
There was one penalty–offside on Nebraska.
President Richard Nixon telephoned both locker rooms afterward.
Asked what he considered the game’s defining moment, Mildren said, “The defining moment of the game is that both teams played to win. A lot of times in those big games, people play not to lose.”
Mildren and Tagge both played well enough to win. Tagge calmly led the Cornhuskers’ final 12-play, 74-yard march, connecting on a critical third-and-10 at midfield. Although he was primarily a wishbone quarterback, Mildren threw for two touchdowns, including a 16-yarder that put Oklahoma up 31-28 midway through the fourth quarter.
Tagge walked off the winner. But 29 years later he said he appreciates how easily the game could have gone Mildren’s way.
“That was Jack’s finest hour,” Tagge said. “He didn’t deserve to lose. Nobody deserved to lose.”
BCS banter: With so many games remaining, the first Bowl Championship Series standings probably will bear little resemblance to the last. Remember that Penn State was No. 2 in the first BCS poll a year ago and wound up in the Alamo Bowl three losses later.
But the first standings raised some interesting postseason possibilities.
How about Notre Dame vs. South Carolina and former Irish head coach Lou Holtz in the Sugar Bowl? For that to happen, the Gamecocks will need to win the Southeastern Conference. There’s also an outside chance the Gamecocks could earn an at-large berth.
Notre Dame, meanwhile, is eligible for a BCS berth if it finishes 9-2 and is ranked in the top 12 of the final BCS standings. The Irish are guaranteed a BCS berth if they are 9-2 or in the top 10 and a non-BCS school (Texas Christian, for example) finishes in the top six. Notre Dame officials insisted on that provision when they agreed to join the BCS; they worried that a non-aligned school would deny Notre Dame an at-large berth.
Notre Dame coach Bob Davie probably wouldn’t want to face his old boss, with whom he parted on icy terms. But it’s a distinct possibility if the Irish sweep their final four games. Notre Dame is 19th in the BCS standings and may rise as other contenders knock each other off.
Because every team in the top seven of the first BCS has to play another, it’s impossible to project the final standings. But it is apparent TCU’s feeble schedule is going to hurt its chances. According to the BCS, the Horned Frogs’ slate ranks 109th.
The BCS weighs strength of schedule, both major polls, eight computer rankings and won-lost records.
A soft schedule was a prime component in coach Dennis Franchione’s plan to rebuild TCU when he arrived in 1997. But it could wind up costing the Horned Frogs a shot at a lucrative bowl. The kicker is Franchione backed out of a game against Nebraska this year.
“If I would have known three years ago what I know today, I wouldn’t have made any changes [in the schedule],” Franchione said. “We would have played the game. But you know we made the smart decision three years ago.”
Fourth and inches: The goalpost-attacking trend is out of hand this year, but sanity prevailed Saturday at Lawrence, Kan., when the crowd jeered fans who tried to pull down the goalposts to celebrate Kansas’ 23-15 victory over Colorado in Memorial Stadium.
“When you beat a 1-5 team, you don’t need to tear your goalpost down,” Kansas coach Terry Allen said.
Think the Big Ten race is a glorious mess? The Ivy League has a five-way tie for first place, with Yale, Harvard, Penn, Cornell and Princeton at 2-1. Princeton and Cornell meet Saturday in Ithaca.
Second-ranked Virginia Tech has been pointing to next week’s showdown with No. 4 Miami in the Orange Bowl, but the Hokies would be wise not to overlook Pitt Saturday in Blacksburg. The Panthers are 5-1, their best start since 1991. It will be an interesting match between Pitt’s 14th-ranked defense, which concedes only 15 points per game, and a Hokies offense that scores nearly 43 points per game, sixth in the country.