College Football Week 11: Iowa saves the sport
COLLEGE FOOTBALL WEEK 11:
I got to Tech’s Jones Stadium early Saturday, before 2:30 p.m. for the 7 p.m. kickoff. I didn’t have anything else to do – the Buddy Holly Museum adventure was behind me – so I figured I’d go to the pressbox and watch the afternoon football games. OU-A&M. Alabama-LSU. Penn State-Iowa.
You know the rest. Sooners rolled. Alabama and LSU went to overtime. And Iowa somehow KO’d Penn State 24-23.
Great, great football, at least on the Bama and Penn State games. Said Pete Thamel of the New York Times, “College football never fails to deliver.”
I watched the last halves of those games with members of the Big 12 office. And particularly with the Penn State game, you never saw such devotion from normally-neutral people. Living and dying with every play.
Penn State stood in the way of a Big 12 national championship appearance. That roadblock now is gone.
THIS’LL BE THE DAYLubbock is the hometown of Buddy Holly, the rock’n roll pioneer killed in a place crash almost 50 years ago, Feb. 3, 1959.
My first adult trip to Lubbock came in 1992, and a photographer I was with, Doug Hoke, wanted to go see the Buddy Holly statue before the OU-Tech game. So we went downtown, Doug climbed upon the base and posed for a picture with Lubbock’s favorite son.
Fast forward 16 years. Another photographer, Steve Sisney, suggested we stop by the Buddy Holly museum.
I’m sort of a Buddy Holly fan; I’ve got his greatest-hits CD and saw the movie starring Gary Busey. So I said sure. Figured it was good karma, since I was in town for OSU-Tech and Busey attended OSU.
Anyway, the museum was $5 and worth it for Holly fans. I learned quite a bit, including how much Buddy Holly and the Crickets (his band) influenced musicians world wide, including four young guys in Liverpool, England, who in the tradition of the Crickets named their band the Beatles.
I also learned that after Holly’s death, the Crickets remained intact and hired a long-time band member named Sonny Carter, whose claim to fame was authoring “Love Is All Around,” a tune better known as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” theme song.
Anyway, as we walked in the door of the Buddy Holly Center, in the old Lubbock depot, there was a media room of some kind where they conduct interviews and lectures and what not. Some old guy, tall and wearing a Stetson, was being interviewed on camera.
As we left the museum, we walked past the media room, and the old guy was leaving.
A few minutes later, as we went looking for our comrade, photographer Chris Landsberger, we went down a hallway with pictures of musicians on the wall. Sisney stopped and pointed to a photo. It was a picture of the guy in the Stetson.
Tommy Allsup, it said his name was. I remembered I had just seen the name “Tommy Allsup” in the museum. So back we went to the museum, where I found the exhibit that mentioned Allsup.
In 1958, the Crickets had broken up, but Holly was persuaded to tour in the Midwest in 1959. So he hired a band for the tour. That guitarist was a guy he had played with on occasion; fellow by the name of Tommy Allsup.
The tour was an organizational disaster. The tour bus was old and drafty. The heat didn’t work properly.
On Feb. 3, 1959, Holly was fed up and decided to charter a small plane in Mason City, Iowa, destined for the next stop in Fargo, N.D. Holly chartered the plane for his band.
But another member of the tour, the Big Bopper (J.R. Richardson, famous for “Chantilly Lace”), had the flu. So bass player Waylon Jennings volunteered to let the Big Bopper have his seat on the plane.
With the band split, Allsup and another tour headliner, Richie Valens, decided to flip a coin to see who got to ride the plan. Valens won.
Five minutes after takeout, in a blinding storm, the Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft crashed in an Iowa field. Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens died. Tommy Allsup survived, and almost 50 years later spent an afternoon with us at the Buddy Holly Museum.
TEN BIGGEST LOSERS OF THE WEEK10. Lame-duck coaches: You expected Washington’s Tyrone Willingham, a 39-19 loser to Arizona State, and Kansas State’s Ron Prince, a 41-24 loser to Missouri, to go down to defeat. But you figured Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer could win one for the already-fired coaches club. Not so. The woefully inept Volunteers lost to hapless Wyoming
13-7.
9. Iowa State: A meager Cyclone season was one yard from a major boost, a road win at Colorado. But with Iowa State on the Colorado 1-yard line, D.J. Sykes and Jimmy Smith stuffed tailback Alexander Robinson for a two-yard loss on the game’s final play.
8. ACC Championship Game: It’s quite likely that the ACC division winners, whoever they may be, will each be 5-3 in the league. Best guess? Virginia Tech vs. Maryland, each at 8-4.
7. Arkansas State: A season that began with such promise – an upset at Texas A&M – is sputtering down the stretch. Ark State lost 22-21 at Florida International and fell to 4-5 overall, 2-2 in the Sun Belt, reviving a great debate. Who is the best team in Arkansas?
6. Illinois: In January, the Illini lost in the Rose Bowl. Saturday, the Illini lost in Kalamazoo. Western Michigan beat Illinois 23-17, and now the 5-5 Illini must beat Ohio State or Northwestern just to become bowl eligible.
5. Internet Expression: In the summer, OU freshman Josh Jarboe lost his scholarship with a violence-laced rap on YouTube. This week, Texas coach Mack Brown dismissed from the team backup center Buck Burnette, who on his Facebook page posted a racial slur about Barack Obama. The world wide web is not some insulated world where consequences don’t exist. It’s a pulpit.
4. West Virginia: The Mountaineers mounted a comeback for the ages, scoring 13 points in the final 72 seconds by every possible point production – touchdown, field goal, safety, 2-point conversion. But then Cincinnati won 26-23 in overtime, and WVU’s Big East title hopes are in jeopardy.
3. Jimmy Clausen: The beleaguered Notre Dame quarterback threw four interceptions in a 17-0 loss at Boston College, and the Irish now have been shut out three times in their last 19 games.
2. TCU: The Horned Frogs dominated Utah in their mid-major showdown, but TCU missed two late field goals and Utah quarterback Brian Johnson threw a 9-yard TD pass with 48 seconds left to knock the Frogs from BCS contention.
1. Zealousness: Two Alabama fans were shot to death over an argument about the LSU-Bama game, witnesses said. Can’t we all just get along?
DINING IN LUBBOCKA dining lesson I never learned until Saturday in Lubbock: don’t sit near the waiter’s station or the kitchen.
For lunch Saturday, we stopped at Triple J Chophouse and Brew Company in Lubbock’s Depot District. I’d been there before; solid place. I had a chicken pot pie. Excellent choice.
But we sat in a booth right next to the big counter in front of the grill and the brick oven. It’s interesting to watch cooks and chefs at work; not easy duty. From organization to culinary skills, those guys have to know what they’re doing. It’s sort of like watching the Food Network, except they’re juggling 8-10 things instead of the Martha Stewart gravy train.
There’s a downside, though. The waiters tend to hang out at the counter, waiting for orders, and you see them on their less-than-best behavior.
At a point when we were waiting on something – drinks, salad, I can’t remember which – our waiter paced in front of the counter, doing not much of anything. I guess he thought he was invisible.
Then our waiter coughed right into his fist. We looked down and noticed we hadn’t received our food. Uh, we suddenly weren’t quite as hungry. We got a life preserver when someone else brought our plates, but when it comes to waiters and cooks, the less you know, the better.
Of course, no trip to Lubbock is complete without a visit to Cagle Steaks, the great place west of town with a ranch setting. I think I wrote about Cagle last year, so I won’t repeat myself.
But I followed through on one my dining rules. When someone offers you a real dessert, take it. Most places go fu-fu on desserts. Chocolate mousse. Crème brule. Taramusu. That kind of stuff. Easy to pass.
Cagle offers you two options: cherry cobbler or peach cobbler. I went with the cherry, with ice cream.
Generally speaking, American restaurants don’t offer enough pie and cobbler.
SALUTE TO THE SWCBetween Tech’s Jones Stadium and its indoor practice facility is a pedestrain mall. I strolled by Saturday afternoon, and in front of the Tech athletic offices, which are in the south end of Jones Stadium, there are rock monuments imbedded in the concrete, saluting the old members of the Southwest Conference.
Tech, A&M, Texas and Baylor are joined by SMU, TCU, Arkansas, Rice and Houston.
It’s sort of cool that Tech keeps the tributes in place. The breakup of the SWC was sort of like the breakup of a marriage, I suppose. Not all bad memories. Tech still feels a kinship with those schools left behind.
REALITY RANKINGSCollege football rankings, based not on what we think teams will do, but what they have done. This week, for grins, you get the top 15 and the bottom 15 – the 15 worst teams from BCS conferences:
1. Alabama
2. Florida
3. Texas Tech
4. Texas
5. USC
6. Penn State
7. Georgia
8. Oklahoma
9. Utah
10. Ohio State
11. Oklahoma State
12. Michigan State
13. Boise State
14. Oregon
15. North Carolina
To answer your question, OU most certainly would move up, probably to No. 2 or No. 3, with victories in its final two games.
Worst 15
15. Arizona State
14. Duke
13. Kansas State
12. Michigan
11. Texas A&M
10. Syracuse
9. Baylor
8. North Carolina State
7. Mississippi State
6. Purdue
5. Tennessee
4. Indiana
3. Iowa State
2. Washington State
1. Washington
An amazing list. Three of the 12 worst teams in big-time college football have won national titles in the past 18 years. Washington, Tennessee and Michigan. Who could have guessed that Michigan and Tennessee would each be 3-7 in mid-November?
PRESSBOX SIGHTINGSA tale of two Ohio State graduates:
Twenty minutes before kickoff, ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit came out of the men’s bathroom of Jones Stadium level that serves both the pressbox and luxury suites.
A mom and her son were waiting for Herbstreit and asked if he would pose for a picture. Herbstreit said sure.
At halftime, Bobby Knight left one of the luxury suites. The only person waiting for him was a peace officer to escort him down the elevator.
FIESTA BOWL PART III?I talked to two Fiesta Bowl reps at halftime of the OSU-Tech game, including chairman-elect Alan Young. They said that should the Big 12 champ make the Big Bowl, the Fiesta still would like to fill the vacancy with a Big 12 team.
Including Oklahoma, which has been to Phoenix two years running? Yes, said the yellow-blazered bowl officials. They also asked how OU fans would respond.
I said in the positive. I think most Sooner fans have enjoyed Phoenix, other than the surprising outcomes, of course.
A Big 12 official said perhaps OU’s football operation would like to return to the Fiesta just to exorcise the demons. Maybe he’s on to something. Even if the Sooners go to Miami or New Orleans or even Pasadena and win, ending their BCS losing streak, they still would face a Fiesta stigma. Might as well try to end it all at once.
TEN BIGGEST WINNERS OF THE WEEK10. USC defense: Sorry, Nick Saban. But the nation’s best defense belongs to the Trojans, who held California to 165 total yards in a 17-3 victory.
9. Running games: For one Saturday at least, running games shined. Seven tailbacks gained at least 168 yards. Nevada’s Val Taua led the way with 263 yards in a 41-28 win over Fresno State. Virginia Tech’s Darren Evans had 253 in a 23-13 win over Maryland. Army’s Collin Mooney gained 207 yards in a 38-31 loss to Rice.
8. Oregon State: The Beavers routed UCLA 34-6, and all of a sudden, talk of Oregon State in the Rose Bowl isn’t so kooky. If the Beavers beat Cal, Arizona and Oregon, they will represent the Pac-10 in Pasadena. And only Arizona is on the road.
7. Oklahoma quarterbacks: Tulsa’s David Johnson, OU’s Sam Bradford and OSU’s Zac Robinson rank 1-2-3 in the nation in pass efficiency. Bradford threw for 320 yards and four touchdowns in a routine rout of Texas A&M.
6. Wyoming: What’s with the Cowboys and the SEC? Wyoming beat Tennessee 13-7; on Sept. 24, 2005, Wyoming beat Ole Miss 24-14. Between those two games, none of which came against SEC schools, Wyoming was 15-25.
5. North Carolina: Don’t look now, but the best team in the ACC is Butch Davis’ Tar Heels. North Carolina spanked Georgia Tech 28-7 to raise its record to 7-2. Tennessee could do much worse than Butch Davis.
4. Mid-American Conference: An upset of a Big Ten team and a BCS contender on national television, all in the same week. Western Michigan beat Illinois 23-17, giving the MAC a 4-6 record vs. the Big Ten this season, and Ball State beat Northern Illinois on ESPN to remain unbeaten and on the fringe of the BCS talk.
3. Rashad Johnson: Few defenders have a day like this – three interceptions, including one returned for a touchdown and one to start overtime, which set up top-ranked Alabama for a 27-21 victory over LSU.
2. Graham Harrell: Seems like there’s a new Heisman front-runner every week, but Harrell might hang on to the top spot. He threw for 456 yards, completing 40 of 50 passes, as Texas Tech routed Oklahoma State 56-20.
1. College football: Penn State’s loss to Iowa gave all of America what it hoped for – a Big Ten-free BCS title game.
THE OPEN ROADI drove out to Lubbock with photographers Sisney and Landsberger. We went I-40 to Amarillo, though I’m told there are shortcuts, like going south at Shamrock, Texas, and snaking through the Texas Panhandle. I’ll try that next year, perhaps.
I enjoy driving the Panhandles. Open country. Gives you an idea of how massive is America. The Texas Panhandle is almost 26,000 square miles.
That’s approximately 170 miles by 158 miles. To give you an idea how big that is, that’s the size of this chunk of Oklahoma: From the Red River to Tulsa north-south, and from Oklahoma City to Sallisaw east-west. That’s the size of the Texas Panhandle.
The country is especially provocative at night. We drove home after the game, pulling out of Lubbock at 12:30 and getting back to The Oklahoman tower at 6:15 a.m.
I say we. Funny. Landsberger went wire to wire behind the wheel. A total stud.
A NEW WAY TO THINK OF TECHHere’s some football I learned this week. OSU linebacker Deron Fontenot said Texas Tech would attack the Cowboys this way: When OSU played zone, the Tech receivers wouldn’t run particular routes. They would flood the field and stop their routes in open space. In other words, the Red Raiders would run to where the Cowboys weren’t and stop and wait for a Graham Harrell pass.
Not every play. Not every receiver. The Red Raiders make a living off receivers coming under the zone, sprinting across the field.
But this was a little clarity in exactly how Mike Leach’s offense works. The Red Raiders spread the field, sideline to sideline, creating space. Then they put receivers in that space. Seems to work famously.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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