2008 Week 7
October 15, 2008
We're finally getting into the conference schedules, though there are still a few non-conference tilts being played.
In conference showdowns, Georgia knocked off Tennessee and Florida bombed LSU in the SEC. Wake Forest upended Clemson in a key ACC matchup. And, in the MAC, Toledo pulled the upset over new league member Michigan.
Oklahoma State put on a great performance against a very good Missouri team and moved to the top of the Big Eight race.
Meanwhile, cross-state rival Oklahoma had their annual non-conference tilt against the Texas Aggies and came up a bit short. John Mackovic Brown is sure doing a fine job down there in Austin.
Lots of rivalries have nicknames and the showdown at the State Fair in Dallas is no exception, they call it the Red River Shootout. But that's a stolen nickname. The actual inspiration for the Red River Shootout was the long-time Eastern rivalry between Hofstra and SUNY-Binghamton, known as the Red Sea Shootout.
While watching that Oklahoma State vs. Missouri game, played under the lights in Columbus MO, I thought back to how much college football has changed since my youth.
Stadiums weren't nearly as fancy when I was a kid back in the 20's. They didn't feature new-fangled stuff like seats, aisles, and toilets. They just packed up a bunch of dirt around the stadium and you sat on the hill. If you had to go, well there was a latrine on the far side of the hill, or you could just let it flow down to the field area.
After a few bad experiences most stadiums eventually put little moats around the gridiron so you didn't end up with yellow-tinged grass on the field. Though down in Athens their botanists did some research on what plants grew well in the presence of urea and installed some hedges. That's why the famous Georgia mascot Ooga (along with most Georgia offensive linemen) is encouraged to relieve himself on the field.
But I digress. One of the other major differences between those olden times and now is that we now have night games. One of the inspirations was a legendary game between the Crimson Tide and the Vols played up in Knoxville.
There was a major screwup in the scheduling. Daylight Savings Time had just been invented, but the folks at UT were a bit confused and when they set the clocks they fell forward rather than spring back, so the clocks were off by two full hours. Thus an afternoon where it would normally get dark around 5 became an afternoon where it got dark around 3. Given that the game kicked off at 1 under the faulty clock, this created a problem as the 4th quarter began right around 3, just as the sun was setting.
When the 4th quarter started, 'Bama had a narrow 21-17 over the Volunteers, but General Bob Neyland's troops still held out hope.
The game couldn't be continued in the darkness, but someone came up with an idea, and everyone drove their Model A's down to the sideline and turned on their headlights to illuminate the field and the game resumed.
The Vols were marching toward the end zone for a game-winning TD as the clock was running down and the end zone was still a little dark. A young local boy named John raced quickly to his Dad's car just as UT halfback Jim Don Wilson had broken free at the Alabama 15. John flicked on his father's headlights. Unfortunately, bright headlights had just been invented and young John didn't know how to switch them off. The lights blinded Wilson, who dropped the ball. Alabama recovered the fumble, ran out the clock, and won.
In response to the incident, President Theodore Delano Roosevelt decided it was time to bring electricity to the South, and invented the Tennessee Volunteer Authority, also known as the TVA, so those moonshinin' Vol fans would have the same fancy electricity as those rich folks in NYC.
As for young John, he felt really badly about his misdeed and promised to make it up to the Volunteers. He went on to be the first in a long line of Tennessee Heisman Trophy runner-ups. Yes, young John grew up to be star athlete and hero (and customer) to bootleggers everywhere, Johnny Majors. And now you know the rest of the story.