Berry Tramel, Sports columnist

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Sooners enter the final frontier

By Berry Tramel
Published: September 16, 2006

EUGENE, Ore. — You knew you had reached exotic soil by the sign along Highway 101: Entering Tsunami Hazard Zone.

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This corner of the country has all kinds of sights unseen in our part of the world. "Fire the Liar" stickers on every other bumper. Makeshift espresso shacks where we would place a snow-cone stand. A $500 fine for pumping your own gas. College Station this ain't.

Oklahoma plays Oregon today in what should be a wild Autzen Stadium, what could be a season-defining showdown and what most definitely will be historic.

The Sooners never have been here before.

For 100 years, Oklahoma has loaded up the Schooner and exported its most-prized commodity all over the USA.

To Arkansas in 1899. To Texas in 1901. By 1917, the Sooners journeyed to Big Ten country (Illinois). They went to Hawaii in 1931. To the East Coast (Washington, D.C.) in 1932.

To the Colorado Rockies in 1936. To Miami in 1938. To the West Coast (Santa Clara) in 1940. To the Northeast (Philadelphia) in 1942.

To New Orleans in 1948. To New England (Boston) in 1949. To Notre Dame in 1952. To New York City itself in 1961.

But not until today have the Sooners graced the Pacific Northwest. Never has OU played football within the great expanse of Washington or Idaho, Oregon or Montana.

That changes today against the Ducks, and Sooner fans sense something special. They began filling flights early in the week, and all week have been spotted up and down the gorgeous Oregon coast.

This has the feel of the Alabama adventure three years ago, when OU for the first time dove into the Deep South football culture and found a world of Civil War cemeteries and civil-rights monuments, of antebellum homes and even older swamps, of thick forests and thicker Southern drawls.

This is a clash of cultures, all right, and on the football field, too.

This is old-money Oklahoma vs. new-money Oregon. Stately tradition against psychedelic Nike. A school twice blessed by the BCS gods (Sooners 2003-04) against the school cursed by the same (Ducks 2001). A school that captured the fancy of the Eastern press more than half a century ago against a school still seeking the same.

This game intrigues the Oregonians, too. Tickets into the Autzen Zoo are kooky scarce and crazy expensive, and my counterpart in Portland this week suggested that toppling these not-great Sooners would be the biggest regular-season victory in the dozen seasons of Mike Bellotti, who has felled Michigan and is 4-3 against USC.

The Sooner camp this week fought the notion that OU-Oregon is a big game.

Bob Stoops said, "You enjoy coaching in any atmosphere. You put the headphones on, you don't hear anybody but yourselves and you're kind of in your own little world, a 100-yard field and the out-of-bounds lines."

Who's he trying to kid? Stoops is the guy who admits to walking around stadiums before a big game, taking in the wonder of it all. Stoops knows the stakes today.

The Oklahoma-Oregon winner moves on in college football's annual roulette. The loser regroups and ponders a Holiday Bowl repeat.

Oklahoma seeks to return to the national spotlight after a year's hiatus. A loss today, after mediocre starts against UAB and Washington, would signal continuation of the slump.

Oregon seeks to end its Sooner curse. The Ducks lost to OU in 2004, when the Sooners were up and Oregon down, and the Ducks lost again in 2005, when the Sooners were down and the Ducks up. Through two games of 2006, we don't know if the Sooners and Ducks are up or down.

So they meet one final time, this time on a patch of turf some call the nation's foremost homefield advantage and in a region as virgin to the Sooners as it was to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark 200 years ago.

"We've seen a lot of places," said OU quarterback Paul Thompson, the man on the spot. "I'm just ready to get out there and play football. I'm not worried about any of the glamour."

Worry? No reason to worry about it. But revel in it. This is a special day.


 


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