Dream builders
All college football programs have to start somewhere, and OU, Alabama are perfect examples

By Berry Tramel

Published: December 24, 2006

For once, all the Oklahoma football fans who think the world is against them will be right.

From New England postmasters to California barkeeps and most ports in between, Americans will band together, pulling in the Fiesta Bowl for a school of which they barely have heard.

Boise State.

"That's what I told the guys,” said OU defensive coordinator Brent Venables. "No one wants you to win this game.”

But that's OK. What went around has come around. Time was, OU was Boise State. At some point, most every college football school was Boise State.

Oklahoma. Alabama, which plays Oklahoma State in the Independence Bowl on Thursday. Southern Cal. Texas. Florida State. They weren't always living the American sports dream. Each once was a dreamer, a starry-eyed football program that longed for the brightest stage.

Maybe the only exclusions are Notre Dame, Army, Navy and the Ivy Leaguers. The bluebloods who reigned when the sport took hold on the national sports consciousness. All other schools were once considered inferior. Reputed to be of lower stock. Cast in the same light as Boise State is in the Fiesta Bowl.

That's what makes the Fiesta no Siesta. Boise State is playing for a cause. Playing for its own status and that of all the other little guys who want to crash the status quo.

"We're honored and excited and thrilled,” Boise State coach Chris Petersen said of reaching the Fiesta Bowl. "Our guys have worked tremendously hard ... not only this year, but the last couple of years really, to scratch and claw and get to a game of this magnitude. And they've got there.”

A crusading team can be a dangerous team. The Sooners themselves once were on such a mission.

OU's 1946 showdown at Army ushered the Sooners into the modern era. Army was the mightiest team in the land; the Cadets did not lose in 1944-46, and the ‘46 Army squad sported Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, back-to-back Heisman winners in 1945-46.

Oklahoma was Boise State. A team out in the middle of nowhere that played good football but was looking to make a name for itself.

Before the game, OU president George Lynn Cross mentioned he thought the Sooners had a "pretty fair line.” His Army hosts chuckled. Early in the game, a football fan named Harry Truman leaned over and told Cross he indeed thought the Sooners had a solid line.

Army won 21-7, but only after returning a disputed fumble 90 yards for a fourth-quarter touchdown. That's the day Oklahoma football, as we know it now, was born.

Alabama's emergence came a little earlier, in the 1926 Rose Bowl against Washington. Here's a Bama press release about a recent documentary on that Rose Bowl:

"It was more than a football game. It was the chance to avenge the South, to reclaim the valor and honor of the Lost Cause. No longer would this land be known for its hookworm and illiteracy. It would be the home of the best damn football in the nation!

"For the first 50 years of college football, the game was dominated by powerhouses in the North, Midwest and West. Princeton. Yale. Harvard. Washington. Southern boys can't compete, the experts said. In fact, the prevailing sentiment was that the South wasn't good for much of anything.”

Over the top? No doubt. But that was the rally cry for the Crimson Tide, who beat Washington 20-19 and went about the business, as OU would do 20 years later, of challenging the Notre Dames and Michigans for national supremacy.

That's what the Sooners face in the Fiesta Bowl. A team playing for a cause. Maybe not something quite so epic as a lost Civil War, but still a mission, to boldly go where no mid-major has gone before.

Bob Stoops, no surprise, doesn't buy into the crusade theory.

"I look at it as a grand opportunity for us, too,” Stoops said. "Everybody has their stakes. We've got 'em, they've got 'em. In the end, you gotta get on the field and earn it.”

There could be two winners in the Fiesta Bowl. The Sooners on the scoreboard, and the Broncos on the board of national opinion. Play OU tough, like the Sooners did Army so many Septembers ago, and Boise State will have earned its stripes.

"It's going to be an unbelievable challenge to play Oklahoma,” Petersen said. "They're like nobody we've seen this year or maybe even since I've been to Boise State. We'll be tested like we haven't been tested before.”