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University of Oklahoma Athletics
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March 25, 2013 | Football
National championship teams, Heisman Trophy winners, Big 8 brawls, legendary coaches. There are few college football rivalries packed with as much history and as many significant storylines as the Sooners vs. the Cornhuskers. Oklahoma and Nebraska will renew their historic rivalry in Norman on Sept. 18, 2021 and will square off in Lincoln on Sept. 17, 2022. Oklahoma leads the all-time series by a 45-38-3 margin and has won six of the last eight meetings between the two teams under Stoops. A current generation of OU fans remembers recent triumphs over Nebraska like the last meeting between the two squads in the 2010 Big 12 Championship Game at Cowboys Stadium when the Sooners fell behind by a 17-0 margin only to rebound for a 30-23 victory. The No. 4 Sooners jumped out to a 35-0 first-quarter lead en route to a 62-28 thumping of the Huskers in their last visit to Norman in 2008. And, of course, there was the Sooners' magical run to the national title in 2000. Coming off wins against No. 11 Texas and No. 2 Kansas State in back-to-back weeks, Oklahoma surged past No. 1 Nebraska by a 31-14 count en route to an Orange Bowl victory and a perfect 13-0 record in 2000 as the Sooners claimed their seventh national title. For some schools, such contests might be enough to constitute a rivalry. For Oklahoma-Nebraska, that's merely the tip of the iceberg for a pair of teams that met as conference combatants every year from 1928 to 1997. In other words, this battle between the Crimson and Cream of Oklahoma and the Scarlet and Cream of Nebraska has been waged for decades. "Classic rivalries like Oklahoma-Nebraska are part of college football's historic fabric," said OU vice president and director of athletics, Joe Castiglione. "The ability to rekindle a fabled series between two tradition-rich programs and two extremely loyal and passionate fan bases was very important to both universities. Playing marquee non-conference opponents remains an integral part of our scheduling philosophy. Games like Oklahoma-Nebraska embody all the qualities that make regular season Saturdays in college football matter to so many." Throughout the history of this storied series, conference and national championship implications have frequently been on the line. No doubt, any discussion of historic Oklahoma-Nebraska contests begins with the fabled "Game of the Century" as the No. 2 Sooners and No. 1 Cornhuskers squared off in Norman with the Big 8 title and national championship hopes on the line in 1971. The Cornhuskers prevailed by a 35-31 count, holding off two 11-point rallies from the Sooners. OU held the lead with 7:10 left to play before Nebraska marched down 74 yards for the game-winning touchdown. But it was Johnny Rodgers' iconic 72-yard punt return for the first touchdown of the game that remains one of the lasting images of Nebraska's national championship campaign in 1971 under head coach Bob Devaney. The game in 2021 will commemorate the 50th anniversary of that classic OU-Nebraska contest. "We didn't have the national championship games back then," recalled Switzer, who was an assistant under Chuck Fairbanks until taking the reins as head coach in 1973. "We had to prove to the writers, the media people and the coaches of the bowls, who the best teams of the country were who won the bowls. In my era, we had to beat Texas, you had to beat Nebraska, and you had to beat everyone else in the bowl game ... The Nebraska teams that we played, I mean, they were as good as we were, some of them, a lot of them we beat." And in 1972, the Sooners would exact their share of revenge with a 17-14 victory in Lincoln as Tinker Owens helped lead OU to the win. "We had to throw to win that one," Switzer said. "We had a receiver to catch it, Tinker Owens, and we got a guy to throw it, Dave Robertson. We had to throw the ball to win and we made a lot of big plays. Tinker at the right time and they put the ball on him and Tinker made the catches. We beat Devaney's last team in '72, the last game he coached." Switzer, who won his first five meetings with Nebraska, coined the term "Sooner Magic" on a blustery afternoon in Lincoln in 1976. Trailing by a 17-7 count in the fourth quarter, Oklahoma cut the Nebraska lead to 17-13 with three minutes remaining. Switzer dug into his back of tricks. Backed up at the 16-yard line, Woodie Shepard completed a 50-yard halfback pass to freshman end Steve Rhodes, whose catch was nothing short of miraculous. Two plays later, Rhodes ran a curl pattern and then pitched to halfback Elvis Peacock on a hook-and-lateral play. Peacock was finally knocked out of bounds at the Nebraska three, setting up the game-winning TD on the next play as OU registered a 20-17 win to vault the Sooners into a three-way tie for the conference championship. To this day, one of the losses that still stings the most for Switzer is his 1978 regular season loss to Nebraska, his first-ever setback against the Cornhuskers. That game was the only blemish on OU's record that season, a 17-14 loss on Veterans Day in Lincoln. Switzer has often said that his best squad that didn't win a national title was that 11-1 team in 1978. "People ask me 'what game stands out (from that season) and it's always the Nebraska game," said. "We lost 17-14. We fumbled nine times. We lost six that day. We only lose 17-14. If they had fumbled that many times, we'd have hung half a hundred on them, I promise you. But we wallowed and gave that game away. It wasn't anyone's fault. We were the best team in the country, number one, were undefeated, we led in every category, offensively, defensively. It was just one of those days, we couldn't overcome the last fumble. We would have won the game if it weren't for that." In typical Switzer fashion, though, the Sooners did gain a measure of revenge against Osborne's squad with a 31-24 win in a rematch of the two teams in the Orange Bowl. The OU-Nebraska hijinx would carry over into the next decade, as Switzer made an impromptu appearance on Devaney's TV show the night before the 1980 contest in Lincoln presenting the legendary Huskers coach a bag of tacos - referencing that Oklahoma would be heading to the Orange Bowl (again), while a date in the Sun Bowl would await Nebraska (again). The Sooners backed up Switzer's bravado, posting a 21-17 win the following day. In 1985, Switzer guided OU to its sixth national title, finishing the season with eight straight wins, including a 27-7 victory against Nebraska. Sixteen years after the "Game of the Century," the two teams entered their 1987 contest ranked atop the AP Poll, as the No. 2 Sooners captured a 17-7 win over the No. 1 Cornhuskers, giving Switzer his final victory over Osborne's squad. Oklahoma and Nebraska - two teams forever intertwined in college football history, two distinguished programs and two teams that will once again meet on the gridiron in 2021 and 2022. |
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