The Game Stoops Stamped OU's Return to Prominence
by Berry Tramel
11/22/2024
O n the night of Oct. 27, 2000, Ben Myers and his girlfriend heard that students were congregating outside the walls of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. So they grabbed some blankets and joined the legions of Sooner students camping out to get the best possible seats for the OU-Nebraska game the next day.
No. 1 Nebraska vs. No. 3 Oklahoma. Just like the old days that some weren’t sure would ever pass this way again.
It had been 13 years since the Sooners had been ranked so high in the Associated Press poll. Heck, in the three seasons before Bob Stoops’ arrival after the 1998 season, OU hadn’t been ranked anywhere in the AP poll. But Stoops had planted the seeds of optimism, and sure enough the Sooners bloomed and October victories over 11th-ranked Texas and No. 2 Kansas State had set up another epic battle of the Big Reds.
Delirium had returned to Norman, setting up perhaps the wildest day in Owen Field’s history. The university in 2024 is celebrating the 100th season of one of college football’s grandest stadiums.
The stadium built by Bennie Owen’s vision and hands has seen more than its share of glory, from the Bud Wilkinson era to the Barry Switzer days to Bob Stoops’ time. Games like the Renaldo Works-led 2002 victory over Alabama (Stoops was 3-0 vs. the Crimson Tide, which comes to Owen Field this week). And the 2003 Bedlam rout when Mike Stoops challenged Les Miles. And the 2008 Texas Tech affair, when Bob Stoops urged the fans to take over the stadium, and they did so with the famed Jump Around game.
But the stadium never has rocked the way it rocked on Oct. 28, 2000.
And Myers, then a freshman from Little Elm, Texas, and now a 42-year-old season-ticket holder living in Dallas, was part of the wildest innovation you’re likely to find among a college football fanbase.
OU’s longtime tradition of tossing oranges onto the field in games that in the old days seemed likely to propel the Sooners to the Orange Bowl, had been frowned upon. Oranges flung by strong-armed students from the upper rows of the stadium could be quite injurious to lower-seating fans or non-uniformed personnel standing on the sidelines.
So security guards long were on the lookout for oranges being smuggled through the gates on gameday, especially before the OU-Nebraska revival.
But those students camping out on Friday night found a way around the no-oranges policy.
Our feelings of the team being special were really confirmed that day.
“People were bringing oranges,” Myers said. “And we threw them over the stadium wall, which at that time was much lower, so that security wouldn't confiscate them as we entered in the morning, and then we could have them to throw onto the field.”
That’s innovation at its finest, and the next day it indeed rained oranges on Owen Field. In what seems to be the preponderance of fans’ favorite home game in OU history, the Sooners rallied from an early 14-point deficit to beat Nebraska 31-14. A little more than two months later, the Sooners beat Florida State 13-2 for the national championship in, yes, the Orange Bowl, igniting the latest glorious era of Sooner football.
“Our feelings of the team being special were really confirmed that day,” Myers said.
Fans remember that day as the loudest in stadium history. Thousands of fans flooded the field, leading to law enforcement famously firing off pepper spray and goal posts being pulled down, a rarity in Norman.
Revelry throughout campus — heck, throughout the state, including impromptu celebrations on highways as fans journeyed home.
OU led 24-14 at halftime, and when cornerback Derrick Strait returned an interception 32 yards for a third-quarter touchdown, the roar was enormous.
Michael Adams, now 40, of Choctaw: “That was probably the loudest I've ever heard it in the stadium, on that play.”
David Dahlgren, now 68, Edmond: “The place went CRAZY! A memory I’ll never ever forget!”
Todd Anderson, now 39, Lantana, Texas: “Pandemonium.”
Strait’s touchdown brought out the oranges, and Sooner Nation seemed to realize that its decade-plus drought was over.
“I have seen a lot of games at Memorial Stadium,” Anderson said. “That was probably the most emotional, and the one that I will truly remember forever.”
The game was huge for all kinds of reasons. The night before, OU kicked off its $100 million Great Expectations fundraising campaign. Stoops, who never even thought about leaving his team the night before a game, made an exception and attended the gala in the OU Memorial Union ballroom.
The Sooner victory fueled momentum for that campaign, and the east-side stadium renovation, completed in 2003, was the result.
Nebraska, which at the time of kickoff had won 88 of its previous 96 games, was dethroned as the Big 12 powerhouse. The Cornhuskers haven’t won a conference title since, either in the Big 12 or the Big Ten. The Sooners won 14 of the first 21 Big 12 championships of the 2000s.
With ESPN’s GameDay live from Norman that day, the 2000 Nebraska game propelled OU back into the national spotlight, and the Sooners rarely have strayed from there since.
“The atmosphere is what sticks out the most,” said Caleb Cummings, now 39, of Austin, Texas. “There was a sense of camaraderie and gratitude among the fans pregame that was unlike anything I had experienced at an OU game prior.
“You could sense some of the older fans who had experienced the ’70s and ’80s were basking in the atmosphere and were so grateful that OU was back to where they believed it belonged.”
Mark Buchanan, now 46 of Sand Springs, was in the Pride of Oklahoma that season and agrees that the travails of the previous decade created the perfect recipe for a Sooner eruption.
“There was an electricity in the air,” Buchanan said. “We were so hungry to be good again. On that day, you could feel something incredible was about to happen.
“It really felt like every player, every cheerleader, every pom, every band member, every Ruf-Nek, every single fan in that stadium had one heartbeat that afternoon. It was like we were all fighting Nebraska together through the players on the field. After we won, I just remember seeing the place go nuts. I’ve never been more proud to be a Sooner than I was that day. It was like we killed the monster of mediocrity who had poisoned us for years prior to Stoops.”
The stadium is louder in the 21st century than in the 20th century. These days, it’s completely bowled in, of course. And the eastside upper deck helps hold in noise, just as the westside upper deck has since 1975.
But stadium veterans say no game was so loud, such an assault on the senses, as 2000 Nebraska.
Creed’s “Higher” thumped from the loudspeakers hours before the game.
The seats were full long before kickoff.
An energy that belied the 11 a.m. kickoff.
The student section was so full, some stood sideways because there was no room.
The noise was authentic, in those days before piped-in cacophony brought an artificial element to sports.
“Still to this day, it was the loudest game I've ever been to,” said Chad Edwards, now 44, of Yukon. “So loud I remember having to yell to say something to my brother even with him right next to me.”
Chad Foshee, now an Oklahoma City lawyer, was a high school senior in 2000 and recalls being stunned seeing the GameDay set in the southwest corner of the end zone.
“Didn’t seem real,” Foshee said. “Everything from the pregame band routine to the team entrance felt like I was seeing an OU game for the first time.
“I had heard about the glory days from my dad, but I had never seen it with my own eyes. I was finally seeing it. I had never seen the stadium so packed … you couldn’t even tell where the sections stopped. We sat in the west-side upper deck, and the upper deck shook when the team took the field. It really did shake.”
Soon enough, the victory was secure, and here came the oranges.
“The best part was (linebacker) Torrance Marshall waving his arms around with an orange in his hand like an angel sent straight from college football heaven,” said Jared Ediger, now 43, of Yukon.
“Today, the craziness of pepper spray engulfing Sooner families and wild men tearing the goal post would surely be labeled as trauma. Not that day. That day, Sooner Magic brought together some 75,000 individuals to proudly celebrate their football team.”
And Bob Stoops, in just his second season at OU, was the architect.
