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HillsboroDuck
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Few rivalries in sports fuel as much hostility and pressure to win like college football's annual Red River Showdown between Oklahoma and Texas.
And through the years, those monumental stakes have led to some serious skullduggery. The most notable example came in 1972, when the Sooners spied on Texas' practices, allowing them to block a quick kick the Longhorns had secretly been working on en route to a victory.
Now, thanks to Mike Leach, the 1999 game can officially be added to that same legacy.
The rancor of the Oklahoma-Texas rivalry reached its peak in 1976, but it began four years earlier with Barry Switzer, Darrell Royal, an oilman and some old-fashioned espionage.
He has nearly $5 million and a deal to play for the Oakland A's, but what if the Oklahoma QB chooses football long term? Mel and Todd break down his NFL prospects.
During pregame warmups of that year's Red River Showdown, an underhanded script outlining OU's opening offensive plays was spotted on the field by one of Texas' student assistants, who scooped it up and took it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese. To the heavily favored Longhorns, it seemed as if they'd caught an enormous break.
"We were trying to figure out if it was authentic," Reese said. "We were in this state of, 'Can we believe this?'"
They shouldn't have.
It was a fake, part of a plot hatched by Leach and consulted by the Longhorns, who quickly fell behind 17-0 before realizing they'd been duped.
"That does sound like Mike," said former Texas coach Mack Brown, unaware of the script at the time. "I do know this: Offensive coordinators are so careful with those scripts they wouldn't be losing them. Those things are valuable. Only Mike would think to lay one out there as a decoy."
In his 2011 book "Swing Your Sword," Leach briefly mentioned the lark. But he never knew for sure just how seriously the Longhorns had taken it, how often they'd referenced it or just how effective it had been.
He was elated to learn recently that they had fallen for it so hard.
"These things evolve and become somewhat legendary," Leach said.
Leading up to the game, Leach didn't tell OU coach Bob Stoops he was planting it, and Reese didn't inform Brown he had it. As a result, few people on either side knew of the decoy script's existence. And yet, it nearly propelled the underdog Sooners, with Stoops in his first year and OU coming off a 5-6 season, to a victory.
"That game might've been the most bizarre experience I ever had as a college football player," said Ahmad Brooks, a starting defensive back for the Longhorns. "I can't tell you how wrong we were in the first 3 or 4 minutes with every play call we had. I've never seen anything like it.
"It was complete pandemonium and it was complete confusion."
Reese finally trashed the script and Texas settled back into their game plan to rally and roll, 38-28.
But not before Leach unleashed pandemonium upon the Longhorns for a quarter.
"It was a decent effort," Leach said. "But it would even be more legendary if we had won the sucker."
A decent effort, fit for such a heated rivalry.
"Yeah, it was kind of shady," said former OU tight end Trent Smith, whom Leach drafted to "accidentally" drop the sheet in front of the Texas coaches.
"But it's OU-Texas. There are no rules."
On the Wednesday night of game week, Leach was with OU offensive assistant Cale Gundy when the two began laughing about how funny it would be to create a decoy script for the Longhorns.
"You start out kind of joking around about it," Leach said. "And then it's like, 'All right, screw it. Why not? Let's do it.' Then we had to think of stuff to put on it."
Leach didn't want to just mess with Texas. He wanted to utilize the ploy to gain an edge. So he took actual plays he had been planning to call and began doctoring up potential companions alongside them.
"In other words, with the fake play call, we wanted to complement it," he explained. "We would run something that would hopefully attack the space that we created by what they thought the play was gonna be."
For the decoy script, Leach began inputting plays the Sooners didn't even have in their system. And he invented the terminology for them as he went along, balancing the line between too complex to understand and too simple to be believable.
GameDay at the Red River Showdown
ESPN's College GameDay will be live at the Classic Corral from the State Fair of Texas in Dallas from from 8-11 a.m. Central on Saturday.
"It had to look like our terminology," Leach continued. "But Z-25 Jet, they may not know what the hell that means, you know? But you didn't wanna get busted, either. So it had to sound football-ish."
When he'd finished his masterpiece, Leach put Gundy's name at the top of it, as if it were Gundy's copy of OU's offensive play script. Then, he had it laminated to make it look official.
"That's Mike," Gundy said. "It was funny."
Outside Gundy, Leach kept the rest of the coaching staff in the dark, including Stoops, who was preparing for his first Red River Showdown.
"I figured Bob had enough problems and we'd let Bob just go ahead and deal with some Bob stuff," Leach said. "It was really me and Cale. You couldn't tell too many because if you did, the cat would get outta the bag or you'd have too many guys looking suspicious."
Next, Leach had to figure out how to lure Texas into taking the bait.
During the 1999 season, Leach, Smith and fullback Seth Littrell had a little tradition during pregame warmups.
"Back then, Coach Leach and me and Seth all dipped Copenhagen snuff," Smith recalled. "I would always carry the can out on the field during pregame. So I remember [Leach] calling me over and asking for the can. We were all going to take a dip together and he was like, 'All right, here's the deal, guys ...' explaining this to me and Seth. I just remember how excited he was about it. I got the feeling this was a total rogue thing that he was doing on his own.
"But he was like, 'Oh, this is going to be amazing. This is going to be hilarious. This is going to be epic.'"
As Leach carried on, Littrell and Smith grew just as excited.
"I thought it was pretty clever, to be honest," Littrell said.
"Yeah, it was kind of shady, but it's OU-Texas. There are no rules."
Former Oklahoma tight end Trent Smith
Leach then handed the script to Smith and ordered him to execute the plant, which he did to perfection.
"He says, 'I'm going to walk off. I want you to stand here for a minute. Then, I want you to drop it right in front of their coaches over there and then just keep jogging," Smith said. "It was kind of exciting. I act like I'm going to tuck this script in the belt on my pants. I let it fall and just kept jogging as though I thought I still had it.
"It was killing me not to look back and see if it had worked."
Off to the side, Leach kept the discarded script within his peripheral vision. And to his delight, he watched as Texas student assistant Casey Horny picked it up.
"The body language was awesome. It was like watching a Muttley cartoon," Leach said, referring to the villainous 1960s dog who was the sidekick to Dick Dastardly. "They decided to give it the Muttley snicker and then went up the tunnel."
Former OU fullback Set Littrell, now head coach at North Texas, was part of a small group of people who knew Leach's plan. Elsa/Getty Images
Back in the locker room, a few of the Texas coaches, including Reese, secondary coach Everett Withers and Tom Herman, just a grad assistant that season, passed around the script, attempting to determine what to make of it.
"It was one of those deals where we were like, 'No, this can't be real,'" said Withers, now head coach at Texas State. "But we all kind of thought it was."
They ultimately decided not to go to Brown with it. Instead, Reese took the script with him up to the press box.
"That's when I really looked it over and we talked a little bit about it," Reese said. "Everybody really thought it was the real deal."
Reese began tweaking his defensive calls to match the script. And it wouldn't take long for that to backfire.
"I just remember sitting in the huddle that first drive and kind of giggling," said Littrell. "Like, they think they know what we're fixin' to do."
The second play of the script called for something akin to a double-reverse pass. In response, the Longhorns brought Brooks on a nickel blitz with the goal of sacking the Sooners for a big loss.
Instead, Leach snuck freshman receiver Antwone Savage behind the linebackers on a shallow crossing route going the other direction to the right. Quarterback Josh Heupel found him so wide open that Savage galloped untouched for a 44-yard touchdown.
"We thought maybe we just screwed the verbiage up," Herman said.
So despite getting torched for a touchdown in two plays, Texas didn't immediately give up on the script. And in turn, its defense grew only more discombobulated...
Out of characters (thanks devs!), click the link to read the rest, it's worth it. And through the years, those monumental stakes have led to some serious skullduggery. The most notable example came in 1972, when the Sooners spied on Texas' practices, allowing them to block a quick kick the Longhorns had secretly been working on en route to a victory.
Now, thanks to Mike Leach, the 1999 game can officially be added to that same legacy.
The rancor of the Oklahoma-Texas rivalry reached its peak in 1976, but it began four years earlier with Barry Switzer, Darrell Royal, an oilman and some old-fashioned espionage.
He has nearly $5 million and a deal to play for the Oakland A's, but what if the Oklahoma QB chooses football long term? Mel and Todd break down his NFL prospects.
During pregame warmups of that year's Red River Showdown, an underhanded script outlining OU's opening offensive plays was spotted on the field by one of Texas' student assistants, who scooped it up and took it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese. To the heavily favored Longhorns, it seemed as if they'd caught an enormous break.
"We were trying to figure out if it was authentic," Reese said. "We were in this state of, 'Can we believe this?'"
They shouldn't have.
It was a fake, part of a plot hatched by Leach and consulted by the Longhorns, who quickly fell behind 17-0 before realizing they'd been duped.
"That does sound like Mike," said former Texas coach Mack Brown, unaware of the script at the time. "I do know this: Offensive coordinators are so careful with those scripts they wouldn't be losing them. Those things are valuable. Only Mike would think to lay one out there as a decoy."
In his 2011 book "Swing Your Sword," Leach briefly mentioned the lark. But he never knew for sure just how seriously the Longhorns had taken it, how often they'd referenced it or just how effective it had been.
He was elated to learn recently that they had fallen for it so hard.
"These things evolve and become somewhat legendary," Leach said.
Leading up to the game, Leach didn't tell OU coach Bob Stoops he was planting it, and Reese didn't inform Brown he had it. As a result, few people on either side knew of the decoy script's existence. And yet, it nearly propelled the underdog Sooners, with Stoops in his first year and OU coming off a 5-6 season, to a victory.
"That game might've been the most bizarre experience I ever had as a college football player," said Ahmad Brooks, a starting defensive back for the Longhorns. "I can't tell you how wrong we were in the first 3 or 4 minutes with every play call we had. I've never seen anything like it.
"It was complete pandemonium and it was complete confusion."
Reese finally trashed the script and Texas settled back into their game plan to rally and roll, 38-28.
But not before Leach unleashed pandemonium upon the Longhorns for a quarter.
"It was a decent effort," Leach said. "But it would even be more legendary if we had won the sucker."
A decent effort, fit for such a heated rivalry.
"Yeah, it was kind of shady," said former OU tight end Trent Smith, whom Leach drafted to "accidentally" drop the sheet in front of the Texas coaches.
"But it's OU-Texas. There are no rules."
On the Wednesday night of game week, Leach was with OU offensive assistant Cale Gundy when the two began laughing about how funny it would be to create a decoy script for the Longhorns.
"You start out kind of joking around about it," Leach said. "And then it's like, 'All right, screw it. Why not? Let's do it.' Then we had to think of stuff to put on it."
Leach didn't want to just mess with Texas. He wanted to utilize the ploy to gain an edge. So he took actual plays he had been planning to call and began doctoring up potential companions alongside them.
"In other words, with the fake play call, we wanted to complement it," he explained. "We would run something that would hopefully attack the space that we created by what they thought the play was gonna be."
For the decoy script, Leach began inputting plays the Sooners didn't even have in their system. And he invented the terminology for them as he went along, balancing the line between too complex to understand and too simple to be believable.
GameDay at the Red River Showdown
ESPN's College GameDay will be live at the Classic Corral from the State Fair of Texas in Dallas from from 8-11 a.m. Central on Saturday.
"It had to look like our terminology," Leach continued. "But Z-25 Jet, they may not know what the hell that means, you know? But you didn't wanna get busted, either. So it had to sound football-ish."
When he'd finished his masterpiece, Leach put Gundy's name at the top of it, as if it were Gundy's copy of OU's offensive play script. Then, he had it laminated to make it look official.
"That's Mike," Gundy said. "It was funny."
Outside Gundy, Leach kept the rest of the coaching staff in the dark, including Stoops, who was preparing for his first Red River Showdown.
"I figured Bob had enough problems and we'd let Bob just go ahead and deal with some Bob stuff," Leach said. "It was really me and Cale. You couldn't tell too many because if you did, the cat would get outta the bag or you'd have too many guys looking suspicious."
Next, Leach had to figure out how to lure Texas into taking the bait.
During the 1999 season, Leach, Smith and fullback Seth Littrell had a little tradition during pregame warmups.
"Back then, Coach Leach and me and Seth all dipped Copenhagen snuff," Smith recalled. "I would always carry the can out on the field during pregame. So I remember [Leach] calling me over and asking for the can. We were all going to take a dip together and he was like, 'All right, here's the deal, guys ...' explaining this to me and Seth. I just remember how excited he was about it. I got the feeling this was a total rogue thing that he was doing on his own.
"But he was like, 'Oh, this is going to be amazing. This is going to be hilarious. This is going to be epic.'"
As Leach carried on, Littrell and Smith grew just as excited.
"I thought it was pretty clever, to be honest," Littrell said.
"Yeah, it was kind of shady, but it's OU-Texas. There are no rules."
Former Oklahoma tight end Trent Smith
Leach then handed the script to Smith and ordered him to execute the plant, which he did to perfection.
"He says, 'I'm going to walk off. I want you to stand here for a minute. Then, I want you to drop it right in front of their coaches over there and then just keep jogging," Smith said. "It was kind of exciting. I act like I'm going to tuck this script in the belt on my pants. I let it fall and just kept jogging as though I thought I still had it.
"It was killing me not to look back and see if it had worked."
Off to the side, Leach kept the discarded script within his peripheral vision. And to his delight, he watched as Texas student assistant Casey Horny picked it up.
"The body language was awesome. It was like watching a Muttley cartoon," Leach said, referring to the villainous 1960s dog who was the sidekick to Dick Dastardly. "They decided to give it the Muttley snicker and then went up the tunnel."
Former OU fullback Set Littrell, now head coach at North Texas, was part of a small group of people who knew Leach's plan. Elsa/Getty Images
Back in the locker room, a few of the Texas coaches, including Reese, secondary coach Everett Withers and Tom Herman, just a grad assistant that season, passed around the script, attempting to determine what to make of it.
"It was one of those deals where we were like, 'No, this can't be real,'" said Withers, now head coach at Texas State. "But we all kind of thought it was."
They ultimately decided not to go to Brown with it. Instead, Reese took the script with him up to the press box.
"That's when I really looked it over and we talked a little bit about it," Reese said. "Everybody really thought it was the real deal."
Reese began tweaking his defensive calls to match the script. And it wouldn't take long for that to backfire.
"I just remember sitting in the huddle that first drive and kind of giggling," said Littrell. "Like, they think they know what we're fixin' to do."
The second play of the script called for something akin to a double-reverse pass. In response, the Longhorns brought Brooks on a nickel blitz with the goal of sacking the Sooners for a big loss.
Instead, Leach snuck freshman receiver Antwone Savage behind the linebackers on a shallow crossing route going the other direction to the right. Quarterback Josh Heupel found him so wide open that Savage galloped untouched for a 44-yard touchdown.
"We thought maybe we just screwed the verbiage up," Herman said.
So despite getting torched for a touchdown in two plays, Texas didn't immediately give up on the script. And in turn, its defense grew only more discombobulated...
Comments
I think attending the Trump rally last night made you dumber.