Well, there goes my Thanksgiving break.
I will have 5 days off for Thanksgiving this year, and thanks to the University of Tulsa’s football showdown with 8th ranked Houston for the C-USA West Division title the itinerary looks like this:
Wednesday and Thursday: Think about Tulsa vs Houston
Friday: Watch Tulsa vs Houston
Saturday and Sunday: React to, internalize and digest results of Tulsa vs Houston
For the game Sports Illustrated writer Stewart Mandel called “Conference USA’s version of LSU-Alabama”, with the winner clinching C-USA West, a berth in the C-USA title game, and potentially C-USA’s first ever berth in a BCS game should Houston win, how could you expect anything less. In fact, I suppose I’m going to spend a large portion of tonight writing this, so we can go ahead and say my brain is on loan to this game for a full week.
Hey, at least I have this planned out in advance.
One of the first posts I wrote when I started this think examined my best and worst memories of TU football, and Houston games from the last 5 years accounted for one of each. That post also makes a reference to the 1968 Tulsa-Houston game in which the Cougars defeated the Golden Hurricane 100-6. Many would believe this game is the genesis of the hate that runs so deep in this rivalry, and to an extent they’re right. By halftime, Houston had yet to score 76% of their eventual points (there’s an easy calculation, mark that as one positive of a 100 point defeat), and it took 49 fourth quarter points by Houston over a TU squad decimated by the flu and playing backups of backups (perhaps even Dr. Phil) to reach their final total. To this day, Houston remains the only team to have scored 100 points against a Division 1 football opponent, and the game is still periodically brought up by Houston fans as an example of an epic beatdown or by Tulsa fans as an example of an epic display of poor sportsmanship by then Houston coach Bill Yeoman. However, whatever people’s thoughts were on this game, it did not occur in a vacuum.
I’m going to do my best Joy Hakim impersonation and take you in my time machine. We’re about to go back to a time when the Beatles were still together and Tulsa and Houston still had nationally relevant football programs. In fact, we’re going so far back that Tulsa was actually only 10 years removed from being in the same conference as Oklahoma State, Texas and Rice were in the same league, and even Oklahoma and Nebraska called themselves conference-mates (yes, that far back). Set the clock to 1967.
“But isn’t Houston nationally relevant now? They’re ranked 8th in the country!”
OK, now you’re just interrupting, but if you must know the answer, no, they aren’t. Like the University of Hawaii in 2007, Houston is a team that has been the beneficiary of an extremely light schedule, giving them an artificially high ranking that may allow them into a premier bowl game. As a Tulsa fan, I can’t particularly fault Houston, as we tried the same trick in 2008, backing out of a marquee home and home series with Texas Tech in order to play a rebuilding Arkansas team instead. Not only did Tulsa lose to Arkansas, Texas Tech added insult to injury by struggling to put away Tulsa’s cupcake replacement, Eastern Washington, in the season opener. Houston beat Tulsa 70-30 that year, perhaps a proper punishment for then Tulsa coach Todd Graham’s short-sighted attempt to inflate his own accomplishments by de-clawing his schedule.
But I digress, back to 1967.
Much like 2011, Houston entered Tulsa ranked in the top 10. Unlike this year, Houston already had two losses, but managed to hold a lofty ranking based on a schedule that included Florida State, Wake Forest, North Carolina State, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and wins over 3rd ranked Michigan State and 5th ranked Georgia. A win on the November 25th season finale in Tulsa would guarantee Houston a top 10 ranking. This was especially important as 1967 marked the last of a 6 year stretch where the AP poll only included 10 teams, meaning a loss would leave Houston completely unranked.
It was clearly Houston’s year, Sports Illustrated had even published an article on Bill Yeoman, and there were hardly enough data points to lend the SI curse any statistical merit back in 1967. Yeoman’s “Veer” offense had Houston in the second year of a three year run as the nation’s leader in total offense, a distinction that current Houston coach Kevin Sumlin’s teams have earned only once (2009).
Tulsa on the other hand, was coming off a 54-12 loss to North Texas, and had lost 3 of its last four overall after starting the season 4-0. On top of it all, Tulsa had gone into the Astrodome the previous year and lost to Houston by a score of 73-14. 1966 had also marked the first time in several years that none of a trifecta of Tulsa legends; Jerry Rhome, Howard Twilley, and Billy Guy Anderson had been on the sidelines, and those guys weren’t walking through the door in 1967.
Of course, I wouldn’t be writing all of this if Tulsa hadn’t won.
Tulsa defeated the Cougars 22-13, which marked the last time Tulsa defeated a top 10 team (Edit: I stand corrected, Tulsa defeated 7th ranked Arkansas in 1971). Predictably, Yeoman wasn’t feeling the love, and famously refused to shake Tulsa coach Glenn Dobb’s hand, remarking “Wait until we get you back in our place next year!”
So the story goes, the next year Yeoman scored away at a Tulsa team lacking 15 of 22 starters, posting 7 touchdowns in the final quarter in an attempt to erase his own failure the year before. Unfortunately for Yeoman, destroying teams full of third stringers and players unfit to see a football field did not earn you a top 10 ranking in 1967; However, since this is the strategy Houston has employed to gain their current top-10 ranking, I guess you could make the argument that Yeoman was simply 44 years ahead of his time.
It should be noted, despite book-ending the 1967 loss with two huge victories by a combined score of 173-20, Yeoman’s lifetime record against Tulsa was only 8-7. Perhaps Tulsa wasn’t ever really as big of an underdog as people thought , which is one of several parallels that can be seen between the 1967 and 2011 versions of TU-Houston (Tulsa’s current team is a 3 point underdog as of this writing).
This Friday, November 25th, Tulsa will take the same field against the same team with the same top-10 ranking as the one they beat 44 years ago to the day. As Henry Ford once said, “Those who can not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Let’s just hope Kevin Sumlin and the Houston Cougars aren’t reading this.
