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Quiet Cowboy Ridin' High Undefeated Oklahoma State beat Colorado 41-21 behind tailback Barry Sanders, the best player you've never heard ofBy Rick Reillyl
The boys here at Heisman Helpers, Inc., think you can run. You're fast, smooth as a TV shave and strong. In fact, we think it would be easier to stop an Amtrak express. You're leading the nation in rushing with 203.3 yards a game. You're averaging 8.6 yards a carry, also the best. And you're averaging 37.3 yards per kick return. Hey, last year they gave the Stiff-Armed One to Notre Dame's Tim Brown on pretty much that last stat alone. O.K., you're only 5 ft. 8 in., but you've got a 41-inch vertical leap. The trouble is, you have as much chance of winning the Heisman as Mike Tyson has of getting the furniture. Barry, you've got no gimmick, no videotape campaign, no golden helmet. Now, we here at HHI know you've got more yards rushing all by yourself than 39 Division I-A teams. And you're the first guy in history to take your team's season-opening kickoff back 100 yards two years in a row. And did you hear Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer say, "Barry Sanders is the best college player in America and ought to be the favorite for the Heisman Trophy"? Switzer would rather wear his hair like the Boz than praise a non-Sooner. And, yes, we saw you run through the Colorado defenders Saturday as if they were 11 cardboard cutouts. You had 174 yards and four touchdowns by the time you sat down, and it wasn't even halfway through the third quarter. You and the Cowboys won 41-21 -- was it really that close? -- which left you undefeated, with Nebraska coming up this Saturday. And some people even think you can whip the Huskers. All of that is very nice. Now, here's why you're blowing the Heisman. Start with your spike, Barry. You don't have one. In four games you've scored 15 touchdowns, and after every one of them you've just flipped the ball to the ref. On Saturday after you broke Buff hearts with that 65-yard TD run early in the third period, there wasn't a ref around, so you went hunting for one. Is this a merit badge thing with you or what? And nicknames. You've got to settle on a nickname. Your friends call you B, or Berrari, as in Ferrari. Your coach calls you Rocket Man. There's also B- line and B-train, not to mention Thunder Thighs for your 37-inchers. You're from Wichita, so maybe we should call you the Wichita Whippet. You're little -- the Midget with the Digits -- but you can bench-press 350 pounds. The Toy Tornado? You fall asleep anytime, anywhere. So how about Sominex Sanders? O.K., so we'll get the boys here working on it. Next, there's this vicious, awful story circulating about you. It's not steroids or under-the-table cash. It's worse than that. We hear you've been going to the library after home games. "It's just a rumor so far," your star wide receiver Hart Lee Dykes told us. "But I did see him with a backpack after a game." Why can't you be more like Dykes? Like you, this guy is a terrific athlete. He may be the only person in sports history to have his name enshrined in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Football Hall of Fame at the age of nine. That happened when he won both the Pitch, Hit and Run contest and the Punt, Pass and Kick contest. Nine years old and his hometown of Bay City, Texas, threw him a parade. Dykes is 6 ft. 4 in., 220 pounds, about as fast as he wants to be and has hands as big and soft as an old baseball glove. He needs only two more catches to break the Big Eight career record of 150 held by Tracy Henderson of Iowa State and 36 more yards to break the conference record of 2,350 set by Nebraska's Johnny Rodgers. He could do it this Saturday in Lincoln, and wouldn't that be poetic? Anyway, the point is, Hart Lee (his mama calls him Poo) is loose. He tucks extra-large hand towels into the back of his game pants with messages on them, like: SEE YA, I'M GONE and TOO LATE. Last week it was BYE-BYE. He wears black shoes (very cool) instead of the Oklahoma State white. He sometimes grabs passes one-handed, as he did against Colorado. Flick and the ball gloms onto his hand like he's wearing stickum, which he isn't. And the man knows how to spike. He may also turn out to be the first player in history to help put three schools on probation. This is what's known as doing Hart time. Illinois is serving a sentence already, and word has it that the NCAA is getting ready to book the Sooners and the Cowboys, too. Former Illinois assistant Rick George admitted giving Dykes $100 in 1985 to hole up in a motel room. George hoped this would keep other recruiters away from Dykes, but somebody must have found him, because Oklahoma allegedly offered him cash and prizes to come to Norman. Oklahoma State may have topped the Sooners. The Dallas Morning News even wrote that Dykes tattled on the Cowboys in exchange for immunity from the NCAA. (Dykes says that's not true.) Dykes has become known as the Typhoid Mary of college football. O.K., Barry, so you're not like Dykes. You didn't even get recruited by Northwestern, which took your older brother, Byron, a running back. You could at least be like your quarterback, Mike Gundy, a 5 ft. 11 in. junior with a tracking system for a right arm. Gundy is the nation's third-ranked quarterback, an interception-proof marvel. He's got a little Dykes in him, too. When he was a freshman he announced, "We'll never lose to Colorado while I'm the quarterback here," and the Cowboys haven't yet. This, Barry, is what's known as a quote. Maybe you're allergic to newsprint. Let's talk about the game against Colorado. How many times in history has there been a matchup of the Big Eight's only two undefeated teams when neither was named Oklahoma or Nebraska? Colorado came in at 4-0 and State at 3-0, though Colorado's 0 looked a little mangy compared with the Cowboys' 0. The Buffs had to pull off some tricks that Penn and Teller might have envied just to come from behind to defeat Iowa, Oregon State and Colorado State. Oklahoma State ran up 50 points or more in all three of its games, including a trouncing of Texas A & M. Usually Oklahoma State versus Colorado is the Big Eight Third-Place Showdown -- the two of them are 1-43 against Oklaraska since 1977 (Colorado beat the Huskers in '86 for that lone victory) -- but both teams were making noises about this being the year to punish one of the Big Two. Or, maybe, both. Anyway, Colorado jerked out ahead 7-0 on its first drive, running a brand-new offense that was one part wishbone, one part I and one part prayer. It was invented by the Buffs' bent-nosed, incurably fun coach, Bill McCartney, author of Colorado's latest rise to good fortune, expunger of memories of Chuck (3-8, 1-10, 3-8) Fairbanks and offensive tinkerer who has tried more sets than Contac has tiny time pills. The Denver Post ran a contest to name his latest one and came up with the Power-bone. Around campus, it's called the I-bone. McCartney prefers Buff- bone. But at times on Saturday, it looked more like the I-Wish, as in, I Wish Something in This Dang Offense Would Work. After that first score, the Buffs didn't put up any points until the final drive of the first half. In the meantime, Barry, you went nuts, finding all sorts of ways to get into the end zone. You went one yard for a TD underneath the AstroTurf. You went another yard on a leap that would have cleared Kareem. Then with 9:28 left in the first half, you went seven yards when you had no right going any. Still, at intermission State was ahead only 24-14. You had your nap and came out for the second half and turned a simple sweep on the Cowboys' first drive into a 65-yard touchdown sprint. All you did was cut it up inside, break one tackle and then outzip a safety who had the angle on you. You then left the game with a little hamstring tightness, but no big deal -- the game was a wrap. "That play broke their backs" is how your coach, Pat Jones, put it. "That Sanders is good, plenty good" is how McCartney put it. "Fastest back I've ever seen" is how Colorado defensive lineman Art Walker put it. And what did you say as the world waited with pencils poised?
1) "The offensive line played so well, they made everything Barry, we know guys who would send a limo out for more sportswriters after having the kind of day you had. Seriously, you're just not in synch with the rest of college football. You wear no jewelry; you say you can't afford it. You have no girlfriends on campus. You've never gone to a nightclub or disco in Stillwater. And you're taking college courses where the final essay question isn't "Compare and contrast the draw vs. the sprint-draw." We looked at your course load: business management, accounting, economics, statistics. Barry, give yourself a break. Sign up for Principles of Ankle Taping. If we can just get you squared away, then we can work on the Oklahoma State bigwigs. They've hurt your chances by scheduling this year's first three games at night. By the time you were through turning defenses into Jell-O, it was too late to feed taped highlights to the network college football shows or to the central and eastern time zone sports highlights shows. Which means that even though you've run from Stillwell to Tulsa and back, almost no Heisman voter east of Omaha has seen any of it. "They spent a million dollars putting in lights here," said one disgruntled Cowboy fan, "and they think that means they have to use them." Still, what you need more than anything is wins. A win against Nebraska and/ or Oklahoma, plus a clean slate the rest of the way, and you're into the Orange Bowl, since if there's a tie for the championship in the Big Eight, the team that has gone to Miami less recently gets the trip. Can the 'Pokes do it? They've gone three weeks without turning the ball over, Dykes can catch balls that are headed for the mezzanine, and the offensive line -- the self-styled Warpigs -- are some fine swine. "In spots, we're awfully good," says Jones. "In spots, we're not. We have some of the best individual players in college football, and we have some other players who are pretty ordinary. We're undefeated. And I don't guess there's anybody else I'd like it to happen to." Of course, if you lose to Nebraska, there's always Oklahoma three weeks later, and if you lose that, it's hello, third place -- for the fourth year out of the last five. "No way," says Dykes. "We're not playing for third place. We're tired of this third-place business. We're tired of getting the bronze. Now we want the gold." Please, Barry, steal that quote. Issue date: October 17, 1988
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