Road to Game Day: Week 6, Dallas

Words by Keith Arnold, who is touring the country with his brother Phil as they invade a different college campus each Saturday during the football season. They’ll be reporting back in this space with their various adventures. You can also keep tabs on their vagabonding over at RoadtoGameDay.com. This weekend, they were in Dallas for the Oklahoma-Texas epic.



Now that was a football game. It took a little over 12,000 miles, but games like Saturday’s are the reason we’re on this trip. As a B-52 flew over the Cotton Bowl, it was hard not to get goose bumps as the stadium, split directly down the middle between fans wearing burnt orange or crimson, went wild as the historic military bomber roared past. As both the Sooners and Longhorns readied for battle, it was tough not to feel like you were a part of something special, even before the opening kick. Maybe it was the tour of the 6th Floor Kennedy Museum and the subsequent perusal of both the grassy knoll and then the 888-page Warren Report, but everything about this weekend had a historic flavor to it. And if there was ever a game that felt historic, this was the one. This game felt so intrinsically American, it might as well have had the soundtrack of a Chevy commercial.

The only bad thing about playing this game at a neutral site was that it made it hard for us to get a feel for the schools. With the Cotton Bowl inside the gates of the Texas State Fair, you needed a ticket in hand to be allowed inside the fairgrounds. Combine that with the 11AM kickoff, absolutely stopped traffic on I-35 at 8:30 in the morning, and this wasn’t a place where we spent a lot of time tailgating. But if there’s a location that is perfect for a rivalry, the Cotton Bowl is it. Norman is 189 miles north of Dallas; Austin 196 miles to the south. There couldn’t be a better midpoint for this battle, and even though the game was in Texas, there was no geographic advantage for either team.

As we walked through the packed West End of downtown Dallas on Friday night, it was obvious that Oklahoma was the touchdown favorite. The contingency from the north traveled much better, and after talking to a few Texas people, there wasn’t much confidence brewing from the Longhorn faithful. That’s not to say that UT fans were anything but boisterous. Every cheer that came from the Longhorn fans ended with something sounding like “OU sucks.”

But any recap of this game that focuses on the school cheers or the Dallas nightlife would discount what we saw on Saturday. We went on this trip to see the best of college football, and this game was the best that college football has to offer. This was one of the most electric sporting events I’ve seen in my life. It wasn’t enough for a fan to buy a ticket, he needed to buy a ticket on the proper side of the stadium. It felt like a high school game, where the home team’s fans enter one gate and the visitors enter the other. But more than a football game, this felt like a heavyweight title fight. And not the one’s we’re seeing now, but something out of a Rocky movie.

Even though the underdog Longhorns were overmatched by the Sooners for much of the game, you could just tell that Colt McCoy wouldn’t allow himself to be beaten. Along with the heroics from seniors Jordan Shipley, Quan Crosby, and Chris Ogbonnaya, it was as if the Longhorns kept dragging themselves up from the mat against the superior Oklahoma squad. Having no answer for the Sooners no-huddle offense, they created magic on special teams. Having to find a way to counter Sam Bradford’s five touchdown passes, Colt McCoy used his legs, head, and arm to lead flawlessly and efficiently. In the end, standing in the middle of a crazed Texas student section, I saw faces of disbelief and shock, each looking at each other as the final minutes ticked off the clock wondering how in the world their Longhorns toppled the mighty Sooners.

Lucky for us, we’re headed for Austin today, off to see if McCoy and company can write another chapter of this story, against another highly ranked Big 12 opponent: Missouri. And if this Saturday is anywhere as good as last weekend, we might keep rolling with the Longhorns, as dates with 3 teams in the top 11 await.

If Texas can make it out of October alive, they might be looking at another national championship run, and a Heisman Trophy for McCoy. And there was no game to announce your candidacy like the one he played on Saturday.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.