OU/texas

Those of you with texas inclinations should be pleased that I used the lowercase iteration and not the backwards lowercase “saxet,” which I have been known to do. I am that much of an Oklahoma Sooners fan.

It’s peculiar that I ended up such a monster fan. Growing up loving sports but living in Tulsa, I was far removed from most collegiate sports except the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricanes (what’s a Golden Hurricane?). Seeing as TU satisfied my love of the underdog but not really my love of winning, I was wide open to new allegiances (although I still cheer on my boys in blue and gold when they have big games). I ended up spending my undergraduate years at the University of Oklahoma, and I almost immediately picked up the mantle of Sooner fan.

I didn’t instantaneously become a rabid fan. But by the time Homecoming came around my freshman year, I was game enough to sit through a freezing cold windstorm to watch my Sooners whip up on Colorado. It’s on my top five list of Unfun Things I Have Endured Because I Love OU Football (the top of which being “Sleeping in a tent made of trash cans and plywood to get on College Gameday vs. Texas Tech”, which I’m pretty proud of in retrospect, but mostly it was terrible at the time).

And today, day of days, is the culmination of OU football. No matter what has happened before or what will happen after, we roll in to the Cotton Bowl and do battle with Texas. Even if both teams were 0-10 on the year other than the OU/texas game, we would still roll out in droves and watch excitedly from our homes because it is THAT BIG.

Alright. I’m dressed up in my sooner garb. It’s go time. Let’s go boys. Forget the two losses. Forget that Jermaine Gresham (who Kirk Herbstreit yesterday called “the best tight end we’ve seen in college football in a long time”) is gone. Forget that Broyles is out. Just do it. Beat Texas.