This Saturday, OU will finally play a real football team when Kansas State visits Gaylord Family are Assholes Memorial Stadium. Kansas State is apparently a good football team. They have a great coach, a good quarterback and have beaten three bad football teams. This has earned them a 15-ranking in the AP poll, which is determined by the same panel of drunken sportswriters who think that OU is the 6th best team in the country.
Anyway, this Top 20 match-up has regurgitated the same old boring, stale and tired discussion that OU fans sucks, don’t cheer at games and are pompous entitled assholes (only two are true). Bob Stoops served as the catalyst for the discussion when he hinted that the fans need to be loud for the K-state game during his weekly press conference.
Cue Berry Tramel column in 3…2…1:
Big game Saturday at Owen Field, and you don't have to check the rankings or gauge ESPN mentions or take R.J. Washington's blood pressure.
Just listen to Bob Stoops nudge OU fans to get rowdy.
Stoops hasn't called out the Sooner crowd — he's still smarting from four years ago — but Monday he dropped a subtle hint that it's all hands on deck when Kansas State comes to town.
“I'm sure we'll have a great crowd,” Stoops said. “Everybody's anticipating the opening of the Big 12 season, so hopefully our crowd will engage and be a factor.”
Stoops doesn't trot that out for Florida A&M or Iowa State. He saves it for games like second-ranked Texas Tech in 2008 and K-State this weekend.
Stoops this week wanted no part of a repeat exhortation. “People got pretty sore at me,” he said of his 2008 declaration. “I can't say that I heard anything. Just seemed that way.”
Sore? Don't you love it when Stoops talks like Beaver Cleaver. Besides, why not call out the fans again? No one in human history ever got so much mileage out of a request.
“I don't need to comment on that,” Stoops said. “You guys are at every game. You can see whether they're raucous or not. So you call it as you see it. You can refer to 2008 if you want.”
OK. Consider it done.
So do the OU fans get a bad rap? I'd say so. I don't think the Sooners have the most electric atmosphere in college football, but I also don't think it's stale.
I've been to games at Tennessee and Oregon, Alabama and Nebraska, Texas A&M and Georgia, Notre Dame and Texas. Owen Field ranks somewhere in the middle of that pack. Tennessee's probably the best I've experienced, and I wasn't even there for a big game (OSU 1995, the Cowboys stunk).
The OU crowd gets juiced for big games, and who cares about little games?
First of all, let me say that I agree with Berry Trammel. OU fans do get a bad rap. Outside of the SEC, the 80,000+ fans huddled around Owen Field have the same game day energy of any other fan base. The get loud and cheer at the games that require it (Nebraska 2000, Alabama 2002, Missouri 2007, Texas Tech 2008, most Bedlam games) and set on their seat and leave early for the games that deserve it (just about any other game played in Norman since 1999). Also, they have the disadvantage of playing their biggest rival each year in Dallas.