USC matchup conjures memories of '78
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BY BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star
The toughest part sometimes is just believing.
Not many believed that second week of November 1978.
Jim Pillen sat in an agronomy class on East Campus days before Nebraska was to play top-ranked Oklahoma in football.
A test was scheduled for the following Monday. One of the kids in class didn’t think that was a very good idea and so he shot his hand into the air.
“Look,” the young man told the instructor, “after we win the game, can we move back this Monday test?”
The instructor thought this a rather funny request.
“That will never happen,” he answered.
Pillen was furious, almost angry enough to leave, but not quite. After all, there was a test coming Monday.
Just another doubter, Pillen decided. There were plenty of those.
A day before the game, Sports Illustrated writer Doug Looney walked into Nebraska’s locker room.
“Yeah, you guys have a good team, but you don’t have a chance,” Looney announced.
Husker linebacker Bruce Dunning overheard and you can be sure this brought forth some rage.
“Get the hell out of our locker room,” Dunning shouted.
Looney left with more quickness than an Oklahoma running back. Saturday finally showed up.
Nov. 11, 1978, came to Lincoln with a chilling cold, a gray blanket of clouds and a noise that still makes goosebumps appear on the arms of old men.
That was the day Nebraska played a team greater in talent, greater in speed, greater in attitude ... lesser in points.
That was the day No. 1 visited Memorial Stadium and left a loser.
“People always ask, ‘What game you remember more than anything?’” the old Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer says these years later. “That one. That one right there. It’s the loss I remember most. I don’t remember the victories. I had too many of them.”
Since that game, 29 years have passed without a visit to Lincoln from a No. 1-ranked team. Until Saturday, that is.
Saturday brings a team from Southern California, a team believed to be greater in talent, greater in speed, greater in attitude...
“I’d tell the Nebraska men in that locker room that they have to put their damn pants on just like you do,” Dunning says. “Man, you get up in their face. You start hitting them and cracking them. You’ll get their attention.”
Barry Switzer answers his phone while sitting in a bar.
You want to talk about ‘78? Shoot, yes, he’ll talk about that game.
“Name one that’s even close to that game,” he says.
Let him put down his drink.
“I remember this. We got beat 17-14. We fumbled nine times,” Switzer says. “If Nebraska had done that, we would have hung half a hundred on them.”
He speaks of the game now with a certain fondness. Enough time passes and you just start to just shake your head and laugh at yesterday’s fumbles.
One of his best teams, that team. Man, could that Billy Sims run the football. He was deserving of that Heisman.
Of course, it was Sims who took the ball in the final minutes toward the Husker goal line, twisting and turning, grace with a football... oh, wait, did he fumble? Did he leave it on the three?
Sims had been 153 yards of magnificence that day, but always to his name there will be that fumble, three yards from the win, Oklahoma’s sixth lost fumble of the day, the one that cast aside national championship dreams.
Then again, perhaps blame should not be assessed so much as credit is given. Jeff Hansen and Andy Means knocked that ball out. Pillen, not too worried about that agronomy test right then, likes to say he “tripped on the 5 and fell on the ball.”
He held the ball to the air while the stadium shook. Soon, the red-clad rooters were on the field, tearing down goalposts.
“I remember getting carried off by fans on my back as oranges were pelting around me,” says George Andrews, a financial advisor now, a defensive end then.
“There are not too many emotional highs like that in a lifetime,” says Lee Kunz, in real estate now, a linebacker then.
Yet just minutes before chaotic joy, Pillen recalls a nervous late-game huddle. With OU driving, a timeout was called. “Dadgum, we got to hang in there,” Husker coach Tom Osborne said.
“Don’t worry, Coach,” Pillen told him. “Something good is going to happen here.”
Osborne was in his sixth year at Nebraska. The seat below him was starting to get hot. He hadn’t yet defeated the Sooners.
People were beginning to talk, the same a some voices today talk about Husker coach Bill Callahan included. This was a coach who needed to show he could win a really big game.
The problem was it looked like Osborne was going to get hit with Sooner Magic yet again.
After the Huskers took a 17-14 lead on a field goal early in the fourth quarter, Nebraska’s John Ruud delivered a crushing hit to OU’s returnman Kelly Phelps on the ensuing kickoff. The ball came out. Nebraska recovered on the 11. But officials said the obvious fumble was no fumble at all. Phelps was down.
“It was the dreadful kind of play that, had Nebraska lost, everyone would have looked at films of and cursed for years. They would have been justified,” Looney wrote in Sports Illustrated.
That magazine cover hangs on a wall on the sixth floor of Memorial Stadium.
There’s that picture of Husker running back Rick Berns running through Sooners, and a headline: NEBRASKA BURSTS OKLAHOMA’S BUBBLE.
A writer asked Switzer after the game if Sims deserved to win the Heisman.
Switzer: Why would you ask that?
Writer: Well, he fumbled.
“My retort to this press person was this: Did any Heisman Trophy running back never fumble the football? Well, yeah, they all do. What the hell?”
Switzer will tell you now Nebraska deserved to win that day. He’ll also tell you the Huskers didn’t have near the team he had that year.
Of course, Huskers will tell you that, too. Nebraska was ranked No. 4 coming into that game, but it was not a team that put fear into anyone.
“I don’t think you have anybody today or then who would say that we were more talented than that team,” Pillen says.
It was an Oklahoma team that, in some ways, compares with the USC team Nebraska will see tonight.
Loaded at running back. Headed by a free-spirited coach. Oozing with confidence.
“Before a game, you’d look over at Oklahoma and see guys throwing frisbees on the field, a few of them lighting cigars,” Kunz says. “They defined loose and relaxed.”
That Oklahoma team didn’t have to wait long to get its revenge against the Huskers. Nebraska’s emotional high met a low the next week, when Missouri came into Lincoln and pulled a 35-31 upset.
That loss made way for a rematch in the Orange Bowl with the Sooners.
Oklahoma fumbled only once that game and dominated even more than the 31-24 score would indicate.
Yeah, that was a good win, Switzer says.
“I just wish we would have done it that first time, big boy.”
The game came up in George Andrews’ car the other day.
Andrews isn’t the type of guy to live in the past, but here he was talking about it on a ride to a 13-year-old’s basketball game.
His son was about to play a tough team and doubting his chances at winning.
For some reason, it just seemed the right time for Andrews to tell his kid about that day in 1978.
Just a little story that illustrates why we are drawn to these games. Because sometimes, not always, not even often, the team that isn’t supposed to win does.
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
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