![]() ![]() ![]() When he'd finished his masterpiece, Leach put Gundy's name at the top of it, as if it were Gundy's copy of OU's offensive play script. "But Z-25 Jet, they may not know what the hell that means, you know? But you didn't wanna get busted, either. "It had to look like our terminology," Leach continued. GameDay at the Red River ShowdownĮSPN's College GameDay will be live at the Classic Corral from the State Fair of Texas in Dallas from 8-11 a.m. And he invented the terminology for them as he went along, balancing the line between too complex to understand and too simple to be believable. "We would run something that would hopefully attack the space that we created by what they thought the play was gonna be."įor the decoy script, Leach began inputting plays the Sooners didn't even have in their system. "In other words, with the fake playcall, we wanted to complement it," he explained. So he took actual plays he had been planning to call and began doctoring up potential companions alongside them. He wanted to use the ploy to gain an edge. Leach didn't want to just mess with Texas. Why not? Let's do it.' Then we had to think of stuff to put on it." "And then it's like, 'All right, screw it. "You start out kind of joking around about it," Leach said. On the Wednesday night of game week, Leach was with OU offensive assistant Cale Gundy when the two began laughing about how funny it would be to create a decoy script for the Longhorns. In his only Red River Showdown, Mike Leach, right, left a lasting memory for coaches on both sides. "Yeah, it was kind of shady," said former OU tight end Trent Smith, whom Leach drafted to "accidentally" drop the sheet in front of the Texas coaches. "But it would even be more legendary if we had won the sucker."Ī decent effort, fit for such a heated rivalry. Reese finally trashed the script, and Texas settled back into its game plan to rally and roll 38-28.īut not before Leach unleashed pandemonium upon the Longhorns for a quarter. ![]() "It was complete pandemonium, and it was complete confusion." ![]() "I can't tell you how wrong we were in the first three or four minutes with every playcall we had. "That game might've been the most bizarre experience I ever had as a college football player," said Ahmad Brooks, a starting defensive back for the Longhorns. And yet, it nearly propelled the underdog Sooners, with Stoops in his first year and OU coming off a 5-6 season, to a victory. As a result, few people on either side knew of the decoy script's existence. Leading up to the game, Leach didn't tell OU coach Bob Stoops he was planting it, and Reese didn't inform Brown he had it. "These things evolve and become somewhat legendary," Leach said. He was elated to learn recently that they had fallen for it so hard. But he never knew for sure just how seriously the Longhorns had taken it, how often they'd referenced it or just how effective it had been. In his 2011 book "Swing Your Sword," Leach briefly mentioned the lark. Only Mike would think to lay one out there as a decoy." "I do know this: Offensive coordinators are so careful with those scripts they wouldn't be losing them. "That does sound like Mike," said former Texas coach Mack Brown, unaware of the script at the time. It was a fake, part of a plot hatched by Leach, the Sooners' offensive coordinator, and consulted by the Longhorns, who quickly fell behind 17-0 before realizing they'd been duped. "We were in this state of, 'Can we believe this?'" "We were trying to figure out if it was authentic," Reese said. To the heavily favored Longhorns, it seemed as if they'd caught an enormous break. During pregame warm-ups of that year's Red River Showdown, an underhanded script outlining OU's opening offensive plays was spotted on the field by one of Texas' student assistants, who scooped it up and took it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese. ![]()
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