Little honor with thieves in rivalry

Few rivalries in sports fuel as much hostility and pressure to win like college football’s annual Red River Showdown between Oklahoma and Texas.

And through the years, those monumental stakes have led to some serious skullduggery. The most notable example came in 1972, when the Sooners spied on Texas’ practices, allowing them to block a quick kick the Longhorns had secretly been working on en route to a victory.

Now, thanks to Mike Leach, the 1999 game can officially be added to that same legacy.

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. To the heavily favored Longhorns, it seemed as if they’d caught an enormous break.

“We were trying to figure out if it was authentic,” Reese said to ESPN’s Jake Trotter. “We were in this state of, ‘Can we believe this?’ ” They shouldn’t have.

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.

“That does sound like Mike,” said former Texas coach Mack Brown, unaware of the script at the time. “I do know this: Offensive coordinators are so careful with those scripts they wouldn’t be losing them. Those things are valuable. Only Mike would think to lay one out there as a decoy.”

In his 2011 book Swing Your Sword, Leach briefly mentioned the lark. 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.

He was elated to learn recently that they had fallen for it so hard.

“These things evolve and become somewhat legendary,” Leach said.