This season is already a throwback to 1918
What goes around comes around. OSU's football game scheduled for Saturday at Baylor has been postponed until Dec. 12, and now the Cowboys will go virtually three weeks between games.
OSU won 47-7 at Kansas on Oct. 3, and the Cowboys' next scheduled game is Oct. 24 at home against Iowa State.
Two straight Saturdays without a game is not unprecedented. Heck, all kinds of teams in this pandemic-stricken season are facing the same kind of nutty scheduling.
But OSU hasn't faced anything like this in 102 years. Since, yes, the 1918 season that was interrupted by the Spanish flu pandemic.
The 1918 Cowboys opened the season Oct. 12 with a 19-6 victory over Haskell, which at the time was not so far removed from a young Oklahoman named Jim Thorpe playing for the Indian boarding school. On Oct. 19, Oklahoma A&M, as the school was then named,
beat Central State (now Central Oklahoma) 26-6.
Then came the interruption. When the Cowboys resumed, it was Nov. 10, and A&M lost 27-5 at Texas and eventually finished off a six-game schedule.
Doris Dellinger's wonderful history book, Intercollegiate Athletics, which chronicles OSU's sports history, offered some details about the 1918 season.
World War I had consumed the campus; 1,145 A&M male students were in the military service. A&M was one of 400 schools with a Student Army Training Corps program. On campus, military uniforms were a more common sight than athletic uniforms. Then the Spanish flu hit. “The country's massive Spanish influenza epidemic engulfed the Stillwater area on the heels of the football opener, a victory over the Haskell Indians … football was suspended as A&M struggled with more than 400 cases of flu.
“In November play was resumed, but fans were warned `to minimize cheering as it irritates the throat and invites flu.' Many schools banned cheering.”
I would concur. Cheering does irritate the throat.
Anyway, not even the Great Depression nor World War II impacted college football the way the Spanish Flu impacted that 1918 season. It's the closest thing to what we're seeing today.
Over the years, OSU has had some scheduling peculiarities.
In 2012, the Cowboys played one game in a span of 27 days. They beat Louisiana-Lafayette 65-24 on Sept. 15, had Sept. 22 off, lost 41-36 to Texas on Sept. 29, had Oct. 6 off, then beat Kansas 20-14 on Oct. 13.
In 1999, 1985 and 1967, the Cowboys had off weeks that sandwiched two Saturday game days.
Maybe the most similar scheduling situation came in 1994, when Pat Jones' final team opened the season on a Thursday night, Sept. 1, with a 31-14 victory at Northern Illinois. Then the Cowboys didn't play again until Sept. 17 at Baylor, where they lost 14-10.
The 9/11 attacks in 2001 didn't profoundly affect the Cowboys' schedule, but other Big 12 teams were impacted.
OU had two straight Saturdays off. The Sooners beat North Texas 37-10 on Sept. 8, then didn't play again until a 38-37 win over Kansas State on Sept. 29.
Missouri beat Texas State 40-6 on Sept. 8, then didn't play again until a 36-3 loss at Nebraska on Sept. 29.
It's not preferable. But it's also unavoidable in 2020, the strangest college football season we've seen since another pandemic, 102 years ago. Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at oklahoman.com/berrytramel.