College Football

Tattered Jersey
The distance from No. 1 to No. 112 in Division I-A football isn't far--about a four-hour drive east on 1-80 from State College, Pa., to New Brunswick, NJ. Rutgers is 0-6 this season and 2-15 overall under coach Terry Shea, whose West Coast offense looks as lost in the hands of the Scarlet Knights as its name suggests. It's too bad the Rutgers offense doesn't get to play the Rutgers defense.
1997 statistics	Rutgers	Opponents
Points per game	10.6	46.0
Third-quarter points	0	89
Completion percentage	43.8	59.9
Yards per pass attempt	4.8	10.8
Rushing yards per game	99	265
Yards per rush	2.8	5.0
Total yards per game	334.0	503.8
Punts	50	22
Minutes with the lead	37:08	322:52

Any Other Questions?
Oklahoma State's Bob Simmons has the answers, Georgia exposed by the Volunteers, Texas A&M on the rebound

No matter how hard he tried, Oklahoma State coach Bob Simmons couldn't dodge the question last week: Would he derive extra satisfaction from beating Colorado, which had snubbed him for its head-coaching job after Buffaloes coach Bill McCartney resigned three years ago? "I moved past that a long time ago," Simmons kept saying to anybody who would listen. "I have a strong inner peace."

It would have been understandable had Simmons not been so forgiving. After all, he had been a Colorado assistant for seven years at the time McCartney left. He was respected among his peers as an able teacher and recruiter, and McCartney had publicly supported his candidacy. Yet Bill Marolt, the Colorado athletic director at the time, selected assistant coach Rick Neuheisel, an offensive whiz who had been with the Buffaloes for just one year.

The decision to bypass Simmons, who's black, stirred controversy and even prompted protests by the Rainbow Coalition. The commotion subsided when, two weeks after the Neuheisel announcement, Simmons accepted the job at Oklahoma State. "He made his peace and moved on," says Bob's son, Nathan, a junior tailback who starts for the Cowboys. "He was elated about coming here."

Funny how things work out. Last Saturday, Bob stood on a rain-dampened Lewis Field and watched his Cowboys, who entered the game ranked 20th, improve to 6-0 with a 33-29 come-from-behind victory over the 24th-ranked Buffaloes. It was the biggest win in Stillwater since Barry Sanders was carrying the ball for Oklahoma State from 1986 to '88.

The victory pushed the Cowboys up to No. 16, their highest ranking in the AP poll since Sanders's final season. Oklahoma State has a talented core of play-makers with the speed to match up against any team on its schedule. Junior defensive back-wide receiver R.W. McQuarters is a threat on both sides of the ball. Senior cornerback Kevin Williams returned an interception 40 yards for a TD to give the Cowboys their first lead against Colorado, at 19-14. Senior tight end Alonzo Mayes, a preseason All-America, hauled in the game-winning 19-yard touchdown pass with 1:56 left. Redshirt freshman quarterback Tony Lindsay killed the Buffaloes with 126 yards rushing and one touchdown on the ground.

When Simmons arrived in Stillwater in 1995, he inherited a team that had won just 18 games over the previous six years and was feeling the effects of a four-year NCAA probation for recruiting violations. In Simmons's first year the school had 56 players on scholarship (the NCAA maximum is 85), and he played 18 freshmen. The Cowboys went 4-8. "We took our lumps, but we learned from them," he says.

Sitting in his office overlooking Lewis Field last week, Simmons described how he built the program from such a sorry state. The first step, he said, was to recruit players who would have an immediate impact. In his inaugural year he landed McQuarters, a blue-chip star out of Tulsa, and last season he added Lindsay, a Denver native who was barely recruited by his home-state Buffaloes.

Simmons, moreover, showed a willingness in adjust his own thinking. Dissatisfied with the Cowboys' defense last season, he hired Rob Ryan—son of former NFL coach Buddy Ryan—to install a version of his father's 46 defense. Although the scheme makes Oklahoma State vulnerable to the big play, the defense has limited opponents to 12.2 points per game, eighth best in the nation.

Most important, Simmons transformed the negative atmosphere that had surrounded the program: "We had to stop using the probation as an excuse for why we couldn't do things." In August, Oklahoma State lost 10 players for the season to academic suspensions—including the leading returning rusher, Andre Richardson, and leading tackier of last year, Raymond Cato—and one other for disciplinary reasons. But the personnel losses didn't faze the Cowboys. "When that happened, it didn't really matter to us," Mayes says. "We knew it was a chance for some other guys to step up and play."