Three For Texas

Bubba Jacques won a game but broke a promise. For four years Jacques had been telling his Texas teammates that if he ever scored a touchdown, he would throw the ball into the crowd—the automatic delay-of-game penalty be damned. He had seen Drew Pearson, a onetime Dallas Cowboys receiver, do that once after catching a TD pass. "I'm a heavy-duty Cowboy fan," says Jacques.

With 13:30 to play last Saturday in the 86th Red River Riot between Texas and Oklahoma, Jacques (pronounced jacks) got his chance. Gathering up Oklahoma fullback Mike McKinley's fumble, he raced 30 yards into the end zone and into a prominent place in the annals of this hallowed rivalry: Jacques' first career touchdown was the Longhorns' only TD in their 10-7 win.

Once past the goal line, Jacques turned to the delirious crowd in the Cotton Bowl, put the ball in his right (throwing) hand and...let it drop. "I chickened out," says Jacques, a senior free safety. "We couldn't afford a 15-yard penalty. We didn't need to be kicking off from the 20."

An undersized (5'9", 176 pounds), self-made player, Jacques lacks exceptional speed or strength. He gets his playing time because he is smart and because, as Texas defensive coordinator Leon Fuller says, "He has a nice nose for the ball."

On the play before McKinley's fumble, Jacques had seen defensive end Shane Dronett tackle Sooner tailback Earnest Williams after a three-yard gain. Jacques noticed that Dronett made no attempt to strip Williams of the ball. "These guys are holding the ball up high," Jacques told his teammates in the huddle. "Tackle the ball—let's make something happen!"

Defensive tackle James Patton was paying attention. On the next play McKinley gained five yards, to the Sooner 25-yard line, when Patton tore the ball from his grasp. As the ball bounced in his direction, says Jacques, "I started seeing things in slow motion."

Jacques grasped for it and came up empty. He bent over again to collect the elusive ball but instead booted it five yards toward the Sooners' goal line. Dang, he would recall thinking, I ain't never going to pick this thing up. On his third try, he did.

Not long after, on their way to the dressing room, the victorious Longhorns had to walk up the ramp behind the south end zone—directly beneath thousands of despondent Oklahoma fans. Rather than brandish the familiar two-finger hook 'em Horns sign, many Texas players extended their arms and raised three fingers—a reminder that the Sooners have now lost three straight games to the Longhorns, who improved their season record to 2-2. With each defeat at the hands of Texas, the stigma that has attached itself to Oklahoma's third-year coach Gary Gibbs grows more difficult to erase: Barry may have let things get out of control, but at least he knew how to beat the Longhorns.

Indeed, Barry Switzer, Gibbs's predecessor, who was forced from his job as the Sooners' coach after the NCAA placed Oklahoma on three years' probation in 1988, was 9-5-2 against the Longhorns. Those three-finger salutes were a cruel dig, but then the Red River Riot (a.k.a. the Crude Feud) has come to embody a kind of delightful mean-spiritedness. The essence of the rivalry, in which Texas holds the upper hand 50-32-4, was captured nicely by dueling messages on the rear windows of two cars in adjacent lanes in a pregame traffic jam on I-35 in Dallas. BAR-B-Q BEVO suggested a dark blue Dodge Colt with Oklahoma plates—a reference to Texas's beloved longhorn mascot. On a battered Texas-registered Volkswagen was written: SOONERS, WELCOME TO TEXAS—NOW GO HOME. A five-letter epilogue added: OUSUX.

Oklahoma's performance this year indicated otherwise. The Sooners entered the game against Texas with a 4-0 record, a No. 6 national ranking and a novel wrinkle in their offense: semiregular use of the forward pass. Long accustomed to the wishbone, Oklahoma fans cheered wildly last season when freshman quarterback Cale Gundy completed several bombs in succession. What made the applause unusual was that Gundy had thrown these passes during warmups before a preseason scrimmage. "It was like they'd never seen anything like it," Gundy says.