How College Football on the Road Can Get Ugly

Though the rules committee was making progress in the evolution of football, they had still seemed to overlook a glaring hole in the playing rules. As they had done in the Kansas game, they had done to them in the following game against Texas. In a game hyped the week leading up to the contest in The Daily Oklahoman, the teams ended up being separated by just a single score. Harold Keith explained in Oklahoma Kickoff that the deciding factor of the game was when the ball spiraled out of bounds and a player from each team scrambled after it.

The mad scramble led through the area where spectators had left their horses and the Texas runner dove through one horse's legs and recovered the ball. It just happened that the ball was in the end zone area out of bounds and was technically, at this time, a touchdown. The score would end up 11-5, the mad scramble through horses out of bounds ended up being the difference in the much anticipated contest. Oklahoma had lost back-to-back games for the first time that season and fell to 3-2-3 overall.

The next game was a nightmare from start to end. The Arkansas Razorbacks were supposed to pay the expenses for Oklahoma to make the trip, but weren't going to pay until the game was over. In a pinch financially, Manager Tribbey decided to summon the help of a local businessman to finance the trip to Fayetteville for the game. John Barbour, the owner of the local drugstore, agreed to pay the sum of $300 for the trip with a promise to be repaid after the trip was over.

After a nightmare of a trip, where the team was redirected through several trains and train stations only to arrive just before game time; nightmarish conditions for the game, icicles hung from the lockers; and fans only heard of during your worst nightmare, things actually got worse. After going through what Tom Tribbey went through to get his team to Arkansas, he was told by Razorback officials that they did not have the guaranteed purse for the game. Now, after losing a horrid contest 12-0, the team would be forced to go home with more than a losing record. Now, they would have to explain to Tom Tribbey that he had no such guarantee on his loan being returned. More bad news was that the next game was just two days in the offing against Missouri-Rolla, in Missouri.

The Rolla Miners were not a pushover by any stretch of the imagination, having handled the same Arkansas team that dismantled Oklahoma days ago. However, the Rough Riders were tired of losing and came out like a house of fire en route to building a 12-0 halftime lead. In the second half, Oklahoma did relent just once in letting the game reach a 12-6 score. Once the game was ticking down the final few minutes it really started to get interesting. To keep from having another unfair advantage during this time the visiting team was allowed to keep time as well as the home team.

When the game reached the final seconds, Oklahoma Coach Mark McMahon believe the game to be over with a 12-6 victory in tow. However, Rolla disagreed and the teams took the field again. After the next play, McMahon again believed the game to be complete, but was turned back by the Rolla coaches. Oklahoma decided they'd had enough and left the field as they believed the game should be over.

The Rough Riders believed the final to be 12-6, but Rolla ran one more play without Oklahoma on the field and scored to cut the lead to 12-11. Unfortunately for Rolla, their point-after-goal was a complete shank and the score was final at 12-11 in the Missouri-Rolla books. Oklahoma records the contest as a 12-6 victory, either way it was a W and the Rough Riders returned home.

Oklahoma's final two games of the season were highly anticipated to say the least. The first was to take place against the Bethany College "Terrible Swedes". The Swedes had quite a reputation in the area and were coached by a young man who had created quite a legend for himself in the early years of college football as a player and coach. Bennie Owen brought his Swedes to Oklahoma City on Thanksgiving Day to do battle at Colcord Park.

The Daily Oklahoman again captured the excitement leading up to the game in its paper, just days before the Swedes arrived, saying, "A big crowd will see the game. After all what is football, especially college football without the shouting, cheering, ribboned, and chrysanthemumed college crowd?" When the game finally arrived the fans and players were pleasantly surprised by the Bethany supporters and the game was one to behold. Harold Keith put it simply,

The Bethany football team was a revelation, too. Splendidly-conditioned, it ran its plays with frenzied speed, as though striving to sprint the varsity into exhaustion. It amazed the Rough Riders and the crowd too, with the modernity of its tactics. It showed the varsity such up-to-the-minute devices as the cutback, the unbalanced line and the direct pass to the quarterback whom the rule-makers had brought out of ball-carrying oblivion that season and under certain restrictions permitted to run with the ball between the two 25-yard lines.

Oklahoma didn't have enough to rival the well-oiled machine that the Swedes appeared to be, coming back in the final minutes to salvage some respect by scoring the final two scores of the day to fall, 12-10.

The final game of the tumultuous 1903 campaign was not unlike a blockbuster Hollywood script. This scrappy, young program developed from a Territorial school in dusty Norman, recent survivors of a nearly devastating fire were challenged by a professional squad from Lawton.

A week after the season concluded and across the country two brothers who owned a bicycle shop were trying to achieve a boyhood dream. The two brothers had accomplished quite a bit by the time they reached their mid-twenties. After building a printing press into a thriving business the brothers caught on to the latest craze to hit America from our friends in England, the bicycle.

The "St. Clair" was a major success for the business, both businesses helped fund a boyhood dream stemming from constant experimentation. Failure after failure didn't stop the dream and on December 17th, 1903, after three miserable failures the dream came to fruition. For 59 seconds, the brothers Wilbur and Orville took flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright Brothers had invented the first successful airplane beginning another leap into the modern day we now live in.