Football Reunion will Highlight the 2011 Big 12 Champions
STILLWATER – This Friday night, former Oklahoma State football players will get together up on the club level of Boone Pickens Stadium and then spend time on Saturday with a special tailgate and enjoy seeing the unbeaten No. 18 Oklahoma State Cowboys take on unbeaten No. 22 Baylor.
It is a reunion weekend for all former Cowboy football players, but the team taking the lead for this weekend is the 2011 Big 12 Champions, the only Big 12 Championship team so far at Oklahoma State. It is the tenth reunion of that season.
“It was kind of a weird year and when you have a special year there are always peaks and valleys and ups and downs, but I felt like that season that each game had its’ own story,” Oklahoma State quarterback Brandon Weeden said. “That my sound kind of crazy but it did.”
The season did have a series of games that had their own unique story. The opener with Louisiana-Lafayette was the debut of Todd Monken as offensive coordinator. The Arizona win on a Thursday might was a 37-14 win that kind of set a message. The Tulsa game was the night that assistant coach Glenn Spencer’s wife died of heart failure and the game didn’t kick off until 12:15 a.m. because of a thunderstorm delay. It would end at 3:30 a.m. The next week was a comeback from a 20-3 deficit to Texas A&M and it goes on and on. It included an upset loss as Iowa State fans sang Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline after a 37-31 double overtime win as Weedon and Cowboys players scrambled to get off the field with the crowd. Two weeks later the Cowboys would have their triumph clinching the conference championship.
“The one that stands out to me and etched a little piece of me was the OU game,” Weeden said on Big 12 This Morning on Sirius-XM Radio. “I came in the locker room after the win and Mr. Pickens (Boone Pickens) was in there and you could tell how excited he was. We all knew monetarily how much he game to the program to get it to kind of where it is today with the facilities that Oklahoma State has now today. He was very vocal he wanted a championship and we had not won a Big 12 Championship. To see him holding that trophy and just the celebration in that locker room after we had completely dominated that football game. To see the goal post go down and put on that championship hat that is probably foremost the memory I take with me. There are somethings that happened that season that I don’t always remember, but that moment I will never forget.”
One of the big plays in that game came from current Cowboys strength assistant coach Jamie Blatnick as he recovered and rumbled with an OU fumble down to the one-yard-line to set up a score.
“I remember picking up the ball and thinking back to a play in high school at Celina where I had fumbled the ball and I was thinking don’t fumble and I went down on the one-yard-line, but we scored, and I did not give the ball back.”
In the second half of the Bedlam win, fellow defensive end and now Oklahoma State Director of Player Development Richetti Jones recovered a fumble for a touchdown pulling it down out of midair. He had scored on an interception and short run to a pick six at Missouri.
Jones was excited this week to hear that teammate and standout All-American wide receiver and Biletnikoff Award winner Justin Blackmon is coming back for the reunion.
“I think I had really good players around me and to have Justin Blackmon and teams were dumb enough to play one-on-one coverage over there sometimes and it was just pitch and catch, it was stealing,” Weeden added of the player he teamed up with for 1,522-yards and 18 touchdowns. Both ended up as first-round NFL Draft selections.
“One thing that flies under the radar but when Dana (Holgorsen) brought that offense to Stillwater everybody thought air raid, but there were games we ran the football and did play-action passing and we were a damn good all-around football team,” Weeden said. “That set us up and made us two-dimensional.”
The loss to Iowa State dropped the Cowboys to third in the polls and they would beat Stanford and Andrew Luck 41-38 in overtime of the Fiesta Bowl instead of playing LSU for the BCS National Championship. Alabama got to do that and won it.
“I think we would have beat LSU and won the national championship,” head coach Mike Gundy said this week. He has always felt that way. “I thought we were very capable of being the best team in the country that season. I don’t think LSU could have kept up with us in scoring points, back then hardly any team could.”
They’ll be back together Saturday, and it will be fun to see those Cowboy gridiron heroes back in Boone Pickens Stadium.