The best spring football ever was OU’s Varsity-Alumni Game, which ran for 34 years and featured real football, played by recent grads and even NFL stars against the current Sooners.

(Berry Tramel produces two newsletters every week. To receive his newsletters, go here.)

NORMAN  — Bud Wilkinson inserted Jerry Pettibone into OU’s 1959 Varsity-Alumni Game.

Pettibone, a left halfback from Dallas Jesuit, was eager to show what he could do.

Then Pettibone looked up at the linebackers on the other side of the line.

The Alumni had Jerry Tubbs, Bob Harrison and Billy Pricer. Tubbs was two years into a 10-year pro career in which he made 100 National Football League starts. Harrison had just finished his Sooner career and was about to embark on a nine-year NFL career. Pricer was two years into what became a five-year run as an NFL fullback.

“I went, ‘Oh s***,’” Pettibone said the other day. “Hey, I got the ball, I ran to the sideline, and I turned up and just closed my eyes, because I knew somebody was going to knock me under the bench.”

Multiple generations of Oklahomans have no idea what we’re talking about. Or don’t believe it.

Football alums, most of them recent but certainly not all, showing up for a long April weekend, quickly running over some plays and strategy, then putting on full pads and playing a full game against a well-conditioned, finely-tuned college football powerhouse.

Wait. What? That’s straight out of 1932. Or an Adam Sandler movie. Hollywood dreams up that kind of nonsense. Not the football establishment.

But it happened. It happened at OU for 34 straight seasons, 1949-82. The Varsity-Alumni Game served as the Sooners’ spring finale and was every bit as much of OU lore as the Sooner Schooner and the triple option.

No reason why you would believe it, but the Varsity won just three of the first 15 games. Then the Alumni went 18 straight games without winning, managing two ties, before a rousing victory in 1981.

“It was a great time,” said Ronnie Fletcher, who played quarterback at OU from 1962-64 and threw a 95-yard touchdown pass to Ben Hart in the 1964 (season) Gator Bowl, but became better known as a perennial Alumni QB. “I just liked playing football.”

Playing for the Alumni, Fletcher would complete passes to Lance Rentzel, his former Sooner teammate but then a Dallas Cowboy star, and Bobby Boyd, a Hall of Fame-caliber safety for the Baltimore Colts who was five classes ahead of Fletcher.

“They’d chase after me,” Fletcher said of the Varsity. “John Blake, he was always piling on. Granville Liggins (OU’s 1967 nose guard star) played against me. (Barry) Switzer was always over on the sideline, reaming me out for running some funky play.”

Once the Varsity got the upper hand, it occasionally would win big. The juggernaut 1971 Sooners who played Nebraska in the Game of the Century? Seven months earlier, they beat the Alumni 49-14. But sometimes the games were close; the 1974 Sooners won the national championship and went unbeaten — except for a 10-10 tie against the Alumni.

Bud Wilkinson’s Sooners from the mid-1950s won 47 straight games — except losing to the Alumni in 1954 (28-7), 1955 (23-8) and 1956 (10-0). OU’s autumn record in those three seasons was 31-0. OU’s spring record in those three seasons was 0-3.

Sherwood Taylor was an OU safety from 1975-79. He’s the father of Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor and Jacksonville Jaguars offensive coordinator Press Taylor.

“I tell the boys, I played against the pros” in college, Sherwood said.

His sons don’t believe him. But it happened. As another OU spring game arrives Saturday on Owen Field, let’s take a few minutes to hail the 34 springs the Sooners played a real football game against their alumni.

Wilkinson’s idea

OU’s first Varsity-Alumni Game was played in 1949, at Taft Stadium in Oklahoma City.

Pettibone said coach Bud Wilkinson championed the concept, in part because he liked the idea of keeping the alumni involved. That first Varsity-Alumni Game was promoted as a fundraiser for the O Club Lounge, a facility to be included in the renovation of Memorial Stadium.

Those 1949 Sooners went on to finish 11-0 and were one of the most dominant teams in OU history, but they had to rally from a 13-0 deficit to beat the Alumni 14-13.

And the establishment of quality alums and competitive games was set.

In spring 1954, OU quarterbacks Gene Calame and Pat O’Neal were injured, so soon-to-be sophomores Jimmy Harris and Jay O’Neal were called on to play against the Alumni.

“I can remember walking out the first time, getting under that center,” said Jay O’Neal, “and there is Stan West. There is Leon Manley. There’s Wade Walker. There’s Jim Weatherall. There’s Tim Catlin. There’s Billy Vessels.”

West, Manley and Walker were stalwart linemen on the 1949 Sooners. Catlin was a year into his NFL career. Weatherall was the 1951 Outland Trophy winner. Vessels was the 1952 Heisman Trophy winner.

“I’m going, ‘What in the hell? What are doing?’” O’Neal said to himself.

Seventy years later, O’Neal remains active with the program as vice president of Sooners Helping Sooners. And he still talks glowingly about the Varsity-Alumni games and the talent of the graduates.

Lineman John Rapacz returned from World War II and played two years for the Sooners, 1946-47, before embarking on a seven-year pro football career, the last five with the New York Giants. 

“Hell of a player … played in the pros forever,” O’Neal said. “Huge guy. You ought to see him dance. He was the most graceful guy you could ever see. Nice as he could be until they rang the ball. Then here he comes.”

O’Neal played against John Rapacz.

“That’s the kind of guys they were,” O’Neal said. “Leon Manley. Best damn player. That guy, they had intramural boxing in those days. You know what his name was? One-round Manley, because he decked everybody. Great guy, just as gentle as he could be, but again, when they rang the ball, time to do your job.”

No wonder the Alumni dominated those early years.

NFL cooperation

Think about Baker Mayfield or Kyler Murray, Mark Andrews or CeeDee Lamb, Orlando Brown or Creed Humphrey, Marvin Mims or Hollywood Brown returning to Norman each April and play an exhibition game against the Sooner varsity.

Preposterous. The players wouldn’t do it. Their NFL franchises wouldn’t let them do it.

And truth was, NFL teams weren’t crazy about the idea 40, 50, 60 years ago.

“We weren’t supposed to play, but I did,” said Clendon Thomas, a regal OU halfback from 1955-57, then an 11-year NFL defensive back. “They didn’t want us to do it, because getting hurt in the off-season’s not real smart. Anytime you get on the football field, you can get hurt. I don’t care who you are.”

And still, Thomas played in several Varsity-Alumni games.

“It was a fun time,” Thomas said. “I loved every minute of it. Got acquainted with some of the young guys. That was a good way to find out what we had.”

Harrison, the rugged OU linebacker from 1956-58, played nine years in the NFL and never missed an Alumni game. Heck, Harrison kept playing after he retired from the pros. Harrison played for the Alumni at age 44 in 1981, then finally let it go in 1982, the final year of the true Varsity-Alumni Game. He coached the alums that season.

Harrison died in 2016 at age 78. But in 2005, Harrison told me he played in defiance of his employer, the San Francisco 49ers.

“I always kept in pretty good shape,” Harrison said. “It was like you was back in real action, playing football.”

He never worried about injury.

“I never thought anything about it,” Harrison said. “I played football 20 years and never ever really got seriously hurt.”

O’Neal said that in the 1950s, NFL teams told their players “you can go play if you want to.” But pro players then “weren’t making that kind of money. And they came back in droves.”

As late as 1981, when Sooner superstar Greg Pruitt was a nine-year NFL halfback, he still was playing in the Varsity-Alumni Game.

Derland Moore vs. Mike Vaughan

Mike Vaughan was OU football’s first giant. Coming out of Ada, Vaughan was 6-foot-6 and 275 pounds. Huge for the 1970s. Vaughan eventually became a two-time all-American offensive tackle.

But in 1974, Vaughan was an unproven prospect. He had yet to play a varsity snap. And in spring ‘74, Vaughan had an ankle injury and didn’t expect to play against the Alumni.

But then coaches told Vaughan he needed to play.

“Well, I wasn’t ready, physically or mentally or experienced wise,” Vaughan said. “And guess who lines up across me? Derland Moore.”

Moore was a star defensive lineman at OU in 1971-72 and had just finished his rookie year with the New Orleans Saints. Moore would go on to play 14 NFL seasons.

“It doesn’t get any realer than Derland Moore,” Vaughan said. “Derland was as good as there ever was. He probably played longer in the pros than any other OU guy.”

That Varsity-Alumni Game ended in a 10-10 tie.

“The reason it ended up in a tie, one of us got our butt kicked a little bit that day,” Vaughan said, referring to himself.

But the next year, Vaughan was a budding star and was quite ready to handle himself against whoever showed up for the Alumni.

Jackson Arnold has some big cleats to fill, following in the legacy of great OU quarterbacks. And Arnold has to fill those cleats in Year 1 of the Sooners’ SEC odyssey.

More from @BerryTramel: ➡️ https://t.co/PAcfD7tJzB

Presented by Weed Man Lawn Care. pic.twitter.com/73xZghUuib

— Sellout Crowd (@selloutcrowd_) April 18, 2024

“Guess who’s lined in front of me again?” Vaughan said. “And guess what he’s saying? ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’

Anyway, we battled, but the tide completely turned. Mike was on top, Derland was on bottom, and he was an all-pro type of guy, world-champion arm wrestler, mean guy. 

“Anyway, we battled it out, Mike comes out on top, Varsity wins, we go on to win the national title again.”

In the off-season, Vaughan suffered a back injury while lifting weights. He was facing back surgery and did not participate in spring practice.

That news did not reach Derland Moore.

“The day of the spring game, I’m on the training table, with a heat pack on my back,” Vaughan said. “Derland walks in the door, all geared up. Got his pads on, getting taped up, and he said, ‘I’m fixin’ to kick,’ you know, kick it again. Or ‘I’m going to kick you this year.’ And I said, ‘well, hell, Derland, I’m not going to play. I’m missing the whole spring.’

“Derland goes and talks to (trainer) Ken Rawlinson and says, ‘Is he not playing today?’ Ken says, ‘Yeah, he’s not playing.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m not, either.’”

Moore didn’t play. If you ever question the competitive level of Varsity-Alumni games, remember Derland Moore.

“He came back for one reason,” Vaughan said. “It was going to be a battle. And I really liked Derland. But Derland, when he lined up in front of you, he wanted to kill you.”

Strategy and competition

From the beginning, the Varsity-Alumni Game had its strategic limitations. 

The Varsity played basic defense, no major stunts or surprises, but that’s no great change from modern spring games, where paranoid coaches are worried that Rival U. opponents will be scouting.

And Wilkinson might have had ulterior motives.

The late George Lynn Cross, who served as OU’s president from 1943-68, wrote in his fabulous book “Presidents Can’t Punt” that Wilkinson “told me he really didn’t want his team to defeat the Alumni. A victory might give them a false impression of their ability and make them less “coachable” in the fall.

“It might also, incidentally, discourage the alumni, whom he hoped to attract back for future games.”

The Alumni indeed kept coming. For three more decades.

“Hell yeah,” said Bobby Proctor, who coached OU defensive backs from 1973-91. “I mean, we had half the damn pros came back and played. It was a knockdown dragout.”

The strategy wasn’t always pristine. But the hitting was legitimate. The Alumni rejects any notion that the Varsity took it easy on the old guys.

“No,” said Fletcher, who ranks with Hog Harrison as the patron saints of the Varsity-Alumni tradition. “Nope, no, no. We played against the Selmons and Rod Shoate and Jerry Anderson.”

J.C. Watts, who quarterbacked the 1979 and 1980 Sooners, played in the final Varsity-Alumni Game, 1982, and that was enough for him.

“I remember it was such a real game that I decided, I don’t need to be doing this,” Watts said. “These guys are serious. I mean, they’re trying to make the team and they want to be impressive.”

Watts was a Canadian Football League star; he played in the CFL from 1981-86. That 1982 Varsity-Alumni Game was enough to make him realize he needed to protect his Canadian career.

“J.T. (John) Truitt, No. 41, man, he came after me, and I ducked and got away from him,” Watts said. “But had he hit me, I probably would have finished my career. And I said, I still got a living to make playing this, and I don’t need to be playing in the Alumni game.

“But I think most people that participated would say it was a special part of the year. It was Willie Franklin coming back. Ron Fletcher. Eddie Hinton. Seeing all those guys. They didn’t always play in the game, but they came back and participated in the alumni weekend. That was pretty special, to see the old-timers. Coach Switzer made a big deal out of it.”

Seems strange that even when the Varsity started dominating the game, the scores weren’t too lopsided, including 17-10 in 1980, 28-21 in 1978, 42-28 in 1973, 17-8 in 1969.

“We had all the experience,” Fletcher said. “We weren’t in good shape. But we had plenty of guys to play. We just had lots of good players.”

The Alumni team wasn’t terribly organized. This was sandlot football; draw it up on the fly. And especially in the early days, the talent between the teams was fairly equitable.

“It’s grab-ass out there,” said O’Neal, who coached for and played for both sides of the Varsity-Alumni Game. “But hell, you had guys that all were playing. They were all-pro. They knew how to play football.”

And Derland Moore wasn’t the only alumnus who showed up with something to prove.

Jim Weatherall was among the best — and the toughest — of Wilkinson’s Sooners. After winning the Outland Trophy in 1951, he served two years in the U.S. Marines, then played in Canada for a year before a six-year career as an NFL defensive tackle.

Weatherall played in Varsity-Alumni games.

“Jim Weatherall used to come in the locker room, and I was still a player,” Pettibone said. “He had tape cans, tape on his forearms, and he’d walk in there, and we’d all be sitting there, and he’d go ‘wham!’ into this locker. And I’d go ‘my gawd.’ ‘Hey, this is what’s going to happen to you guys today. You’re going to get some of this today.’”

Alumni quarterback Dean Blevins signs autographs during the 1979 Varsity-Alumni Game. Two years later, Blevins would lead the Alumni to a stunning victory. (Michal Thompson/Oklahoman archives)

Last hurrah

The Varsity-Alumni Game slowly was losing its luster in the late 1970s. Fewer and fewer pros were playing, since NFL teams were wising up. The Greg Pruitts could still get away with playing in an unsanctioned exhibition, but younger players could not.

And by 1981, the Alumni had not won in 18 years. Then came a magical Saturday. The Varsity led 36-26 in the fourth quarter, but then came a rally for the ages.

Dean Blevins, still on the scene today as sports anchor for Griffin Media’s CBS affiliate KWTV-9, quarterbacked the Alumni to a stirring comeback.

Blevins was a two-sport star at Norman High School, recruited by Barry Switzer for football and by North Carolina’s Dean Smith for basketball.

That day, Blevins completed 19 of 40 passes for 215 yards. I know that sounds meager by contemporary standards. But 215 passing yards in 1981 was like 515 today.

That kind of throwing is what Blevins envisioned when he signed with the Sooners. He realizes now how naive that was.

“That’s what I wanted to do when I went to OU,” Blevins said. “Like Switzer was going to let me do that. He told my family I was going to win the Heisman and I was going to throw for a million yards. Then I got to OU and realized he had told everyone else the same thing.”

Blevins eventually started a few games for OU and had some memorable roles in historic comebacks, like Nebraska 1976 and Ohio State 1977. But Blevins’ most fun game might have been Varsity-Alumni 1981.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Blevins said.

Blevins directed a 17-play drive, capped by a 12-yard touchdown pass to Craig Lund. Then the Alumni recovered an onside kick, and Blevins led another TD drive. His two-yard touchdown run put the Alumni ahead with 3:54 left in the game, and they won 39-36.

“That particular day was kind of fun,” Blevins said.

He had played in Canada himself, and in one practice and two nights with Alumni teammates drinking O’Douls, Blevins drew up some pass routes quite foreign to Sooner culture.

One of those routes resulted in a 79-yard touchdown pass to Lee Hover, a flag-football buddy of Blevins’. Several ex-Sooners — Blevins, Hoover, Tinker Owens, Steve Rhodes, Jay Jimerson, Terry Peters, Brian Hall, Zac Henderson, John Carroll, Gregg Byram, Sherwood Taylor, Mike Babb — played on a nationally-competitive flag football team, the Tullius Dodge Striders.

That April day in 1981, the Alumni used the shotgun formation of the Tullius Dodge Striders to take down the Varsity. The OU defense was clueless on how to stop it; as far from the wishbone as possible.

That day, the Alumni had 28 first downs and 434 total yards. The Varsity had 12 first downs and 305 yards.

“Oh gosh, those guys were mangled,” Blevins said of the Alumni. “But there were some tough suckers. Those guys were absolutely beat up, but it was an opportunity to play for some pride.

“We took it really seriously. We wanted to win. It was a real game. There were no wink-at-us-and-we-won’t-tackle-you-hard. It was real football. Just real old-fashioned football.”

Well, maybe not everything was real.

Before the game, the Varsity agreed to cover all kickoffs. Including the Alumni’s.

And early in the game, when the Varsity’s Ricki Byars broke open a kickoff return, the Alumni’s Kenith Pope jumped off the sideline and tackled Byars.

Later in the game, the Varsity wised up. Rod Pegues took a kickoff straight up the middle, to avoid would-be tacklers coming in from the bench, and scored on a 95-yard return.

The Daily Oklahoman’s Al Carter reported that there were several questionable pass-interference penalties against the Varsity. Carter wrote that after the game, game referee Norman Lamb, a long-time OU booster, embraced Alumni coach Jimmy Harris and said, “We did it!”

Good-bye to Varsity-Alumni

In the 1982 game, the Alumni’s Mike Babb suffered a major knee injury. Nine days later, Babb underwent surgery to repair the knee but suffered cardiac arrest and died at the age of 23.

That spelled the end of the Varsity-Alumni Game. The game wasn’t officially terminated until the next February, and OU released a statement saying it was because too many alums were playing in the spring United States Football League.

But most realized the threat of injury, and in Babb’s case tragedy, was too grave to continue. Blevins said he was told straightforwardly that Babb’s death caused OU officials to end the game.

And frankly, the threat of injury should have scared off more players than it did.

“We didn’t worry about getting hurt,” Ronnie Fletcher said. “We didn’t care about that.”

But it should have. He recited old Sooners who got hurt in the game. Tackles Calvin Woodworth and Jim Lawrence, who were on Wilkinson’s mid-1950s teams, both suffered broken legs in Varsity-Alum games. Broken legs are a bummer for an athlete. They are tenfold that for working men.

From 1992-94, the alumni returned in a hybrid format, playing part of the Red-White Scrimmage against players low on the depth chart. Music star Toby Keith, who was not an OU alum, participated in the 1994 version and famously suffered a broken ankle.

But much of that format was scripted, with the Varsity playing along for iconic players to score. 

It was not real football. It was not the Varsity-Alumni Game of yore, when Dean Blevins, stood in a huddle with Greg Pruitt and Steve Zabel, when Hog Harrison played a real football game at age 44 against players less than half his age, when a young Jerry Pettibone looked up from his halfback position and wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into.

The Varsity-Alumni Game has been gone longer than the 34 years it lived.

For the younger generations, it’s impossible to fathom. 

“It’s amazing to look back and envision that happening today,” Blevins said. “But it was sure a lot of fun. Oh my gosh was that fun.”