Mussatto: In last Big 12 home game, OU football puts on vintage offensive show vs. TCU

NORMAN — Brent Venables tripped and fell as he led the Sooners out of a smoke-filled tunnel onto Owen Field. It caused quite the pileup. A half-dozen or so Sooners toppled like dominos onto their head coach.

“I didn’t keep my feet,” Venables said, “and probably 5,000 pounds fell on top of me.”

As his face pressed into the turf, Venables said he no longer questioned how people get trampled to death.

It seemed a bad omen ahead of OU’s final Big 12 game in Norman. Turns out, it was OU that trampled the Horned Frogs 69-45 on Friday. It was OU’s second-highest point total in a Big 12 game (77-0 vs. Texas A&M, 2003) — a throwback score to when offenses ruled the league.

Friday offered plenty of chances to reminisce, to confront the finality of OU’s Big 12 tenure, to get one last glimpse of the two Roman numeral logos on the 25-yard lines before they’re swapped for SEC badges.

It’s premature, however, to declare OU’s Big 12 reign over. By winning Friday, OU kept alive its chance of playing in the Big 12 Championship Game. The Sooners’ fate won’t be sealed, one way or another, until Saturday.

But if things don’t break OU’s way, Friday will have been the Sooners’ Big 12 farewell game. And if it was, it was a happy goodbye to a conference the Sooners have played in since 1996, when the Big Eight and Southwest Conference merged.

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“It’s hard to believe,” OU president Joseph Harroz Jr. told The Oklahoman before the game. “I was actually at OU and got to be part of the formation of the Big 12, and so all of these years later, there’s a surreal aspect to it. It’s been an incredible run, it really has.”

OU dominated the league, winning 14 conference championships in football. Texas, Kansas State and Baylor are tied for second most with three.

Old members like Nebraska, Colorado and Texas A&M left, and new ones arrived — including TCU and West Virginia in 2012, and BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF this season — but none knocked the Sooners from their perch. At least not for long.

TCU coach Sonny Dykes, whose 2022 Horned Frogs became the first ever Big 12 team to play in the College Football Playoff final, was asked about OU’s impending exit from the conference.

“I hate to say it, but I think it’s kind of the way things are now,” said Dykes, who graduated from Texas Tech, where his dad, Spike, was the longtime football coach in the Red Raiders’ Southwest Conference and early Big 12 days. “Rivalries used to mean something, and really the only thing that means something now is money.

“I don’t know, I guess that’s OK. I don’t particularly like that way of thinking, but look, they pay me a bunch of money, too, so what am I gonna do, sit around here and complain about it? It’s just what drives college football these days.”

When The Pride of Oklahoma took the field before the game, members of the color guard stood at the 35-yard-line, as they always do, holding 15 flags, representing each Big 12 school plus one flag bearing the Big 12 logo.

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It made you wonder what will be done with the purple and white TCU flag, the cardinal and gold flag of Iowa State and all the others — aside from Texas — after Friday.

Brian Britt, director of The Pride, said he plans to reach out to his colleagues from across the conference, offering the flags up as a token of appreciation. A souvenir of sorts.

“Hopefully that’ll be something that they can find a use for,” Britt told The Oklahoman. “If nothing else, maybe they could raffle it off or something as a fundraiser.

“If not, we’ll hang onto them and put them in storage for when we can hopefully open a museum one of these days.”

Friday’s game will be a footnote in OU football history. Maybe even a trivia question: Which team did OU play in its final Big 12 game?

Final regular-season Big 12 game, at least.

The Sooners helped their Big 12 championship pursuit Friday, but the rest is out of OU’s hands.

“We lost that power,” Venables said. “That’s how I look at it. We lost that power, but the greatest asset we have is our own mindset … You don’t know what the next 48 hours will look like.”

By beating TCU, OU might yet have a last gasp in the Big 12.

Joe Mussatto is a sports columnist for The Oklahoman. Have a story idea for Joe? Email him at jmussatto@oklahoman.com. Support Joe's work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at subscribe.oklahoman.com.

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This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OU football wins home finale in Big 12 vs. TCU before moving to SEC