How the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University handle football fan emergencies

And it does. Fans come down with heat exhaustion and strokes. They trip and break bones, and they sometimes have heart attacks.

Game day can get even more exciting when Mother Nature steps in. In 2001, lightning briefly emptied the stadium when a storm hit Norman during the fourth quarter of the game against North Carolina. Oklahoma State University has had similar almost-predictable brushes with bad weather. But when Mother Nature sent an unexpected plague of crickets to Stillwater more than a decade ago, fans scurried as the bugs rained down during a game.

The health and safety of 145,000 people — 85,000 at the University of Oklahoma and 60,000 at OSU — rest in the hands of paramedics, nurses, doctors, police, bomb-sniffing dogs, weather watchers and other emergency workers.

"Anytime you have 85,000 people at one location, you have the potential to have more than one need occur at the same time," said Kenneth Mossman, OU athletic department spokesman.

Just as the football players strategize, condition and plan in the months and weeks before the opener, the universities prepare well ahead for those emergencies.

Teams trained to attend to medical emergencies and equipped with a first- aid kit and automatic defibrillators are interspersed throughout the OSU stands, said Floyd Cobb, OSU fire marshal and assistant director of environmental health and safety.

Four nurses' aid stations are posted in the stadium. The staff typically includes a registered nurse hired from the local medical center, an administrative person, and someone trained to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid.