Oklahoma football: Don’t stress over the College Football Hall of Fame

OU linebacker Brian Bosworth takes a breather during spring football drills. Staff photo by Jim Argo taken 4/5/86;

The new College Football Hall of Fame class was announced Tuesday. Jimmy Johnson made it, for his remarkable five-year run at Miami U. Brian Bosworth did not, even though he remains the most decorated linebacker in college football history.

We wrote about Johnson in the Wednesday Oklahoman. You can read that here. What’s interesting about Johnson is that I think he feels solid about his five years as head coach at OSU. But he never really references the OSU Cowboys much. He was on the Dan Patrick national radio show Tuesday, and Johnson mentioned the Dallas Cowboys, the Miami Dolphins, Miami U. and even his days as an assistant at Pitt and OU. But nary a word about OSU. Probably an oversight, but still interesting.

Johnson certainly belongs in the College Football Hall of Fame, and so does Bosworth. But Boz didn’t make it, because the selectors maintain some kind of artificial character standards. My old pal Dennis Dodd of cbssports.com wrote a fabulous column about the Boz. I recommend it highly. You can read it here.

But I’ll say the same thing about Boz that I said when Barry Switzer was being blackballed from the College Football Hall of Fame before being admitted in 2001. This is not an institution to be taken seriously.