Miami has become OU Sooner's home away from home for bowl games

Earnie Seiler was an Oklahoma State grad but a Miami man. The front guy for the sleepy Florida fishing village that wanted to attract tourists.

So in late 1938, here he came back to Oklahoma, except to Norman, home of Tom Stidham’s undefeated Sooners.

Seiler was promoting the Orange Bowl, a four-year-old football game that had a new stadium and had attracted 19,000 fans for the Auburn-Michigan State game the previous January.

Seiler’s chalkings showed up all over campus. "On to Miami.” He gave a presentation complete with posters of comely girls stretched out on the sands of Miami Beach.

"I’m a great believer in visual aids,” Seiler said, a tactic that still works in the modern age.

So on Jan. 1, 1939, Oklahoma played fellow unbeaten Tennessee in an Orange Bowl that drew 32,191 fans to a stadium that seated 22,000 permanently and had 27,000 with temporary bleachers.

The Volunteers won 17-0, but the Orange Bowl had taken off. And so had Oklahoma football.

Seventy years later, the Sooners return to those Miami sands, only this time not as strangers. They play Florida on Jan. 8 in the BCS title game. Call this an Orange Bowl Extra, and while the Gators are in their home state, the Sooners should be no less comfortable.

Miami is OU’s home away from home.

They literally have grown up together, this Sooner football program and this bowl game and this metropolis in the far corner of America, which wasn’t incorpated until 1896 and which in 1930 had a population of 110,637 with mostly unpaved roads.

Page 1 of 2

1 2 Next