OU notebook

Published: September 25, 2007

Oklahoma football players Joe Jon Finley and Jacob Gutierrez got a little more than they expected during breakfast last Saturday.

A man collapsed as he walked by the table where the players were eating with Finley's mother and friend inside a Norman International House of Pancakes.

"A man kind of stumbled past us and just passed out right there, kind of fell into my lap,” Finley said. "I caught him and sat him down.”

The man lay unconscious for a few minutes. A registered nurse was eating at the restaurant and helped the players tend to him until an ambulance arrived.

"She told us what to do and got him figured out,” Finley said. "He was alright, but it was kind of a scary deal.”

•OU-Texas time set: The Oklahoma-Texas game will kick off at 2:30 p.m. and be televised by ABC, it was announced Monday.

The Sooners, ranked No. 3 in the Associated Press Top 25, and the seventh-ranked Longhorns face off in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl on Oct. 6.

•The little things: After his team outscored its first four opponents 246-47, OU coach Bob Stoops found another way to keep his players motivated.

On Monday, he showed the team a tape of all their mistakes in last Friday's 62-21 win over Tulsa.

"This was the first time coach Stoops has really done this,” junior receiver Malcolm Kelly said. "He showed us, as a team, all the small mistakes that we made. It was a lot of stuff.

"He always talks about us not listening to the hype, not listening to the people saying, ‘Oh, you're doing great.' In reality, we're doing pretty good, but we're really killing ourselves in a lot of aspects of the game.”

•Thin air: Stoops says he isn't worried about the thinner air at the high elevation of the Rocky Mountains affecting his players Saturday against Colorado.

"It hasn't (affected us) yet,” Stoops said, referring to his previous games in Boulder. Stoops' teams played there in 1999 and 2003, going 1-1.

OU offensive tackle Phil Loadholt, who grew up in Fountain, Colo., said the team is in good enough condition to avoid any problems.

"We're in good shape — really, really good shape,” the 6-foot-8, 350-pound Loadholt said.

"I think it's more of a mental thing anyway. It's gonna be thinner up there, but they know how to breathe, so there shouldn't be any problems.”

By Scott Wright

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