The unpublished story between Texas and Oklahoma in 1999 of Mike Leach's fake storyline

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During the pre-game warm-up of this year's Red River Showdown, a script outlining the first offending pieces of the OU was spotted on the field by one of the student assistants from Texas, who collected it and entrusted it to Carl Reese, Longhorns' defense coordinator. For the very favored Longhorns, they seemed to have taken a huge break.

"We were trying to find out if it was genuine," Reese said. "We were in this state of 'can we believe that?'

They should not have been.

It was a fake, part of a plot developed by Leach and consulted by the Longhorns, who quickly fell behind 17-0 before realizing that they had been fooled.

"It sounds like Mike," said former Texas coach Mack Brown, who was unaware of the scenario at the time. "I know this: offensive coordinators are so cautious with these scripts that they will not lose them.These things are valuable.Only Mike could think of preparing one as a lure."

In his 2011 book "Swing Your Sword", Leach briefly mentioned the lark. But he never knew for sure how long the Longhorns had taken it, how many times they had referenced it or how effective it had been.

He was delighted to learn recently that they had fallen into the trap.

"These things are evolving and becoming somewhat legendary," Leach said.

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Oklahoma and Texas are bringing a ton of history and composure for the 2018 edition of their rivalry at the Dallas Cotton Bowl.

Upon arriving, Leach did not tell the coach of the OU, Bob Stoops, that he was planting it, and Reese did not inform Brown that he l & # 39; had. As a result, few people on either side were aware of the existence of the lure script. And yet, he almost propelled the Underdogs Sooners, with Stoops in his first year and OU coming out of a 5-6 season, to victory.

"This match was perhaps the most bizarre experience I've ever had as a college footballer," said Ahmad Brooks, a Longhorn-based defenseman. "I can not tell you how bad we were in the first 3 or 4 minutes with every single twist, we have never seen anything like it.

"It was a complete pandemonium and a total confusion."

Reese finally canceled the script and Texas reinstated his game plan to rally and roll, 38-28.

But not until Leach emits a pandemonium on the Longhorns for a quarter.

"It was a decent effort," said Leach. "But it would be even more legendary if we had won the sucker."

A decent effort, worthy of such a keen rivalry.

"Yeah, it was a little fishy," said former tight member of the OU, Trent Smith, whom Leach drafted to "accidentally" dismiss the sheet in front of Texas coaches.

"But it's OR-Texas, there are no rules."

On the Wednesday night of the week of the match, Leach was with the offensive assistant of the OU, Cale Gundy, when the two men started to laugh at how amusing it would be to create a decoy scenario for them. Longhorns.

"You start making fun of that," Leach said. "And then, it's like:" Okay, fuck him. "Why not? Let's do it." Then we had to think of things to put on. "

Leach did not just want to play Texas. He wanted to use the ploy to gain an advantage. So he took plays that he had planned to call and began to look after potential companions by their side.

"In other words, with the call of the false game, we wanted to complete it," he explained. "We were going to launch something that, hopefully, would attack the space created by what they thought the room was going to be."

For the lure script, Leach started playing pieces that the Sooners did not even have in their system. And he invented the terminology for them as they went, striking a balance between too complex to understand and too simple to be credible.

"It must have looked like our terminology," continued Leach. "But Z-25 Jet, they may not know what it means, you know, but you did not want to be disturbed either, so it must have sounded like a football."

When he finished his masterpiece, Leach placed Gundy's name on top of it, as if it were the copy of Gundy's offensive game script. Then he laminated it to make it official.

"It's Mike," says Gundy. "It was funny."

Outside of Gundy, Leach left the rest of the coaching staff in the dark, including Stoops, who was preparing for his first showdown at the Red River.

"I thought Bob had enough problems and we were going to let Bob go ahead and settle things with Bob," Leach said. "It was really me and Cale, you could not say too much because if you did, the cat would come out of the bag or you would have too many guys who seemed suspicious."

Then Leach had to find a way to attract Texas bait.

During the 1999 season, Leach, Smith and halfback Seth Littrell had a small tradition during pre-game warm-ups.

"At the time, coach Leach and I and Seth all drank the Copenhagen snuff," Smith remembered. "I'll always carry the tin on the field during the preliminary game, so I remember [Leach] call me and ask for the can. We were all going to dive together and he thought, "Okay, here's the market, guys …", explaining that to me and Seth. I just remembered how excited he was about it. I had the impression that it was a totally misguided thing that he was managing on his own.

"But he thought," Oh, that'll be great. It's going to be hilarious. It's going to be epic. "

As Leach continued, Littrell and Smith became equally excited.

"To be honest, I thought it was pretty clever," Littrell said.

"Yeah, it was a bit fishy, ​​but it's OR-Texas, there are no rules."

Trent Smith, former tight end of Oklahoma

Leach then handed the script to Smith and ordered him to run the plant, which he did to perfection.

He says, "I'm going to leave. I want you to stay here for a minute. Then I want you to drop that in front of their coaches and continue jogging, "said Smith." It was a bit exciting. I act as if I put this script to the waistband of my pants. I dropped it and just kept jogging as if I thought I still had it.

"It hurt me not to look back and see if it worked."

On the side, Leach kept the script abandoned in its peripheral vision. And to his delight, he watched Casey Horny, Texas assistant, assist him.

"The body language was awesome – it was like watching a Muttley cartoon," said Leach, referring to the naughty dog ​​of the 1960s, Dick Dastardly's sidekick. "They decided to give him the sneer of Muttley and then took the tunnel."

Back in the locker room, some of the Texan coaches, including Reese, high school coach Everett Withers, and Tom Herman, a graduate assistant that season, went around the script to try to figure out what was going on. it had to be done.

"It was one of those contracts where we were:" No, it can not be real, "said Withers, now head coach of Texas State." But we all thought about that. "

They finally decided not to go to Brown with. Instead, Reese took the script with him up to the press gallery.

"It was at that time that I really looked at the situation and talked about it a bit," said Reese. "Everyone really thought it was the real deal."

Reese began tweaking his defensive calls to match the script. And it would not take long for this to turn against us.

"I just remember sitting around this first car and laughing like crazy," Littrell said. "Like, they think they know what we are repairing."

The second piece of the script called something that looks like a double reverse pass. In response, the Longhorns brought Brooks to a nickel blitz in an attempt to sack the Sooners for a big loss.

Instead, the catcher Leach snuck Antwone Savage behind the linebackers on a shallow crossing lane going the other way to the right. Quarterback Josh Heupel found him so wide open that Savage galloped without touching the ball for a 44-yard touchdown.

"We thought maybe we just messed up the verbiage," Herman said.

So, despite being hit by a touchdown in two rooms, Texas did not immediately abandon the scenario. And in turn, his defense became only more disconcerted.

Reese was concerned about all the screens of the lure script. So, when he would have otherwise put the pressure on, he sat down, giving Heupel all the time needed to separate Texas. According to Withers, the Longhorns were also disturbed by all the wrinkles of the script for which they had not been prepared, such as backs for passing out of the backfield.

"We were so worried about it that we were not worried about just doing our job," said Withers. "That captivated our attention and that's probably why they were so effective in the first quarter."

When the Sooners went to 17-0, just 10 minutes into the match, Reese finally canceled the script.

"He was thrown in the trash," he said. "At that moment, you thought you had been, I go back to basics and started looking at what was happening and trying to adapt to it." "

That's all the Longhorns really needed. They dominated the rest of the way by winning Heupel three times, including one by Brooks.

"What you do not want is these Longhorns that trigger you at full speed, without hesitation," Leach said. "Because they were pretty overwhelming at that time."

They have indeed mastered the Sooners to complete the biggest return of the school in 34 years. Texas earned them just one more touchdown, which did not happen until the end of the third quarter after the Longhorns secured a 31-20 lead.

"When everything was finished, I had a good laugh," said Reese. "Because it was really a good stratagem and he managed to ruin us for a while.

"I learned a good lesson there."

After the match, the Texas assistants had doubts that Leach had been the first to plant the lure script. But they were not completely positive.

"I had thought, based on his reputation – I do not speak negatively at all – but it was certainly something he could do," Herman said. "I do not know if I've ever had confirmation until I talk to someone who was part of the Oklahoma staff and they categorically confirmed:" I did not know if I ever had confirmation until I spoke to someone who was part of Oklahoma staff and they categorically confirmed: & # 39; Oh yeah, that's one thing he worked on all week. "

Brooks, meanwhile, said he and his teammates were puzzled as to why their defense seemed so lost in the first quarter.

"What's funny is that I only heard this story when Tom told it a year ago," he said. "The coaches never told us that it was found, so we did not know it.

"It was a brilliant gesture from Mike Leach."

As for Leach, he had never been informed of the story of the event by Texas.