The late-night dive to rescue the Bedlam goalposts after Oklahoma State’s historic win
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Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff Writer
STILLWATER, Okla. — At 11 p.m. on the campus of Oklahoma State, about five jubilant hours after the Cowboys ended 118 years of Bedlam history with a 27-24 victory over Oklahoma, a group of OSU students were doing a little film study of their own.
“We’ve analyzed the video,” one bystander said, almost as if he’s triangulated coordinates. “Look, from this angle, you can see the tree and those two fountains.”
Call it CSI: Stillwater. But they weren’t solving a crime. They were looking for a legendary piece of OSU football history.
Noah Campbell, a sophomore civil engineering major from Tonkawa, Oklahoma, was shirtless, wearing shorts on a brisk 63-degree night and standing neck-deep in Theta Pond, an idyllic spot on the edge of campus that, according to the university, was “used at the turn of the century to water the college work animals.” But on Saturday night, Theta Pond had swallowed the goalposts that had been dunked by students following OSU’s victory, and Campbell was being navigated toward two water features by total strangers.
“My uncle texted me about it,” Campbell’s friend Griffin Singleton said. “I told them that they threw the goalposts in Theta Pond and he was like, ‘You should go get a piece of those goalposts. That’d be pretty legendary.’ I sent out a text to our little group chat, asking if anybody wanted to go, that I was heading there with a grinder [a power tool for cutting] and I was going to try and get a piece of the goalposts.”
Campbell took him up on the offer, saying his dad had also texted him that he had a friend who wanted a piece of them, and he volunteered to do the actual water excavation. Together, they made a trip to the pond but were dissuaded by students sitting on benches around it, who told them the goalposts were long gone, paraded down The Strip right around the corner, past the Wooden Nickel and The Copper Penny and all the other bars where revelers were still celebrating.
But upon returning home, another friend told them that he thought they were still submerged at the bottom of the pond. They decided to make one more run at it.
“I was like, ‘Look, if you want to get in the pond right now and swim around and look for it, I’ll come and support you,'” Singleton said. “[Campbell] looked at me [and] he was like, ‘Yeah, if we find this, it’d be huge.'”
Campbell said the water “felt like an ice bath,” and onlookers steered him wrong a couple of times. But after about 15 minutes, after a team of Cowboys studied angles of several different TikTok and Instagram posts, Campbell lit up.
“Griff … Griff … I found it,” he said, feeling something with his foot on the mossy bottom of the pond. Four or five students rushed over to help as Campbell reached down and pulled a bright yellow piece of metal out of the water. It was Bedlam all over again.
“It’s like a piece of the Berlin Wall!” a voice exclaimed from the darkness.
Together, a team of newly forged friends started to lift the pole out. It kept going. And going. “Is this one of the uprights?” they asked, and it appeared to be.
Campbell and Singleton estimated it was about 30-35 feet long, way bigger than they expected. They whisked it away down the street, wary of being discovered by anyone else who’d try to make away with their bounty.
“The No. 1 priority was just getting off the streets as fast as possible,” Singleton said.
Oklahoma State’s goalposts got tossed into Theta Pond on campus after the Bedlam win. But later Saturday night, I stumbled across Noah Campbell, a student who went for a swim to find part of them – and succeeded. pic.twitter.com/57UQcbVdPm
— Dave Wilson (@dwil) November 6, 2023
An agribusiness major with a minor in law from Amarillo, Texas, Singleton just happened to have a chop saw in his truck. He cut the goalpost in half, but it still wouldn’t fit in the bed of his Toyota Tundra, so he rolled down the windows in the back seat and stuck the pieces through them horizontally, sticking out about five feet on each side, thankful he just had a short drive ahead to get home.
It was another magical moment in a historic day for the jilted Cowboys. Their blood rivals, the Sooners, are leaving them behind for the SEC. The series has been lopsided, with OSU almost always outmanned by one of the most storied programs in college football history, losing 91 of the rivalry games. They’d get one chance to settle a multigenerational score. And most Oklahoma State fans would’ve done anything to be there.
Carroll Germany, 82, who graduated from OSU and later was the superintendent of the university’s fruit and vegetable research farm, has only missed two Bedlam games in Stillwater since 1959, he estimates. He remembers freezing to his seat in the 1985 “Ice Bowl” game, a 13-0 loss to the Sooners, and wanting to go to the car in the second half, but his 13-year-old son, a Cowboys fan, called him a fair-weather fan. So he, his son and his son’s friend, a Sooners fan, stuck it out.
On Saturday, Germany, who was walking gingerly, said he can’t handle stadium stairs very well anymore. But he’s no fair-weather fan, so he wouldn’t miss this one. He drove more than two hours from Tahlequah, Oklahoma to watch the game with his son and his son’s friend, that same Sooners fan, proud to keep the tradition alive. Only this time, they had to add three extra seats for his grandsons, his son’s boys, who are all OSU students.
“It’s a big deal,” Germany said. “A really big deal.”
Reece Hamar, who was sporting a fuzzy orange OSU robe and a newsboy cap, said he’s been to every home game in Stillwater for 23 years. Both his brothers went to Oklahoma State, as did both his parents and grandparents.
“It’s a family tradition when it comes to the Pokes,” he said, adding that he’s still looking forward to playing the Sooners in other sports.
“Look at the Bedlam series, other than football,” Hamar said. “We’re going to win. I mean, we won it eight of the last nine years.”
But this day was about football. He knows the history. And Saturday meant everything.
“We’re going to have 5,000-6,000 days until OU has beaten us after today,” Hamar said, anticipating a long gap in another game between the two. “So that’s something to hang your hat on.”
The victory came from the steady hands of an unlikely hero. Quarterback Alan Bowman is in his sixth season after twice suffering a collapsed lung while playing at Texas Tech for three seasons before being benched and transferring to Michigan, where he was a backup who appeared in five games in two seasons. He began this season at Oklahoma State in a three-way quarterback rotation before seizing the job and throwing for 334 yards Saturday. Bowman will end his career going 1-0 in Bedlam.
“Obviously the record skews one way and that’s fine,” Bowman said while wearing a game-worn Josh Fields jersey, honoring the former OSU QB who went 2-0 against the Sooners. “But I think now we kind of gave the opportunity for everybody in Oklahoma to talk about — well, the only one they have to talk about is the last one — and we won it. At the end of the day, you can just say, ‘Well, what happened in the last one?’ And we all know what happened.”
The Sooners had a fitting star, however. Receiver Drake Stoops had career bests of 12 catches and 134 yards after his father, legendary Sooners coach Bob, went 14-4 against the Cowboys. But on this day, the usual Sooner Magic was thwarted, with Stoops being stopped two yards short by freshman corner Dylan Smith on fourth-and-5 on OU’s last-chance drive to tie the game. An unheralded true freshman stopping a Stoops, who was also the subject of a controversial no-call on a potential pass interference in the end zone earlier. It was OSU’s day.
Afterward, fans flooded the field, covering every inch of the surface. The speakers blared “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” by Sooners fan Toby Keith and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” by Taylor Swift. The goalposts somehow made their way out of the stadium with high walls all the way around. A grown man ran up to OSU players yelling, “THANK YOU! THANK YOU!” before looking to the skies.
In his news conference, Mike Gundy, the former OSU quarterback in his 33rd appearance in the rivalry, celebrated the “once-in-a-lifetime gift” his players had delivered to “Oklahoma State people.” After he was finished at the podium, he sat down and talked to reporters for an extended period, relaxed and free-flowing.
“I’m having fun,” Gundy said. “One hundred and eighteen years. It’s worth it.”
People lined up to take pictures with the stump that remained when the goalposts were ripped down. Newscasters did their postgame shows next to it.
Andy Stevenson, a member of the Paddle People, the OSU spirit group that bangs their wooden paddles on the wall, had lined up 2½ hours before the game, saying it was the most people he’d ever seen at Boone Pickens Stadium that early — by a long shot.
He also ended up being one of the small groups helping Campbell navigate the pond, reflecting on what the day meant to him.
“It was crazy,” Stevenson said. “I mean, to be part of the last Bedlam and to win? That’s insane. It’s my senior year. I wanted nothing more than this.”
Hundreds of students were lined up trying to get into bars on The Strip, unaware that one street over at the same time, those goalposts were being whisked away. At 11:08 p.m., a lone “Boomer!” rang out in a parking lot on Jefferson Ave. It got no response.
Campbell and Singleton, meanwhile, had just headed home to carve up a piece of neon yellow aluminum pipe that was more suited for a museum than the bottom of a pond.
“I’ll take a piece and then I’ll probably give it to family and friends,” Singleton said. “This is not just OSU history. This is college football history.”
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Mark Schlabach
NASHVILLE — Earlier this summer, Australian Football League coach Damien Hardwick stumbled across the Netflix series, “Any Given Saturday,” which followed SEC teams throughout the 2024 season.
Hardwick, coach of the Gold Coast Suns in Queensland, was fascinated while watching the third episode, “Shock the World,” which documented Vanderbilt‘s 40-35 upset of then-No. 1 Alabama on Oct. 5, 2024.
It was the Commodores’ first victory over a No. 1-ranked team and their first over the Crimson Tide in 40 years.
Led by an undersized, fiery quarterback and a coaching staff convinced it could take on the world, Vanderbilt flipped the script from being the SEC’s perennial punching bag to world beaters.
“The club I’m at now is very, very similar,” Hardwick said. “A bit of a laughingstock, a bit of a joke. People used to come to our place for a holiday.”
The Gold Coast Suns, an expansion team that joined the AFL in 2009, had never captured a final series berth in their 16-year history until this past season. Hardwick was so impressed by Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea and the culture he built that he and four of his assistants took a 22-hour flight to the United States and spent two days with the Commodores this week.
“He’s a connector,” Hardwick said of Lea. “We were fortunate enough to sit in his meeting, and I felt like running through a brick wall for him with the way he goes about it. He’s just a very smart operator. The way he gets his people to do great things is what makes a great coach, and that’s the reason I think they’re having success.”
Lea and quarterback Diego Pavia are two big reasons for Vanderbilt’s success, but they aren’t the only people behind its sudden transformation from SEC also-ran to legitimate College Football Playoff contender.
Heading into Saturday’s game at No. 20 Texas (noon ET, ABC), the Commodores are 7-1 for the first time since 1941 and No. 9 in the AP poll, their highest ranking since they were seventh for one week in 1937.
According to Lea, chancellor Daniel Diermeier and athletic director Candice Storey Lee deserve just as much credit as the players and coaches for providing the financial resources and other support that previously wasn’t there for the football team at one of the country’s most highly regarded academic institutions.
“Vanderbilt’s never cared about this program,” said Lea, a Vanderbilt fullback from 2002 to 2004. “Well, I shouldn’t say never because of some of the records that we’re breaking right now, so maybe back in the 1940s or whatever. But there’s never been a time where it was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be really good at this, and we’re going to do the things we need.’
“In fact, if anything, I think there’s been almost a resistance to that for fear that it cuts against a narrative that we’re an elite academic institution. What our chancellor understands now is that this is the front porch.”
Diermeier, who was named Vanderbilt’s ninth chancellor in July 2020, is a most unlikely college football fan. He grew up in West Berlin, Germany, during the Cold War. He was a sports fan as a child, watching Olympic wrestling and World Cup soccer on TV. He was the first person in his family to attend college and went to USC as an international student in 1988.
Diermeier spoke fairly fluent English but didn’t know much about the sports metaphors that are a part of American vernacular. Someone in the USC language lab suggested he watch sports on TV to learn about phrases such as “got the ball across the goal line” and “hit a home run.”
Diermeier wasn’t familiar with baseball or American football but decided to follow the sports anyway. The first baseball game he watched was Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, in which Dodgers pinch-hitter Kirk Gibson smacked a walk-off, two-run homer against A’s closer Dennis Eckersley and famously hobbled around the bases in the ninth inning of a 5-4 victory.
That same year, No. 2 USC, led by star quarterback Rodney Peete, defeated No. 6 UCLA 31-22 in the Rose Bowl to improve to 10-0. USC lost to No. 1 Notre Dame 27-10 in its regular-season finale, knocking it out of the national championship hunt.
“The whole campus was crazy,” Diermeier recalled. “There was Rodney Peete versus [UCLA quarterback] Troy Aikman. It was fantastic, and I just loved it. I saw what college athletics can do for a community. It was a very powerful experience.”
After earning a PhD in political science at the University of Rochester, Diermeier’s academic career ascended from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management to the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he also served as provost.
The football programs at Stanford and Northwestern were similar to Vanderbilt’s — they were trying to be competitive at high-academic institutions. They enjoyed stretches of being good but largely have struggled.
“People told me, ‘Yeah, you have seen the Big Ten and you have seen the Pac-12, [but] you have not seen the SEC and that’s a different game,'” Diermeier said. “They were right, and so it became very quickly clear that this is a different level of intensity, a different level of passion, and that we had not performed on that level.”
The Commodores went 0-9 in Diermeier’s first season on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Vanderbilt fired coach Derek Mason, whose teams went 27-55 in seven seasons, and replaced him with Lea, who had been Notre Dame‘s defensive coordinator for three seasons.
It wasn’t like the Commodores had never won in the 21st century. Lea’s coach at Vanderbilt, Bobby Johnson, had some success, guiding the Commodores to a 7-6 record and bowl victory in 2008. James Franklin pulled off what had seemed impossible, directing Vandy to back-to-back 9-4 campaigns in 2012 and 2013.
But a criminal case involving four football players accused of raping and sodomizing an unconscious 21-year-old female student in a dorm room hung a dark cloud over the program. Three of the four players were convicted; the fourth reached a plea deal with prosecutors.
“Unfortunately, [Franklin] left in a manner that wasn’t great [because] you had this rape trial that really was a black eye for the program,” Lea said. “And so that stretch of success was kind of almost wiped away.”
Lea didn’t have immediate success at his alma mater. The Commodores went 2-10 in 2021 and improved to 5-7 the next season. After going 2-10 again in 2023, Lea knew things had to change dramatically if Vanderbilt was ever going to be good.
After losing All-SEC offensive tackle Tyler Steen to Alabama following the 2021 season and 1,000-yard rusher Ray Davis to Kentucky the next season, Lea realized the Commodores couldn’t be competitive in the SEC unless they took more seasoned players from the transfer portal and became more competitive in name, image and likeness payouts.
After going 9-27 in his first three seasons, Lea told his athletic director that if the school couldn’t find $3 million in donations before the transfer portal opened in December 2023, Vanderbilt wouldn’t have a program.
Lee secured $6 million in NIL contributions in one week, according to Lea.
“She knew what was going on here,” Lea said. “We’ve never been disorganized. It’s always been purposeful and intentional. But it’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the team. It’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the coach. She was such a partner and wanted to solve the problem. In that one week, she never flinched.”
That money helped the Commodores land New Mexico State transfers Pavia and star tight end Eli Stowers after Lea hired then-Aggies coach Jerry Kill as his chief consultant and senior offensive advisor. Lea also brought in New Mexico State offensive coordinator Tim Beck and three other assistants to help turn things around.
When Vanderbilt general manager Barton Simmons talked to Pavia for the first time, the former junior college quarterback who didn’t have a single FBS or FCS scholarship offer coming out of high school, told him: “Just tell Coach Lea if he brings me here, we’re gonna win every f—ing game we play.”
“It didn’t feel like bulls—, and it felt authentic,” Simmons said. “He wasn’t saying it in an impulsive way. It was almost like he was expressing his belief.”
The Commodores haven’t won every game with Pavia under center, but they’ve won more than most people would have believed. He’s among the Heisman Trophy favorites after passing for 1,698 yards with 15 touchdowns and leading the team in rushing with 458 yards and five scores.
Lea said Pavia has brought much more to the Commodores than his production.
“There’s only so much I can do as head coach to establish leadership in the program,” Lea said. “What I’ve learned through Diego is, first of all, there’s no one more important on the team than the quarterback. And second, you can’t manufacture alpha leadership, but once you have an alpha leader, that attitude can spread throughout.”
Simmons, a former recruiting analyst for Rivals.com and 247Sports, was one of Lea’s football teammates at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. They won two state titles together. Simmons was a defensive back at Yale, while Lea went to play baseball at Birmingham Southern before transferring to Vanderbilt.
Simmons was among Lea’s first hires, putting him in charge of personnel and roster development, while assisting in recruiting and scouting.
A former SEC defensive coordinator told ESPN that the Commodores have done a remarkable job of evaluating transfers, especially in the trenches. All five of their starting offensive linemen are graduate transfers or seniors from other schools. The top three reserves also are transfers.
The Vanderbilt coaching staff’s message to potential recruits and transfers is clear: “If you’re coming here, this is going to be really, really hard because you’re playing in the best conference in college football,” Simmons said. “We’re going to hold you to the highest standards in college football. And you’re going to have to go to class during the week next to some of the smartest people in the world.”
While Diermeier has helped by securing athletes priority registration for classes to keep practice times open and creating more slots for graduate transfers, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements and expectations haven’t wavered.
“We say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that we compete with Harvard Monday to Friday and with Alabama on Saturday,” Diermeier said.
Lee wasn’t done in getting her football coach what he needed, either. The ongoing Vandy United campaign has raised more than $350 million to improve athletics facilities and the student-athlete experience.
The new south end at FirstBank Stadium includes a multiuse, 130,000 square foot facility with a new football locker room, premium seating, dining facility and renovated concourse.
A previously completed north end zone project included a new videoboard, premium seating and a basketball practice facility.
Lea hopes the football investments aren’t over. He wants a stand-alone football operations building and indoor practice facility. Lea said the current weight room doesn’t allow his entire team to work out together.
The university provided $100 million to the campaign fund to get it off the ground.
“It’s essential to have alignment from the very top,” Lee said. “So in order for me to execute the vision, I do have to have support and someone in our chancellor who wants to be bold, who’s not beholden to the past, who doesn’t care about what the history was. [Diermeier] said from the very beginning that there would be no daylight between us, and he would support the vision that I had.”
With the changing landscape in college athletics, Lee realized Vanderbilt was in danger of being left behind if hefty investments weren’t made.
“The past has kind of always hung over us,” Lee said. “We’ve had these moments of success, but they’ve been fleeting. We don’t want to just experience success in a moment, right? We want to be able to sustain excellence, and that’s what this university expects across the board.”
Diermeier, a former business school professor, put it another way, comparing the rapidly evolving world of college sports to the deregulation of U.S. airlines in 1978.
“I want to be Southwest,” he said. “I don’t want to be Pan Am.”
Lee has deep roots at Vanderbilt. She was a captain of the women’s basketball team in 2002 and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees there. She became the school’s first female athletic director and the first Black woman to lead an SEC athletic department in 2020.
While some have suggested that she and Lea have grand visions for Vanderbilt football only because they went to school there, she says that’s not the case.
“I mean, we are both alums and so we care deeply for this place, but it’s not just that,” she said. “It’s not just an emotional connection, and we do have that, but it is also because we are fierce competitors that deeply believe that this can become something great.”
While Lea once feared NIL and the transfer portal would leave the Commodores behind, he now calls their presence the great disruptor. It has leveled the playing field for schools like Vanderbilt, Indiana and Georgia Tech, if the right financial resources are in place.
“We’ve become a really attractive place because this is also different,” Lea said. “People are inspired by the idea of building something and not inheriting something.”
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas quarterback Arch Manning was “making good progress” in practice, coach Steve Sarkisian said Thursday, but his status to return from a concussion in time to play against No. 9 Vanderbilt was still uncertain.
Manning has been in concussion protocol since being injured at the beginning of overtime in No. 20 Texas’ 45-38 win over Mississippi State last week. Backup Matthew Caldwell came on to throw the winning touchdown as Texas rallied from 17 points down in the fourth quarter.
Manning has spent the week in Texas’ concussion protocol and he returned to practice Wednesday. He was listed as questionable on the team’s Wednesday night injury report to the Southeastern Conference.
“I don’t have anything beyond for Arch just because we have to follow the protocol of the days and the reps, but he’s making good progress,” Sarkisian said.
If Manning can’t play, Caldwell will start. He is a graduate transfer from Troy.
“We haven’t changed anything that we’ve done,” Sarkisian said. “The game plan is the game plan. All of his teammates have confidence in Matt if it’s his time to go.”
Manning has passed for 1,795 yards and 15 touchdowns. A preseason favorite for the Heisman Trophy, Manning struggled for much of the early season but played his best game against Mississippi State with 346 yards passing and three touchdowns. He passed for 169 yards in the final quarter.
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