Bryant: Rickey Henderson wasn’t as good as he says he was — he was better
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Howard Bryant, Columnist, ESPN.com
Before he was a somebody, Rickey Henderson was already a constituency of one.
Professional athletes are a different species, world-class talents whose sense of self and possibility do not often fit within the confines of the doubts and fears natural to the rest of us. But Rickey, the physical specimen who thought he could play baseball forever before he died at 65 on Friday night in Oakland, California, from complications with pneumonia and asthma, stood even beyond his most gilded peers on the confidence scale.
I once asked him when he knew he had the talent to play Major League Baseball, to be on the same field with Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan, to play the same game Willie Mays and Henry Aaron played. To live at the altitude of the gods. As easily as telling the time, Rickey answered, “I don’t know. Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade.”
When Henderson was a 10th grader at Oakland Technical High School, his new baseball coach, Bob Cryer, fanned the players out and pointed to those he wanted to report to the varsity and then junior varsity. Rickey was sent to the JV. The other kids protested, tried to tell the coach that Rickey, who might have looked smaller than everyone else, was a legend. The kids told the coach he was making a mistake.
Taking matters into his own hands, Rickey walked up to the new coach and said, “You must not know who I am.”
After he was a somebody, everybody knew who Rickey Henderson was. Start with the name. A one-namer. That meant he was a star. Ubiquitous. Baseball used to have one-namers — Ruth, Reggie, Willie, Pete, Rickey — now it’s so desperate for a show-stopper like them, the league is likely to put a security detail on Shohei Ohtani.
When it was done, Rickey had finished a 24-year career having scored more runs, stolen more bases, hit more home runs to lead off a game and drawn more walks than anyone who ever played. He had fulfilled his own prophecy to be one of the best who ever did it, the greatest ever when it came to hitting first and stealing bases.
We protect our own time, and for those who saw him, Rickey Henderson spanned time, from the early days when he and Billy Martin resurrected the A’s and put Rickey on the map, to the days when his iconoclasm chafed the old guard so much that many did not think he was the automatic Hall of Famer he would one day become.
Rickey amassed a career so big it was impossible to not concede that he knew what he was doing all along. The stories that were once proof that he was bad for the game became the nostalgia we missed, the personality we craved. His personality hadn’t necessarily changed; the numbers were simply too big to dispute. He wasn’t as good as he said he was. He was actually better.
Buck Showalter recalled a game in the early 1990s when the New York Yankees were in Oakland. Showalter was a coach on the Yankees’ staff, and late in the game, the manager was giving out instructions.
“Rickey was hitting against us, and he has us playing no-doubles defense,” Showalter said. “Guarding the lines. Don’t give up anything big. Don’t let him get in scoring position. Then Mattingly turns around and yells into the dugout, ‘What for? If he gets a single, it’s a double anyway!‘”
Wherever you look in baseball, there is Rickey. When you see Kyle Schwarber and Ohtani and Aaron Judge hitting leadoff, you see Rickey: It is because no true leadoff hitter has ever been able to replicate his power that the sport has resorted to letting cleanup hitters start the game.
When baseball laments its lack of action, capitulates to the truth that dry, analytical no-risk baseball has been a failure by enlarging the bases and just giving stolen bases away, you see Rickey, for there was nothing like Rickey leading off, stalking the pitcher, prowling … and attacking.
No one loved Rickey more than the analytics guys, because Rickey did everything they want, with a video-game efficiency.
Get on base more than 40 percent of the time? Check.
Hit for average? Check.
Hit for power? Check.
Hit for leadoff power? Double-check.
Steal bases at an 85 percent success rate? Check.
As a baseball player, Rickey was everything in one. As the analytics godfather Bill James once said, “If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”
There were so many moments. There was 1982, when Rickey shattered Lou Brock’s single-season record of 118 stolen bases with 130. There was his first season with the Yankees in 1985, when he scored 146 runs and believes he was robbed of the MVP. There was 1990, the year Rickey did win the MVP.
But his Mount Everest for me was the 1989 postseason, starting with the American League Championship Series destruction of Toronto in which he hit .400 with two home runs and scored eight runs in five games to earn series MVP. Rickey followed it up with a World Series in which he hit .474 as the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants.
Over those nine games, Rickey went 15-for-34, scored 12 runs, hit three home runs, walked nine times (with only two strikeouts) and stole 11 of 12 bases. The numbers were impressive but the value was in Rickey proving, at long last, that he was a championship-level ballplayer, a winning ballplayer. As remarkable as it sounds, there was once a belief in the game that Rickey did not always make a team better. The 1989 playoffs erased any doubt that Rickey was one of the great impact players of his time.
His toughness had always been underrated, and that toughness destroyed the Blue Jays. It was what his Oakland teammate Dennis Eckersley said made him so dangerous. He could not be intimidated.
It reminded me of the time Rickey and I were sitting in the dugout in spring training in Mesa, Arizona, talking about competition and he suddenly said, “Did I ever tell you the time I punched Richard Dotson in the face?”
The date was Sept. 10, 1984, A’s-White Sox at the Oakland Coliseum. Dotson was a serviceable major league pitcher for the better part of his 12-year career, mostly with the White Sox. He even won 22 games in 1983 and finished fourth on the Cy Young ballot. In the summer of 1984, he made his first and only All-Star team, on which he and Rickey were teammates.
But later that season, neither team was going anywhere. In the bottom of the first, Dotson starts Rickey off with a fastball … right under his chin, dropping him to one knee. Rickey eventually flies out to right, but not before Dotson throws another one near his cheekbone.
“Next time up,” Rickey says, “I’m standing two steps in front of the plate, damn near standing on the plate, begging this Mother Hubbard to hit me. So he throws four balls way, way outside. OK, I take my walk, but I’m not jogging to first base. I’m strolling to first. I’m jangling to first. I’m taking my sweet time to first. Then I take off for second. Boom. Steal second.”
Rickey is on second in the bottom of the third with one out, and Dotson is angry. Rickey stretches out, like he’s about to take third. Dotson is so worried about Rickey, he walks Dwayne Murphy.
With Dotson facing Dave Kingman, the giant slugger who never took a check swing in his life, Rickey taunts him, threatening to steal third. Kingman takes two enormous hacks; insulted, Dotson drills Kingman with a fastball to the body. Rickey is watching the whole thing from second base.
“Dave walks to first. Everything’s cool — and then he jets to the mound and punches Dotson. Just unloads on him. Now everybody coming off the bench. Both benches. And here we go. I’m on second base and I come in flying and BOOM! I pop Dotson right in his face.”
Home plate umpire Vic Voltaggio ejects Kingman. (Rickey got free punches on Dotson; Voltaggio doesn’t toss him.) White Sox manager Tony La Russa, leaves Dotson in the game. First pissed, now punched, Dotson walks Bruce Bochte, scoring Rickey for the only run of the game. The A’s win 1-0, all because Rickey performed mental surgery on Dotson. Other than Kingman and Rickey tattooing Dotson’s face, Oakland never even got a hit in the inning.
Nobody on the Chicago bench was more enraged than La Russa. The next night, Rickey was chopping it up with another East Bay legend, White Sox leadoff man Rudy Law, who was grim-faced.
“He tells me, ‘Rickey, Tony held a meeting, and the meeting wasn’t about the fight. It was all about you.’ And I was like, ‘Me? It wasn’t about the team, or Kingman?’ Rudy said, ‘No, it was all about getting you.’
“OK, so now, it’s fight day. And I said to everybody, ‘If anything happens, I better see everybody out there, or after I’m done whipping their ass, anyone on our team I see on the bench or slow to get out there, I’m whipping your asses, too.'”
Just before the first pitch, Rickey had one last message to deliver.
“I run over to their dugout and I say to Tony, ‘If anything happens out there today, I’m not coming to the mound for the pitcher. I’m coming straight here, right to the dugout — to get you.'”
La Russa and Rickey would win a championship together in that great year of 1989 and an American League pennant in 1990. In between, the two massive personalities would clash. La Russa was convinced that Rickey’s personality prevented him from being even greater.
It was a common sentiment, and it was true: Rickey Henderson understood the lessons of American capitalism better than his teachers. Money was the mode of currency to express all things — value, appreciation, power — and if anyone had more than he, they had better have the résumé to prove it. Even if they did, that might not be enough.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rickey would withhold his services if he felt the game was treating him unfairly — even when he was in the wrong, like the years he took the security of a long-term contract and then fumed when annual free agent deals would exceed his own.
The constant sparring over money convinced La Russa that Henderson, in his words, “wasn’t a great player.” Talented, yes. Game-changing, yes. But to La Russa, great players never allowed anything to come before winning, and Rickey did.
And yet Rickey went from one of the most disliked players in the game to one of the most beloved over the course of his career, in large part because of his flamboyant personality and style. Whether the Rickey stories were true or not stopped being the point. Even Rickey would begin to admit to stories that never happened because the legend was more important than the facts. The legends live on.
One story, which was definitely true, articulated Rickey’s arc. It occurred May 30, 1994, with the A’s making their first trip of the season to Toronto. The team bus left the Toronto Sheraton, rolled down Spadina Avenue, and as it rumbled to the SkyDome, it past a billboard on Blue Jays Way containing just three elements: a photo of an elated Joe Carter, the date of his epic home run, and the time it landed in the seats to give Toronto the championship in 1993. No other words.
The billboard sparked a question that bounced around the A’s bus as it pulled into the ballpark: “Where were you when Joe Carter hit the home run?” From the front to the back, players, coaches, and staff recalled their whereabouts during Canada’s most famous baseball moment. Dave Feldman, the statistician for KRON-TV, the A’s television affiliate, said he was sitting on the couch, watching the game in his San Francisco apartment, totally stunned. More voices followed, with more recollections.
Then, a lone voice boomed from the very back of the bus.
“I was on second base!”
It was Rickey.
The only thing that did more for Rickey’s reputation than his hilarity was his sheer dominance. “Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it — those days when he really wanted to play — there was nobody better,” Eckersley said.
Like the time in 1998, when Rickey was close to done. He was 39, and his manager, Art Howe, lamented that Rickey couldn’t get around on a fastball anymore. As proof, he would strike out 118 times that year, the most ever in a single season for him. That meant he was vulnerable, and the youngsters thought they could take him out.
“One time we were in Cleveland, and Kenny Lofton was leading the league in stolen bases,” recalled Ron Washington, the A’s third base coach at the time. “And here’s Lofton across the diamond chirping at Rickey: ‘See that old man on the other side of the field? There’s a new sheriff in town. That dude is done.’ And don’t you know, Rickey just went on a tear. Second — gone. Third — gone. He’d come back into the dugout and say, ‘If Rickey sleep, let Rickey sleep.’ He just took whatever he wanted. When you talked s— to him the way Kenny Lofton did, he reminded you that he was still Rickey Henderson.”
When it all coalesced into a titanic career, even La Russa had to reassess.
“Rickey knew his body better than anybody else,” La Russa later told me. “I have to admit I was wrong about him. As a manager, I would ask him how he felt and he would tell me, ’70 percent.’ Seventy percent wasn’t good enough for him to play, but I’d tell him 70 percent of Rickey Henderson was better than 100 percent of anybody else I had on the bench. There were times he did not play even when that 70 percent, I thought, could have benefited the team, but when you look at the end results of what he did, the totality of his career achievements cannot be argued.”
His detractors were not completely wrong. Rickey was difficult. Rickey was a force of his own making, for better and, for a manager, often for worse — especially when he saw himself as underpaid. But if the games are about numbers, as we are told they are, Rickey Henderson stood vindicated, and in the end, that is why he was loved.
“Tell me something,” he once said to me during a discussion over malingering. “How in the hell you gonna steal 1,400 bases jaking it? How could you do what I did, for as long as I did it, and say I didn’t want to be out there?”
Virginia Tech is finalizing a deal to make James Franklin the school’s next head coach, sources told ESPN on Monday. The deal is expected to be completed in the near future.
Franklin is the former coach at both Penn State and Vanderbilt, where he went 128-60 over 15 seasons. He brings a resume that includes winning more than 68% of his games, an appearance in the semi-finals of the 2024 College Football Playoff and a Big Ten championship in 2016.
He’ll replace his former defensive coordinator, Brent Pry, who was fired in September after an 0-3 start and a 16-24 record through four seasons.
Franklin’s arrival in Blacksburg will give the Hokies their most accomplished coach since Hall of Famer Frank Beamer, who retired in 2015 after 29 seasons at the school. Since that time, Tech has endured the underwhelming tenures of Justin Fuente and Pry as the school struggled to assimilate to modern college football.
After firing Pry, Tech’s Board of Visitors passed a plan to add $229 million to the athletics budget over the next four years. The move was to help make Tech a more attractive job and attract a candidate that could revive the school’s lagging football fortunes.
In Franklin, they get an established coach whose availability on the open market wasn’t even considered a possibility at the start of the 2025 season. Penn State began the season ranked No. 2 in the country.
Franklin’s teams endured three-straight losses to open the season, including a double-overtime loss to No. 6 Oregon when they were ranked No. 3 in September.
After losses to UCLA and Northwestern, Penn State fired Franklin. They were originally on the hook for $49 million for his contract, but that number is subject to off-set and should end up being significantly less pending the terms of his Virginia Tech contract.
Franklin came to Penn State in 2014 in the throes of NCAA sanctions from the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. He pushed the program through a dark period and led them to the Rose Bowl and Big Ten title in 2016.
Franklin’s tenure was ultimately defined by general success that never manifested itself at the very highest levels of winning, as he finished 4-21 at Penn State against AP Top 10 opponents. Over his 12 seasons there, he led Penn State to six seasons of double-digit victories, including three-straight from 2022 to 2024.
Virginia Tech hasn’t won double-digit games since Fuente’s first season in 2016. From 2004 to 2011, Tech won double-digit games each season under Beamer.
Franklin brings strong ties to the I-95 corridor, including the talent-rich DMV area. Along with recruiting that area heavily at Penn State, Franklin coached two stints at Maryland as an assistant and one year at James Madison.
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Eli Lederman
STILLWATER, Okla. — The stands inside Boone Pickens Stadium are brimming with the usual unusual characters. Naturally, the fans in Section 2 NO-SHIRTY 1 are already shirtless. The most popular bananas on campus are here, too. The Kool-Aid Man, of course, is sitting just a few rows over.
This is the scene 40 minutes before Oklahoma State‘s Week 12 visit from Kansas State. Amid the most forlorn season in the Cowboys’ modern football history, the Stillwater faithful is coping as best it can this fall, uncovering new methods to mine slivers of joy out of its football misery.
“It’s Oklahoma State, man,” student Alex Jackson, shirtless, tells ESPN. “We’re loyal and true.”
“Loyal and true” is the school’s guiding motto; three words that have closed the second-to-last stanza of Oklahoma State’s alma mater since 1957. Seldom, if ever, has that maxim been tested more — from a purely on-field standpoint, at least — than in 2025 with the 1-9 Cowboys slowly, but surely crashing toward their worst finish of the 21st century, even worse than last year’s 3-9 finish.
Oklahoma State dropped its final nine games and snapped its 18-year bowl appearance streak in 2024. After an uninspiring 1-2 start this fall, the program fired Mike Gundy, the winningest coach in school history, three games into his 21st season in charge.
It hasn’t gotten better since. After Saturday’s 14-6 loss to Kansas State, the Cowboys have been outscored 268-101 in seven games under interim coach Doug Meacham. They haven’t won a Big 12 game since the final week of the 2023 regular season, a drought of 723 days and counting.
Yet Oklahoma State fans haven’t folded. A reported crowd of 46,340 showed up for the Cowboys’ 18th straight FBS loss over the weekend, energized more by the organic movement that sprouted in the bleachers of Boone Pickens Stadium last month than anything on the field.
It started when one shirtless fan — an Oklahoma City-area banker named Trent Eaton — turned into hundreds waving T-shirts over their heads in the section of seats now known as “2 NO-SHIRTY 1” during a 39-17 loss to Houston. A week later, 100-plus students filled Section 124 wearing matching banana costumes; Pete’s Peelers became one of the few bright spots of a 32-point homecoming defeat when they formed a conga line as Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places,” one of Payne County’s most sacred anthems, blared from the stadium speakers.
The party in Section 231 raged on Saturday afternoon. The Peelers were back and received a visit from university president Jim Hess. Around them all, as the Cowboys rolled to their eighth loss in a row, were pockets of other costumed students, including a group of nearly a dozen women sporting Oklahoma State apparel and searing bright orange bobs.
“We decided we needed to create something for the girls,” said OSU student Lexsey McLemore, who picked out the wigs with a friend, Ava Smith, specifically for Saturday’s game.
Oklahoma State is far from the only major college football program “going through it” this fall. Preseason national title favorites such as Clemson, LSU and Penn State have stumbled. Across the country, there are properly irritated prestige fan bases at Auburn, Arkansas, Florida and Florida State. Gundy is one of 11 FBS coaches fired since the start of the 2025 regular season.
But in Stillwater, the home fans have responded with creativity, drawing delight and meaning from a series of moments made possible only by the woeful season unfolding in front of them.
“The morale is pretty low right now, obviously,” said Joel Sherman, a junior engineering student and one of the founding members of Pete’s Peelers. “But this season has given us the opportunity to do everything we’ve done. I think if Oklahoma State was actually in contention for the Big 12, we’re probably not doing this.”
“Not even if we were in the running to make a bowl game,” said fellow banana Tyler Blake, another costumed engineer.
THE MORNING OF Oct. 11 marked a historic sliding doors moment. If Eaton’s wife, Michelle, hadn’t answered the call, would a national movement have ever been reborn in Stillwater?
Eaton’s sister, Callista Bradford, is an Oklahoma State season-ticket holder. She also has a history of riling up fans in Stillwater. As a student, Bradford, 32, was part of the Paddle People, a student group that creates noise by smacking wooden paddles against the wall padding that surrounds the field at Boone Pickens Stadium.
Bradford initially planned to attend Oklahoma State’s Week 7 visit from Houston with her husband. When he backed out at the last minute, Bradford called Eaton with a late invite.
Eaton didn’t pick up. His wife, eventually, did, and Bradford picked Eaton up from his house 15 minutes later. The T-shirt he would later swing above his head in notoriety was waiting in the car.
“I was going to wear my orange, Whataburger, free giveaway T-shirt,” Eaton, a University of Miami grad, said. “But my brother-in-law told me that I couldn’t wear that, so [there was] an OSU shirt for me in the back seat.”
Bradford’s seats in the lower bowl of Boone Pickens Stadium are situated diagonally across from Section 231 in the stadium’s upper deck. From there, she and her brother watched Cowboys running back Rodney Fields Jr. turn a double pass into a 63-yard touchdown on the game’s opening possession, delivering the kind of jolt that has lately been all-too-rare at Oklahoma State.
But the Cowboys only mustered another three first downs before halftime. They trailed Houston 27-10 two minutes into the second half. With the program’s latest fall 2025 rout officially underway, Bradford and Eaton could see the home crowd beginning to file out of the stadium.
So Bradford pointed to an empty block of seats in Section 231, and offered up a sibling dare.
“We saw this completely empty section across from us,” Eaton recalled. “My sister goes, ‘I’ll give you 10 bucks if you go over there and take your shirt off.’ I said ‘Why not?’ The rest is history.”
It was a nervous walk to Section 231. Bradford recorded every step of her brother’s climb to the upper deck and made sure that the friends in the section around her paid attention, too.
When Eaton finally popped his shirt off and hoisted it above his head, Section 1 erupted.
“There was nothing to cheer for on the field at the time,” Bradford said. “So the people in the sections around us didn’t know why we were cheering. But slowly, everyone figured it out.”
Eaton wasn’t waving alone for very long before Luke Schneberger, an OSU student, approached him with a question: Could he join in? Soon, two became four, then six, then 10. After the stadium jumbotron flashed a shot of the expanding cluster of T-shirt-waving men, more fans raced over to join the party in Section 231, eventually overflowing into surrounding sections. In the final minutes of the game, a message flashed across the jumbotron: “New World Record (Probably) Most Shirtless Guys In A Section.”
“I thought maybe three or four people would join up and then one of us would get tired and leave and then would just die down,” Eaton said. “Waving that shirt gets really tiring.
“I think more than anything, people didn’t want to miss out on just having some fun. It was the biggest shirtless section of all time. So they were like, what the hell? Why not join it?”
📍Section 2-No Shirty-1, Stillwater, OK pic.twitter.com/k9FfAuUwfe
— Eli Lederman (@ByEliLederman) November 15, 2025
The television broadcast took notice. Social media did, too. Bradford’s phone started blowing up with texts from friends and family before Eaton got back to his original seat. Days later, a Texas-based apparel brand, “Uncle Bekah’s Inappropriate Trucker Hats,” dropped a line of Oklahoma State hats, including one featuring a silhouette of Eaton waving a T-shirt. He got some free merch.
Since then, fans on campuses including North Carolina, North Texas, UCLA, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest and Wisconsin have initiated their own shirtless sections. Another popped up at 3-7 Michigan State Saturday night. Eaton was particularly moved last weekend when a friend sent a clip of Hurricanes fans getting in on the act during a Week 11 win.
There’s dispute over the exact origins of the shirtless section craze. Indiana fans might have a rightful claim dating to an outburst during the Hoosiers’ 38-3 loss to Rutgers in Nov. 2021.
But in 2025, there’s no debate over where the movement reemerged.
“We’re a country school with a little bit of a rowdy side to it.” Bradford said. “Seeing our fans stay rowdy and loyal even though the team isn’t doing what we want them to do, I’m proud of that.”
DANIEL WANN IS a professor of psychology at Murray State. A devoted fan of Kentucky basketball who earned his PhD in social psychology at the University of Kansas, he has spent the past 35 years focused on the psychology of sports fandom.
Wann’s work has covered everything from superstitions to the consequences of excessive fandom to how different game start times affect fan’s moods. But his principle psychological curiosity lies in the simple question of why sports fans care so much and how fandom, above all else, meets many of our basic human needs. To Wann, Oklahoma State is a familiar case study.
“If you live on campus or in the town at Oklahoma State, by being a Cowboys fan, that’s going to help you meet the need to belong,” Wann said. “You don’t even need the team to be successful to be able to feel camaraderie and association with other fans regardless of the outcome. Fandom can still meet that need to belong. It also helps people meet the need for distinctiveness.”
In late September, weeks before Eaton peeled his shirt off in Section 231, Oklahoma State students Cy Barker, Hayden Andrews, Jake Goodman and Joel Sherman gathered in a house off-campus and debated that very concept, in a sense at least.
“We were sitting on a couch and one of us was like, ‘What’s something we could do for homecoming that would just be goofy?'” recalled Andrews, who studies aviation management.
Barker, Andrews, Goodman and Sherman belong to the same campus ministry and attend most Cowboys home games. They stormed the field together when Oklahoma State upset No. 9 Oklahoma in the final annual playing of the Bedlam Rivalry game in Nov. 2023. Since then, they’ve watched the program win just one of its past 18 games against conference opponents.
From their deliberations, overalls were deemed too expensive. Pajama onesies could get hot. Andrews had a banana suit from high school in his closet. Soon, the decision was settled.
The group pulled Tyler Blake, another ministry friend, in on the plan. And in the weeks leading up to Oklahoma State’s Oct. 18 homecoming visit from Cincinnati, they extended invites to members of six other campus ministries to join them.
“The vision was just kind of built around having a handful of dudes in banana suits at the game,” Goodman, a senior business student, said. “We didn’t plan on anything but that. Everything that followed just happened.”
On game day, the Peelers met on campus outside the Edmon Low Library. An initial group of just a few bananas quickly grew to 30 or so. Soon, there were nearly 100 of them. They marched to the stadium before kickoff alternating between church hymns and the Florida State “War Chant.” Like the shirtless fans seven days earlier, the banana-suited crew in Section 124 became the story as Oklahoma State tumbled to a 49-17 defeat.
Meanwhile, seven sections over and a stadium level up, Section 231 was bumping once again.
Eaton wasn’t on hand. But a collection of motivated fans enthusiastically took the baton, delivering a repeat performance of shirt-waving. At one point, that group included Oklahoma State women’s basketball coach Jacie Hoyt, who climbed into the upper deck wearing a T-shirt with the word “shirtless” written across the front. She had ordered it from Amazon that week.
“It was honestly the most fun I’ve had in years,” Hoyt told ESPN. “Those guys were just so fun and funny — truly loyal and true.”
Hoyt’s visit to the “2 NO-SHIRTY 1” crowd came just before halftime. Two hours later, the section became the site for a magical meeting of the minds.
As the Peelers’ conga snaked through the stands in the early minutes of the fourth quarter, their counterparts in the upper deck took notice. Soon, the Peelers themselves were being summoned to Section 231 while Oklahoma State’s shirtless devotees chanted a clear directive: “Take them off.”
Packed into Section 231, Pete’s Peelers, literally, peeled their costumes. Together, the two groups partied out the final minutes of the Cowboys’ second-worst conference loss of the season. “We had as much fun dressing up as bananas to watch a blowout as we did rushing the field when we beat Oklahoma,” Goodman said. “The score didn’t matter. We still had fun.”
FOR A MOMENT, the focus returns to the game. Down 7-6 with just under two minutes left in the third quarter, the Cowboys are driving deep into Kansas State territory. Not since Gundy’s final game, a 19-12 loss to Tulsa on Sept. 19, has Oklahoma State been this close to a win.
Section 231 is bursting with shirtless fans of all ages and, oddly, a fully clothed Batman. The Peelers are shouting below them.
Oklahoma State quarterback Zane Flores drops back to pass from the Wildcats’ 23-yard line. But tight end Carson Su’esu’e whiffs on a block and Kansas State defensive end Ryan Davis engulfs Flores to force a fumble. It’s one of three second-half turnovers within 25 yards of the end zone.
“Well, it’s over now,” says Blake, sliding the tip of his banana costume off his head.
Minutes later the Kool-Aid Man joins the Peelers. They sway together as Garth Brooks sings about friends in low places and chasing his blues away. They’ll be OK.
Like Pete’s Peelers, Eaton was back at Oklahoma State on Saturday for the first time since his October star turn. This time, he kept his shirt on (initially) and watched from the sideline.
Doug Meacham made sure of it.
Oklahoma State’s 60-year-old interim coach is an admirer of Eaton’s. Or at the very least, he’s a genuine appreciator of the juice those fans delivered this fall. “Our guys felt it,” Meacham said after the initial shirtless showing last month. “That was something.”
So Oklahoma State brought Bradford and Eaton back for Saturday’s game with sideline passes.
Meacham met them outside the stadium an hour before kickoff and personally escorted Eaton and Bradford onto the field, where they mingled with two legends of the 2011 Cowboys: Brandon Weeden and Justin Blackmon, the latter of whom joined the program’s ring of honor at halftime.
“I thought [Eaton] was some frat kid — it’s a 30-something-year-old. Hats off to him,” Meacham said of Eaton after Saturday’s loss. “I appreciated his enthusiasm and I wanted to reward them for getting the fans into it. You looked up today and they’re still up there getting after it. It’s pretty cool.”
Eaton and Bradford enjoyed their view from the sidelines. But a return to Boone Pickens Stadium called for a hero’s welcome. After halftime, Eaton climbed back to Section 231.
Despite a scoreless second half, the 2 NO-SHIRTY 1 vibes were high and the bleachers were packed. A child in the section recognized Eaton immediately and shouted his name, prompting a swarm of high-fives, fist bumps and photo requests from the group of shirtless shirt-wavers.
When Eaton finally got his own shirt off, he pulled out his phone for a selfie with the crowd around him. Later, a caption underneath the photo on a family text chain read: “My people.”
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Andrea Adelson
As the final seconds ticked off Ole Miss‘ come-from-behind 34-24 win over Florida, the fans inside Vaught Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi, started chanting, “We want Lane! We want Lane!”
Coach Lane Kiffin has long been rumored to be the top candidate for the Gators’ open head coaching job, making their matchup Saturday night somewhat awkward. Kiffin fielded questions about his coaching future during the week and again after the game, given the opponent across the sideline.
“I love what we’re doing here,” Kiffin said postgame when asked about his future at Ole Miss. “Today was awesome. To even talk about it right now would be so disrespectful to our players and how well they played today. We’ve got a lot of things going here. Doing really well, and I love it here.”
The win moved No. 7 Ole Miss to 10-1 heading into an open date before it closes the season at Mississippi State. A berth in the College Football Playoff is all but certain if the Rebels beat the Bulldogs in the Egg Bowl.
Though nobody at Ole Miss said its result against Florida last year would serve as a motivating factor, it is hard to ignore the fact that the Gators’ win over the Rebels kept them out of the playoff.
For a large chunk of Saturday night, it appeared Florida might do the same thing for a second straight season. In the first half, Ole Miss did not have an answer for Florida quarterback DJ Lagway, who threw for one touchdown and ran for another to give the Gators a 24-20 lead at halftime.
Ole Miss made one mistake after another in the red zone, costing itself valuable points. Twice the Rebels turned the ball over on downs after getting inside the 5-yard line, and on two other drives they had to settle for field goals inside the 10.
But the defense held Florida scoreless in the second half, and the offense made enough plays to pull out the win. Trinidad Chambliss threw for 301 yards with a touchdown and an interception, and Kewan Lacy had a career-high 224 rushing yards and three scores.
Kiffin, in his sixth season at Ole Miss, has led the Rebels to three straight 10-win seasons — the longest streak in program history. His four 10-win seasons over the past five years are more than the team had in the previous 50 seasons combined (three).
“I told our guys this week, as you get older everybody always says the good old days,” Kiffin said. “I said, ‘Hey guys, I think we’re in the good old days right now.’ I think for our fans, for our players, it’s this utopia of what’s going on, so enjoy it. Because these runs don’t happen very often anywhere.”
It’s easy to see why a program like Florida would be interested in Kiffin. Former coach Billy Napier, whom Florida fired last month, never won 10 games in a season during his tenure. Over the past 10 seasons, Florida has two 10-win seasons, both under former coach Dan Mullen in 2018 and 2019.
During the television broadcast, the camera panned to Florida fans in the crowd wearing orange and blue shirts that read, “Please Lane Come to Gainesville.”
After the game, Kiffin was pressed further on how he handles the speculation about Florida and what message he has to Ole Miss fans who might want clarity on his situation.
“I don’t think we were distracted; 538 yards today for an offense seems pretty focused,” Kiffin said. “We’ve been dealing with what people would say are distractions for weeks now. It’s different nowadays. I think kids think differently.
“They’re getting pre-portaled every Saturday night they play well. I just talk to them and say, ‘That’s part of the process. When you guys play really well, these things happen, your coach gets talked about,’ and it ain’t the first time or first year that it’s happened around here. I don’t think it’s a problem.”
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