Seasons I still can’t believe actually happened: Barry Sanders in ‘88

Back in the glorious decade of the 80’s, my friends and I played a computer game by Epyx called “Summer Games.” There’s a clip of the actual game below, but before you start laughing hysterically while watching it, keep in mind it was the friggin’ 80’s.  Back then, this damn thing might as well have been “Halo”:

If you skip to the 1:30 mark of the video, you’ll see the 100 meter dash portion of the game.  It was painful watching that pixelated guy take upwards of 11 or 12 seconds to finish the race when I knew good and well Carl Lewis could do it in 10.

So I devoted an inordinate amount of time to getting this bastard to move faster.  Oh yes, this is what passed for an actual, honest to goodness goal during my wasted youth.  Practice my jump shot?  Get better at math?  Help the elderly?  Nah, those pursuits were of no interest to me, I was much more concerned with doing better at a crappy video game.

After much trial and error, I figured out that I could (try to follow this) bend my knees, force the joystick snugly between the calf and thigh of my left leg (with the stick pointed at my other leg) and then use a rapid up and down motion with my right hand to make the guy run faster…MUCH faster.  If my mom had walked in, she would have thought I had a masturbation problem, but that was still at least two years down the road.

My somewhat vulgar but effective method yielded a 7.37 time (yes, I remember it to the tenth of a second) that the game saved as a world record.  When my friends saw that number on the screen they stared in amazement.  You know that look of awe the nerds had when they saw Molly Ringwald’s underwear in “Sixteen Candles?”  That’s the same reaction that a 7.37 in “Summer Games” generated.

I bring that story up because it’s the only frame of reference I have for the numbers Barry Sanders put up at Oklahoma State in 1988, the year he won the Heisman.  Whenever I come across them in print I get a slack jawed look of wonder.

That season, if you count the bowl game, Sanders ran for 2,850 yards.  TWO THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY YARDS.  He had nearly as many games of 300+ rushing yards (4) as he had games in which he ran for between 150 and 200 yards (5).  The guy gained 1,152 yards in OSU’s last five regular season games alone.

His regular season total of 2,628 yards came in the old days when the only way you got a 12th game on your schedule was to get into the Kickoff Classic in the Meadowlands or play a road game against Hawaii.  Yup, Barry blew it up against the old fashioned 11-game schedule. What he could have done with an extra game or two, as players get these days…

This was the old Big 8, before Bill McCartney got Colorado’s house in order and Nebraska and Oklahoma shared dominion over the league.  Against the Huskers on October 15, Sanders put up 189 yards and 4 scores.  Three weeks later he ran for 215 yards and 2 touchdowns against the Sooners.

Oklahoma State lost both of those contests (their only losses that season), but Sanders sent a message to the league’s power duo.  Not since Gale Sayers had an opposing player in the Big 8’s little six bombarded the Huskers and Sooners that way.

I’ve basically only touched on the yardage to this point, but the number of times Sanders found the end zone was just as impressive.  He broke the single season TD record of 31 in OSU’s ninth game.  He would push that record to 37 once the dust had settled.

Then came five more touchdowns in Oklahoma State’s Holiday Bowl win over a hopelessly outmatched Wyoming team. That’s a total of 42 touchdowns that season.  FORTY FRIGGIN’ TWO.  At this moment, if you don’t look as if you’ve just seen Molly Ringwald’s underwear, then you’re not much of a college football fan.

Here’s Rick Reilly singing Sanders’s praises in October of that year, before most of America realized how special the guy was (that would be Sanders, not Reilly).  You’ll notice in his writing that Reilly hadn’t fully committed to the general douchebaggery that’s come to dominate his persona.

The reference I made to my goofy “Summer Games” obsession is relevant not just because of the impressive nature of the numbers, but also for how unattainable they are.  Back then I taught everyone my pseudo-masturbatory 100-meter method, but try as they might, they couldn’t match that 7.37.  Oh, there were some low 8’s and such generated by others, but they couldn’t quite get to the promised land.

It’s been two plus decades since Sanders ran wild across the heartland, but nobody’s really come close to matching his production.  In the pantheon of sports records, 2,850 yards rushing in a college football season is looking as unbreakable as Rickey Henderson’s 1,406 career stolen bases or Latrell Sprewell’s track record of knuckleheadedness.

Plays I still can’t believe actually happened: Miracle at the Meadowlands

Plays I still can’t believe actually happened: Matt Davison in ‘97