Bob Stoops woke up with a knot in his stomach, worried what the BCS had in store for his Oklahoma football team.
That Sunday-morning knot and the Big 12 South untied themselves at the same time yesterday. Stoops and his Sooners are bound for the Big 12 Conference championship game -- and maybe the BCS title game. That's leaving rival Texas with that nasty feeling inside.
Oklahoma edged out the Longhorns by 13-thousandths of a point for second place in the Bowl Championship Series standings yesterday.
How did they do it? Ask the computers. Oklahoma ended up winning by three scores on Saturday against Oklahoma State, which means a touchdown like this one to Jermaine Gresham may have made put them over the hump:
(See more clips from OU/OSU here.)
That means the Sooners will face No. 19 Missouri for a chance at their third straight conference title -- and most likely a shot at the national championship if they win.
But after the craziness that the last week brought, Stoops isn't comfortable even believing that.
A three-way Big 12 South tie had to be broken to determine whether Oklahoma, Texas or Texas Tech would represent the division in the conference title game. It all came down to a fifth tiebreaker: the BCS. Oklahoma finished a single point ahead of Texas in the USA Today coaches' poll and six points behind the Longhorns in the Harris Poll. That left it to the computer ratings, and the Sooners came out on top in four of the six.
As it turned out, the only element of the BCS system that couldn't be swayed by the campaigning made all the difference.
