Monday, May 4, 1998

Be patient - Switzer will get hall call

By Kevin B. Blackistone

The Dallas Morning News

(KRT)

DALLAS - This is an order for the legions of Barry Switzer fans - including those living in greater Dallas under assumed allegiances - who have grabbed their torches and clubs for a march to the College Football Hall of Fame, just outside Notre Dame:

Cease and desist.

No doubt it looked as if the king of Sooners' football coaches last month continued to get the royal shaft from those who operate his game's shrine. Switzer, who left Oklahoma in 1989, still isn't in the hall. Yet, the hall's guardians waived their rule that an inductee must be retired from football for at least three years and immediately elected Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne, the decades-long Oklahoma nemesis who stepped down in January.

"I've gotten about 80 e-mails from people," said Rick Walls, an official for the National Football Foundation, which runs the College Football Hall of Fame. "Many said they couldn't understand why Barry isn't already in the hall."

They also said some other things a little more pointedly. The kinds of things people south of the Red River said about Switzer after he started running - I said RUNNING, not RUINING - their favorite NFL team a few campaigns. Switzer even made an utterance or two over the years about his being left out.

Whether you're a Cowboys' fan - Dallas or Oklahoma State - or even a Longhorns' fan, you'd be hard-pressed to present an argument against Switzer being in the college football hall. His resume from OU is overwhelming.

He compiled a record of 157-29-4 in Norman, Okla., from 1973, when he took over from Chuck Fairbanks, to 1989, when he was forced to resign. That's a winning percentage of .837, the fourth best in college history.

His teams won three national titles, including two back-to-back. Switzer's Sooners took a dozen Big Eight crowns and won eight of 13 bowl games. They once won 28 consecutive games and went 37 games without a loss.

Few college coaches were ever more successful than Switzer, but Switzer isn't among the 133 honored in the hall. This apparent slight, however, was explained.

The hall has another rule that requires nominees be retired from pro football for at least three years, too. Switzer was first eligible to be on the ballot in 1993, which he was. The next year, Jerry Jones hired him to replace Jimmy Johnson, making Switzer ineligible, again.

Switzer left Valley Ranch for good earlier this year, which means the next college hall ballot he can wind up on is 2001.

That may not assuage the ire of Sooners' fans who don't understand why Switzer wasn't voted in his first go around in 1993, when former coaches Bobby Dodd and Bo Schembechler won approval. Switzer was even on the 1994 ballot, but lost out to Vince Dooley and longtime black college football coach John Merritt.

"We know it's important to people in Oklahoma," Walls said. "It's important to Barry. It's important to the hall."

It just hasn't happened yet.

Switzer, of course, is not without his enemies for whatever reasons, and not just because they might be from Texas or worship the Cowboys. Switzer is brash at best, or abrasive at worst. He's rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. This is the coach who started a black quarterback when the idea was still pretty much verboten in football, college or pro.

He also left the place he became famous because it had, under his watch, become infamous. There were guns and drugs and all other signs that his was a program out of control. He didn't leave Norman with the dignity Osborne departed Lincoln, Neb., despite Osborne's end-of-career struggles with reckless athletes like Lawrence Phillips and Christian Peter.

One criterion for gaining coronation to the hall is that one's post-football record as a citizen be as stellar as one's football record. Switzer did get busted toting a gun through airport security. He admitted the indiscretion and paid a price, the heaviest from a suddenly image-conscious boss.

That certainly doesn't measure up to the severity of what the hall's honors committee had in mind when it stated that off-the-field behavior be weighed. And, Switzer wouldn't be the lone honoree in the hall who make sailors say, "So and so cusses like a football coach."

The bottom line is that Barry Switzer should be in the hall. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Walls said that the only thing stopping Switzer from induction now - if indeed he is retired - is re-nomination by any of the foundation's 10,000 dues-paying members, of which I am one.

Therefore, with the power entrusted in me as a card-carrying member of the National Football Foundation's Lone Star chapter, I hereby call once more for the nomination of Barry Switzer to the College Football Hall of Fame.

Is everybody happy now?

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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