The Time Pat Jones Literally Pulled The Plug On a Barry Sanders Interview

These looks back Oklahoma State has been doing of historically great games are totally fantastic. I’m all the way in on them. We’ve seen Josh Fields and Rashaun Woods break down Bedlam 2002, Clint Chelf break down the 2013 Baylor game and now Pat Jones and Mike Gundy on the Texas Tech game in Tokyo from 1988.

Jones reflects on what a weird experience it was as Barry Sanders was up for the Heisman which was being presented while he was in Tokyo for the Tech game. Because of the time difference, Barry had to get up basically in the middle of the night to see if he would win an award he probably didn’t care all that much about.

The problem was that (I believe) the game was later on that morning. Jones noted that they had to go eat their pregame breakfast and then play. So there was to be no dawdling even though nobody was awake yet in Tokyo. This story is Jones’ wheelhouse.

“[They told us], ‘Y’all have to come to downtown Tokyo at 5 in the morning [for the Heisman presentation],'” said Jones. “We had to get down there or there would have been another international incident of which I was a participant in several.

“I’m listening in my ear [after he won], and I think it’s over with. I hear Bob Costas say ‘we’ll be back in just a minute and we’ll do a lengthy interview with Barry Sanders.’ He cuts off and we have to get back [to go play the football game]. I just reach down and there’s a bunch of plugs in the wall. I just reach down and unplug them all. The place kind of went dark. I said, ‘come on, Sanders, let’s go.'”

Spectacular. The whole video is spectacular actually. The story starts at around 1:10. Also, here’s a story from 30 years ago about how pumped OSU was to get $100,000 (plus expenses) to go play that game. Seriously, $100K! That’s like a third of our wide receiver’s coach’s salary in 2016.