In Matt Brown's book What If? A Closer Look At College Football's Great Questions, one of the chapters is entitled "What if Maryland kept Bear Bryant?" At the end of World War II, Bryant landed a job as a 32-year-old head coach for the Terrapins. He referred to the year he spent there as his "upchucking days" due to his habit of throwing up before games. He departed after that year for Kentucky, to be replaced by Clark Shaughnessy, who left after a single season himself. While Shaughnessy was at Maryland, halfway across the country OU hired a fellow named Jim Tatum. Supposedly one of the conditions of Tatum's hiring was that he bring his assistant, Bud Wilkinson, with him.
Tatum was kind of a Mike Leach-type, brilliant and innovative, a great recruiter--9 players out of his only class became All-Americans--and a head coach who won Oklahoma's first bowl game by drubbing North Carolina State, and crushed Oklahoma A&M 73-12, an especially sweet victory since the pre-OSU Aggies had beaten the Sooners twice in a row. But, like Leach, Tatum was also outspoken enough to sour his relations with the administration, and after only one season, when Maryland made an offer, Tatum left for the east coast.
In the book Brown concludes, "My guess, if Tatum didn't have a job offer at Maryland, he'd stick around at Oklahoma for a few more years before more or less getting chased out of town, no matter how many games he won . . . Meanwhile, Wilkinson would head elsewhere, and the Oklahoma dynasty of the 1950s would have never launched."
Thought that might be interesting to some of you.
Special thanks to @gabbo34 for posting the excellent The Voice of College Football video on the Big 18 thread (where I learned of the What If? book).
Tatum was kind of a Mike Leach-type, brilliant and innovative, a great recruiter--9 players out of his only class became All-Americans--and a head coach who won Oklahoma's first bowl game by drubbing North Carolina State, and crushed Oklahoma A&M 73-12, an especially sweet victory since the pre-OSU Aggies had beaten the Sooners twice in a row. But, like Leach, Tatum was also outspoken enough to sour his relations with the administration, and after only one season, when Maryland made an offer, Tatum left for the east coast.
In the book Brown concludes, "My guess, if Tatum didn't have a job offer at Maryland, he'd stick around at Oklahoma for a few more years before more or less getting chased out of town, no matter how many games he won . . . Meanwhile, Wilkinson would head elsewhere, and the Oklahoma dynasty of the 1950s would have never launched."
Thought that might be interesting to some of you.
Special thanks to @gabbo34 for posting the excellent The Voice of College Football video on the Big 18 thread (where I learned of the What If? book).
