Vance Mueller felt reasonably certain of at least two things when an injury cut short his senior season of high school football, ended his dream of a major college scholarship and led him to enroll at brainy Occidental College:
He would never play in a college game that was televised.
The NFL would never find him.
He was wrong on both counts.
Twenty-five years ago this week, with NFL players out on strike and Sunday air time to fill, CBS televised an Occidental football game to 60% of the nation, an event so once-in-a-lifetime rare that even the school president allowed a Tiger paw to be painted on his face to mark the occasion and Oxy's usually indifferent-to-football student body tore down the goal posts at game's end.
Mueller, a freshman tailback, took advantage of the extraordinary opportunity by scoring three touchdowns and accounting for 139 yards rushing and receiving in the Tigers' 34-20 victory over San Diego, his first step toward an NFL career.
"Sometimes, you have a dream to grow up and go to a college like Notre Dame or Michigan," says the former Los Angeles Raider, a 43-year-old fitness-club owner and father of three living in El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento. "Other times you take a different turn and you go someplace you absolutely had no intention of going and it turns out to be the best thing ever, which turned out to be my scenario.
"I talk to kids and I tell them that Oxy was the last place on Earth I ever envisioned going, and it turned out to be the best place for me. I think sometimes you just have to be open to going where the adventure takes you."
Alighting at Oxy, which has an enrollment of about 1,600 students, was serendipitous indeed for Mueller, who planned to play linebacker at Oklahoma for Barry Switzer before suffering a shoulder injury.
Only a few weeks into Mueller's freshman season, CBS announced that it would regionally televise four NCAA Division III games, including Oxy-San Diego, on Oct. 3, 1982. A plan to allow major college teams to move games to Sundays during the NFL strike was blocked by Turner Broadcasting System.
Regular NFL announcers Dick Stockton and Hank Stram were dispatched by CBS to work the Oxy-San Diego game, Stram showing up at Occidental's Patterson Field in a limousine. Working with an NFL production crew, Stockton and Stram called the game from a makeshift press box built for the occasion.
