University Of Oklahoma

Just beyond the stately brick buildings and the graceful elm trees at the University of Oklahoma, the boys were draining a bottle of liquor called "Hot Damn" -- and more. At the Sigma Chi fraternity house, the night wasn't much different than many others, until Blake Hammontree died. Hammontree, 19, was found the morning of Sept. 30 with a blood-alcohol level of 0.42, suggesting, investigators said, that he had consumed more than 15 shots within two hours.

Football and fate become fickle and fantastic when you can suggest Boise State needs to offer Oklahoma trick plays this week to help the Sooners defeat Oklahoma State. How about the "Statue of Stillwater," a variation of a play Boise State once used to win a Fiesta Bowl? Maybe Ian Johnson could fly to Norman this week and make another proposal. There has to be something left in Boise's bag of miracles that might help Oklahoma. Sometimes, in college football, your interests change.

The University of Oklahoma football program, which has won six national championships, was handed a 3-year probation Monday for repeated recruiting violations that National Collegiate Athletic Assn. officials said the school should have controlled.

Blake Griffin had just made the play of the game, and perhaps this NCAA tournament, an extraterrestrial -- he reached into the heavens -- one-handed dunk of an Austin Johnson lob pass. But Ty Lawson countered in less than eight seconds, slicing through the defense for a runner in the lane. That second-half sequence was Sunday's NCAA South Regional final in a capsule: The brilliance of Oklahoma's Griffin against the precision of North Carolina's Tar Heels.

Oklahoma parole board members promised prosecutors Wednesday they would not parole Nigel Clay, one of two former University of Oklahoma football players convicted of raping a woman at an athletic dorm in 1989.

Drinking will be banned at University of Oklahoma fraternities and residence halls under a policy announced in Norman, two months after a 19-year-old student died of alcohol poisoning. University of Oklahoma President David Boren said the rules would go into effect Jan. 18 at the start of the new semester. Three violations will end in a student's suspension for a semester.

William E. Lambert, the University of Oklahoma booster who was banned from associating with the school's football program in the wake of a 3-year NCAA probation, served time in federal prison for possessing stolen stock certificates, The Daily Oklahoman reported.

The two high-powered offenses fizzled and the two Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks combined to throw four interceptions. The track meet that was anticipated and all but promised was halted by punts, penalties, injuries, sometimes clueless officiating and the usual buzz killer -- television timeouts. Fifty years after the Baltimore Colts versus the New York Giants, this was hardly the greatest game ever played.

Start with the grass stains. He left the field wearing the most splendid of grass stains, long swaths of green stretching over his shoulders, across his chest, down his back, the badge of a linebacker. Now check out the number. He is No. 15, but his jersey was tugged and twisted so much, sometimes it looked as if he were No. 11, sometimes 17, the wrinkles of a lineman. Finish with the face.

NORMAN, Okla. -- Three members of the spirit group known as "Ruf/Neks" agreed to meet for Labor Day lunch at a restaurant not far from the Big Red Sports/Imports car dealership that fuel-injected Oklahoma football toward its sixth major NCAA probation. One wore a T-shirt that read "We Only Came Here to Drink and Beat Texas."

The rich tradition of Oklahoma football now includes one of the most punishing losses in the history of the college game. The Sooners lost an entire season of wins. When the NCAA announced Wednesday that it was vacating all of Oklahoma's wins from the 2005 season because three players accepted improper payments from a car dealer, the hallowed program took a historically uncommon hit. The Sooners' 8-4 season becomes 0-4. A come-from-behind win over Oregon in the Holiday Bowl? Never happened.

Crazy, zany and loony are three apt words to describe the end of Monday night's Fiesta Bowl at the University of Phoenix Stadium. You thought it would never end, but it did, with one of the most gutsy calls and remarkable plays in the history of college football. Ian Johnson scored the game-winning, two-point conversion run to lift Boise State to a 43-42 overtime victory over Oklahoma.

Those who figured that the Big 12 Conference title game rated on the national significance scale somewhere below USC-UCLA, Army-Navy and the canasta game at your local rotary club were proven correct. But only because of that instant-replay official who may supplant Texas Coach Mack Brown as the most hated man in Oklahoma. It was the official, remember, who cost the Sooners a victory over Oregon in September when he botched the ruling on an onside kick.

Roy Williams took one look at Courtney Paris and reached for the phone. The North Carolina men's basketball coach had just seen the then-freshman leader of the Oklahoma women's team chew up another overmatched opponent and wanted to tell her coach that he was envious. "He left me a voice mail after he'd seen us play on television," Oklahoma Coach Sherri Coale says, laughing as she recalls the message left on her phone last December. "He said, 'You are lucky, my friend.

A joyous occasion quickly turned bleak for Adrian Peterson of Oklahoma when he suffered a broken collarbone on a dive into the end zone Saturday in a 34-9 victory over Iowa State at Norman, Okla. Peterson, a junior, was having a spectacular game in front of his father, who recently was released from prison and was watching his son play football in person for the first time since before Adrian was in high school.