COLLEGE FOOTBALL : ORANGE, SUGAR, COTTON BOWLS : Sooners Are Big Winners in Miami, 42-8 : But the Opponent This Time Is an Outmanned Arkansas

Two Arkansas football players, Kevin Hunt and Mike Porter, rented a sailboat at their Miami Beach hotel the other day for an after-practice sail.

A strong wind came up, capsizing the inexperienced mariners, who were unable to right their craft. As they hung on to their upside-down boat, yelling for help, it drifted out four miles into the Atlantic Ocean.

Four hours later, they were rescued and towed back to the beach by two Cuban-American fishermen. They laughed and made wisecracks about almost drifting to Cuba.

The way things turned out Thursday night, Cuba could have been the prefered destination for Arkansas’ football team. The Razorbacks, 18-point underdogs, weren’t nearly that good. They were dominated by Oklahoma’s prodigious defense and crushed, 42-8.

So suffocating was Oklahoma’s defense that the Sooners came withing 19 seconds of their sixth shutout of the season and the first in the Orange Bowl game in 24 years.

Even Barry Switzer, the Oklahoma coach, seemed in awe of his defense. Arkansas had been intercepted only twice during its 9-2 season, but Switzer’s team intercepted Arkansas five times and recovered two fumbles Thursday night.

Offensively, Oklahoma quarterback Jamelle Holieway (“Maybe the best I’ve ever had,” according to Switzer) started slowly, first taking little bites out of Arkansas’ undermanned defense. But then he turned loose his big sprinter, Spencer Tillman. Tillman broke Arkansas’ back with two touchdowns on long plays in the first half. He finished with 109 yards.

In the end, the way Switzer saw it, an old score was settled, an old ulcer healed. In 1978, Oklahoma had a chance to win a national championship in the Orange Bowl as a huge favorite over a Lou Holtz-coached Arkansas team, but Oklahoma was humiliated, 31-6.

“Yeah, this was important to me, as important as any we’ve ever played,” Switzer said Thursday night. “That 1978 loss was the most embarrassing defeat of my career. Yeah, I talked about that game to the team tonight.”

Miamians smelled this one coming. The crowd was 57,291, well below the 73,000 capacity. The exits started filling midway through the third quarter, when Oklahoma had made it 28-0.

What a difference a few months make. On Sept. 27 here, Oklahoma was beaten, 28-16, by the Miami Hurricanes, with help from an enthusiastic crowd. That loss was the only stain on a second straight 11-1 Sooner season.

“The crowd got into the game, and our kicking game fell apart, that’s why we lost to Miami here,” Switzer said. “Would we have beaten them tonight? I don’t know.”

Switzer’s players, including Holieway and 280-pound guard Mark Hutson, talked bravely of a different result had the Hurricanes been the opponent Thursday night.

“I would love it,” Hutson said. “This was sweet, winning big tonight, but I’d have rather had another chance at Miami.”

Holieway: “If we’d played like this against Miami, we’d have beaten them.”

Unable to claim No. 1 overall, Switzer applied for No. 1 in defense.

“We are the best defensive team in college football,” he said. “Tonight, our defense was too quick and too fast to allow them to get in scoring position. And we dominated them in the second half--we had them going backward on four series in the second half.”

Defensively, linebacker Dante Jones was the leader with nine tackles. He substituted for a player of whom you may have heard, Brian Bosworth--declared ineligible after testing positive for steroids on the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. drug test.

“Dante Jones filled in for a great football player tonight and did a great job because he’s a great player himself,” Switzer said, adding that Jones is only one of many underclassmen returning next year.

“We’re going to be good next year,” he said.

One who doesn’t return, Tillman, went out like a comet. By the third play of the second quarter, Arkansas had stopped Oklahoma twice and didn’t look anything like a team about to blow up.

From his 23, Holieway moved right and made an acrobatic pitch to Tillman on a second-and-six play and took it 77 yards down the Oklahoma sideline for the first touchdown.

The Arkansas coach, Ken Hatfield, seemed to be in a daze. His team finished 9-3.

“I thought at the end of our regular season that our team could play with anyone in the country,” he said. “I don’t know. . . . I guess the long layoff hurt us.

“We didn’t challenge them, didn’t force them to throw. They have a great, great defense.”

Arkansas entered the game having had passes intercepted only twice all season and had lost only 11 fumbles, but the Sooners picked off five passes and recovered two fumbles.

Eventually, Oklahoma turned it into a rout. Less than 5,000 were around at the end, and you had to agree with the guy who tacked up the sign that read: “I’d SOONER Be In Chicken Creek, Okla.”