Sooners spread out the wrath

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 “Ruf/Neks” were formed here almost a century ago and their many duties now include cleaning up after “Boomer” and “Sooner,” the ponies that pull the school’s famous schooner during football games.

The Ruf/Neks think the probation is a load of you-know-what.

They want to know why Oklahoma was forced to vacate all eight wins from its 2005 season while No. 1 USC continues to play on without paying pipers.

Oklahoma self-reported its violations, punished itself, and yet the NCAA still descended.

Elsewhere, allegations swirl that USC may have defeated Oklahoma to win the 2004 national title while using an ineligible player, Reggie Bush.

“And we get our wins erased?” Justin Myers, a 21-year-old marketing major, asked. “I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, it’s just not the proper allocation of rules and regulations.”

Cody Busch, 19, who wants to be a sports agent, leans more toward grassy knoll scenarios.

“What would they do without USC?” Busch wondered. “They’re too important to the success of college football. It’s suspicious USC doesn’t get anything.”

Colin Huff, 20, majoring in finance, spoke up from Myers’ left.

“They’re like America’s Team,” Huff huffed of USC.

Fair to say this is a ticked-off team and a ticked-off town, and that might not be good news today for incoming Miami or anyone else standing in the Sooners’ way this season.

North Texas bellied-up 79 points and nearly 700 total yards here last weekend and was lucky it wasn’t 100 points and 1,000 yards.

Oklahoma appears a team with a chance to go. . .

“Undefeated,” former Sooners coach Barry Switzer said from his office chair in the home he built five years ago on a corner lot not far from campus.

Oklahoma’s rough patch started in 2006 training camp, when Coach Bob Stoops dismissed starting quarterback Rhett Bomar and guard J.D. Quinn after it was learned the players had been paid for work not performed at a local car dealership.

That bit of distraction was followed by a September trip to Oregon in which Oklahoma was -- by all credible accounts -- robbed of victory by a Pacific 10 Conference officiating crew that was subsequently suspended for its performance.

Oklahoma would somehow rally to win nine consecutive games and the Big 12 Conference title despite playing seven games without star tailback Adrian Peterson, who broke his collarbone Oct. 14 at the end of a 53-yard touchdown run against Iowa State.

Then came the Fiesta Bowl, and that dramatic overtime loss to Boise State, and that Boise State tailback proposing to his girlfriend, and Oklahoma forever becoming the black mustache in this villainous backdrop.

“It’s going to make a great movie,” Ruf/Nek Myers said, “but I’m not watching it.”

Another Ruf/Nek described the post-Fiesta Bowl scene back on campus:

“People would not talk,” Busch said. “It was like someone died.”

In July, just as Oklahoma learned how to master remote-control jumps over Fiesta Bowl highlights on ESPN, the NCAA dropped the “failure to monitor” bomb stemming from the car dealership scandal.

The school was ordered to vacate eight wins from 2005, expunging the record from history books while dropping Stoops’ career win total from 86 to 78.

The school would lose two scholarships for 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.

The sanctions were major, meant to send a message, but seemingly not contention-damaging.

“They didn’t do anything to Oklahoma to keep them from winning,” said Switzer, whose Oklahoma program drew far more punitive NCAA damages two decades ago.

Still, the school’s reputation was further impugned after years of image restoration led by Athletic Director Joe Castiglione.

Do fair-minded people believe the program came clean?

“There are those who don’t and those who do,” Stoops said this week. “So in the end we can’t worry about it.”

The school is appealing the sanctions, with one official saying final resolution might not come until December. Now in his ninth year at Oklahoma, Stoops is pushing the program forward. He has been hyper-competitive almost from the crib, so it’s hard to imagine there being more hitch in Stoops’ step -- but there is.

“There really isn’t anything to hinder us now,” Stoops said between whistle blows at the end of Monday’s practice. “To me, the distraction was last year.”

Stoops rescued a sanctions-sullied program and brought home Oklahoma’s seventh national title in 2000. But last season may have been his best coaching job.

After the Oregon fiasco, he called his team together and said it had a decision to make.

“I told them, ‘If you want your excuse,’ it’s there,” Stoops said.

He gave the same speech three weeks later after Peterson was lost to injury. Stoops asked his Sooners whether this was where they wanted to call it quits. His players all shook their heads no.

“Most teams would fall down from that,” Allen Patrick, the tailback who replaced Peterson in the lineup, said of the distractions.

Junior receiver Malcolm Kelly said one message is ingrained in Oklahoma players from the start.

“[Stoops] always says this university is bigger than him, bigger than us, bigger than any starter,” Kelly said.

The coach said the program had no time to wallow after any of last season’s downturns, including the Fiesta Bowl.

“The Boise deal isn’t a deal to me,” Stoops said. “The Big 12 championship trophy is still in there. And it isn’t going away. In the end, you lost in a tight, wild game. What were we going to gain this year from it?”

Stoops was surprised the NCAA acted independently on top of Oklahoma’s self-imposed sanctions but is comfortable with his role in the affair.

“You don’t follow your teenage kids around at night do you?” Stoops said. “No one does because there’s a level of trust there. Eventually, if there’s a problem, you find out about it and you deal with it.”

Stoops offered no public opinion regarding the Bush investigation at USC, stalled in large part by NCAA’s lack of subpoena power and the unwillingness of potential witnesses to cooperate.

Others, of course, are free to speak their minds.

Switzer called USC and Notre Dame the “sacred cows” of college football programs while, in terms of NCAA scrutiny, “Oklahoma’s been their whipping boy.” Switzer said the alleged problems at USC are no more the fault of Trojans Coach Pete Carroll than Stoops is to blame for Oklahoma’s monitoring woes.

“They got alumni out there doing things for their kids too, just like it happens here,” Switzer said.

Switzer says the NCAA’s order for Oklahoma to vacate wins is laughable, and would say the same if USC was forced to relinquish the 2004 national title it claimed with a 55-19 victory against Oklahoma.

“I still know who won the game and who’s the best team,” Switzer said. “And Stoops knows too. That don’t change history. I don’t think they want the trophy.”

If the NCAA really wanted to punish Oklahoma, Switzer said, it could have ordered the kind of scholarship strip that devastated Miami and Alabama in the 1990s.

Oklahoma appears to have enough gas left to unleash wrath for many seasons. Next comes today’s long-time-no-see game against Miami that rekindles 20-year-old memories of high-caliber execution, excitement and expletives.

The schools played three consecutive years starting in 1985.

“We were the two best teams,” Switzer said. “But they were better than us. We were 33-0 against everybody else in that time span. We were 0-3 against them.”

Miami is not the Miami of then, in full re-tooling mode after a 7-6 season that led to the firing of Larry Coker and the promotion of assistant coach Randy Shannon.

Want another conspiracy theory?

Paul Dee, Miami’s athletic director, served as chairman on the NCAA Committee on Infractions that handed out sanctions against Oklahoma.

It might not mean much to most.

But the Ruf/Neks may want to know.

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chris.dufresne@latimes.com