Border wars dwindling under economic woes, college demands

The Oil Bowl, featuring top seniors from Oklahoma and Texas, enjoyed its 71st anniversary this summer. Jeffrey Haderthauer/Times Record News

The summer before his red-shirt freshman season at Texas Tech in 2004, prized quarterback recruit Graham Harrell took a week-long working vacation. Already ensconced in workouts on the Tech campus, Harrell left to prepare for and play in the Oil Bowl -- the annual all-star football grudge match between Oklahoma and Texas high school seniors. "When Texas plays Oklahoma in college, half the Sooners roster is from Texas and vice versa," says Harrell. "With the summer all-star games, it's purely a state rivalry."

This year marked the 71st edition of the border rivalry game between the two football-crazed states, but Texas and Oklahoma aren't alone in waging such battles. North and South Carolina have also been going at it for 71 years, Ohio and Pennsylvania for 51, Kansas and Missouri for 16, Montana and North Dakota for 15. Even Vermont and New Hampshire duke it out over bragging rights, squaring off every summer now for 55 years.

In their heyday, border rivalry games also pitted the likes of Georgia vs. Florida, Tennessee vs. Kentucky and Maryland vs. Virginia. In 1985, Deion Sanders was part of the Florida squad that lined up against Georgia. In 2001 Matt Leinart was the starting quarterback for the California team that lost 10-7 to Texas. But economic woes, sagging attendance as well as colleges wanting their prized recruits on campus earlier, and in one piece, has reduced the number of summer shootouts.

Ecomonic woes helped doom Georgia-Florida, its longtime major sponsor pulling financial backing in 2001. Georgia organizers tried to keep the game going by arranging to play in Tennessee's Neyland Stadium as part of a doubleheader that also featured Kentucky vs. Tennessee, but that lasted only one year and the game soon fell by the wayside.

More recently, Tennessee-Kentucky called it quits in 2007, squeezed out in a scheduling conflict with the Tennessee-Georgia all-star classic, traditionally played the week before, with some Tennessee athletes playing in both games.

Kentucky wanted so badly to continue that series that it offered a three-year, all-expenses paid deal to Tennessee, provided the game would continue to be played in June. When Tennessee rejected the offer, insisting that a December date was more to its liking, Kentucky tried to arrange a border rivalry game with neighboring Indiana and West Virginia. Unsuccessful, it eventually settled on restoring its own East-West intra-state all-star game.

But East-West, North-South and other intra-state games are a dime a dozen, with not nearly as much at stake. Border rivalry games, on the other hand, have a little more cachet to them, which is certainly why New York badgered New Jersey into a matchup over 10 years ago.

"They were hemming and hawing about playing New York," said Al Paturzo, a high school football coach in Staten Island and one of the game's co-founders. "But I pushed them for about a year to take the challenge."

New Jersey already had an intrastate North-South all-star game -- the state had also considered a matchup with its western rival, Pennsylvania -- and Boomer Esiason had started a game between New York City's and Long Island's best in New York. After talking to football people in both states -- including personnel from local colleges and both the Jets and Giants -- the states agreed to cross the Hudson.

The reasons for starting the game were many, from creating a spectator event for fans to giving seniors one last chance to play high school football, but the prime concern was providing more exposure for athletes coming out of the lightly-recruited Northeast. Though the state's top players garnered national attention from BCS schools around the country, mid-level players were often ignored.

"We did it to improve New York football, to get recognition for New York football," said Paturzo. "We're getting something like 19 Division I scholarships now, and Jersey gave out something like 37 Division I scholarships."

The Governor's Bowl, as the game was called, looked west to Pennsylvania and Ohio's Big 33 interstate game as a model, actively seeking advice from that game's organizers. Knowing the game would be a tougher sell in the crowded New York City sports market than in the football-obsessed Rust Belt, the Governor's Bowl announced itself with a glitzy introduction: alongside coaches from Rutgers and Syracuse, as well as representatives from the NFL, spokesman Phil Simms launched the game in the same Downtown Athletic Club room where the Heisman Trophy was awarded every year through 2000.