NORMAN — Back in the fall of 1959, word made its way from the United States Military Academy to the United States House of Representatives that Army was planning to de-emphasize football.
Edward Hebert, longtime representative from Louisiana and member of the House Armed Services Committee, was incensed.
"Unless the army's attitude in the athletic arena is changed," he told a reporter from The Associated Press, "it will find itself standing on the side of the road."
While Army was then one of the blue bloods of college football, neither Hebert nor anyone else knew the monolith that college football was going to become.