Editor’s note: This is the third of a six-part series examining some of the most iconic plays in the Nebraska-Oklahoma rivalry before the Huskers and Sooners meet Saturday in Norman.
LINCOLN, Neb. — Mike Stuntz in 2001 held a distinction as the first freshman skill player on offense at Nebraska in four years to bypass a redshirt season. And for eight games, the decision to play him looked inconsequential.
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A high school quarterback at Council Bluffs (Iowa) St. Albert, Stuntz moved to split end in his first weeks with the Huskers and played on special teams. He touched the ball once, early in a blowout win against Rice, fumbling a lateral from quarterback Eric Crouch. Stuntz recovered it and gained 25 yards.
So at the open of preparations for No. 1-ranked Oklahoma in late October, when Nebraska coach Frank Solich unveiled plans for a daring trick play that featured the 6-foot-1, 185-pound Stuntz, the reaction from teammates was, well, somewhat mixed.
“I believe there was a little bit of skepticism,” Stuntz said, “particularly from our soon-to-be Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback.”
The beauty of Solich’s razzle dazzle was in the element of surprise. Who would expect Stuntz to get tapped to deliver his first career pass in a crucial spot for the second-ranked Huskers against their chief rival, reawakened as the defending national champion under third-year coach Bob Stoops?
The Sooners hardly knew of Stuntz and likely had no idea, Nebraska coaches figured, that he was left-handed and possessed the temperament at age 18 to execute one of the most significant plays in Oklahoma-Nebraska history.
“He was a cool cat,” said Ron Brown, a 24-year veteran of the Nebraska coaching staff who directed the wide receivers in 2001. “There’s no doubt about it. He had ice water in his veins, and he was just kind of a low-key guy.”
The right guy for the right moment.
The Black 41 Flash Reverse pass was the dagger that beat Oklahoma on Oct. 27, 2001. Nebraska’s 20-10 win at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln snapped the Sooners’ 20-game winning streak and pushed the Huskers to 9-0 and the top of the Bowl Championship Series rankings at the open of November.
Crouch, the fifth-year senior from Omaha who a month later won the Huskers’ third Heisman in a tight vote over quarterbacks Rex Grossman of Florida, Ken Dorsey of Miami and Joey Harrington of Oregon, played the other featured role in the play — a striking contrast to Stuntz.
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“Looking back,” Crouch said, “Mike was the perfect player for that scenario.”
The decisive possession started with Nebraska up by a field goal with 8:54 remaining. Oklahoma stuffed Crouch for a loss on a third-and-2 option play from the Huskers’ 31, but defensive end Cory Heinecke was flagged for a facemask to extend the drive. As Stoops protested the penalty from OU’s west sideline, in came the call from Solich.
“I don’t know how confident anyone felt,” said reserve wide receiver John Klem, whose play in earlier moments helped set the stage for the reverse pass to succeed. “It was like, ‘Huh? We’re doing it.’”
Crouch took a moment to digest what he heard in the huddle.
“Honestly, I probably thought, ‘This guy’s crazy. Why would this play work?” Crouch said. “But I have to hand it to (Solich) for having the guts to do it.”
Solich, in his fourth season, had come under heat for not yet winning a national championship, as predecessor Tom Osborne did in three of his final four seasons. And the former Nebraska fullback and longtime running backs coach was not known for taking risks.
Still, he had a fondness for trick plays, especially in this Oklahoma series. In the first team meeting after the Huskers beat Texas Tech a week before the OU game, Solich rolled a highlight reel of gadget plays that loomed large in Nebraska’s history against the Sooners.
More often than not, Oklahoma had pulled off the magic. Solich’s message in that meeting? Not this time.
“It was pretty cool,” Crouch said, “just to get into that mindset of how big these games are and what they mean in the history of the program and the rich tradition of both schools. Basically, it got us fired up.”
At the conclusion of the video, the lights switched on and the screen rolled up to reveal a play drawn on the whiteboard. Written next to the diagram was its name: Black 41 Flash Reverse, words stitched into Nebraska tradition after what happened on the Saturday afternoon that followed.
Nebraska coaches got the idea a couple of weeks before Oklahoma came to town.
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“Somebody had run it,” Brown said. “We were watching college football. We saw it on TV, and we said, ‘Hey, that’s an interesting play.’”
But as the big game drew near, concerns surfaced. The play called for Crouch to take the snap and hand to running back Thunder Collins, who lined up on the short, left side of the field. Collins was to sell the jet sweep and pitch to Stuntz, moving toward the middle of the field from the right side of the alignment as Crouch slipped to his left down the sideline, preferably undetected.
All that remained was for Stuntz, still running to his left, to throw a strike, 30 yards in the air, to the speedy Crouch.
“A lot of things had to go right,” Klem said.
In practice, they did not. In fact, Crouch said, the Huskers killed the play before Saturday.
“It just wasn’t working,” he said. “Whether there was a fumble on the handoff or the motion was off, the defender got to Mike before he could throw it or saw me coming out and covered me, there’s a laundry list of reasons why it got pulled. And I think it was for the better.”
Others recall it slightly differently during the week.
“It wasn’t perfect,” Stuntz said. “But there was some success.”
Klem, a junior walk-on wingback in 2001, said the success rate hovered around 50 percent against the scout team. “There were a couple of times it worked great. And there were a couple of times, it was like ‘Really, why are we putting Stuntz in there?’ The timing wasn’t always there.”
Brown agreed with Klem. If it went entirely awry in practice, Nebraska never would have run it in a game, he said. And even if Solich took it out of the game plan, it clearly remained an option in the coach’s mind.
Three plays in a short stretch sandwiched around halftime convinced Solich to rethink any decision to pack his trick away for another day.
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On the fourth play of a drive that began with 5:20 left in the first half after DeJuan Groce returned a punt 33 yards to the Oklahoma 30, Solich called the jet sweep to Collins, a second-year I-back out of Los Angeles who rushed for 647 yards in 2001 as the primary backup to Dahrran Diedrick.
The Sooners stopped Collins after a 4-yard gain, but Klem, a fierce blocker, upended All-America safety Roy Williams to help seal the edge.
“Roy Williams tried to jump over me,” Klem said. “That was his signature move. I got lucky. I’m sure I closed my eyes, but I ended up smoking him, flipping him. He landed on his head and got up woozy as hell.”
Remember that.
Josh Brown kicked a field goal to put Nebraska up 10-7 before OU, on its next drive, attempted the unthinkable — at least, from the perspective of the Huskers.
Nebraska had knocked out Oklahoma QB Jason White early in the second quarter. Nate Hybl replaced him and moved OU to the Huskers’ 20-yard line. That’s when offensive coordinator Mark Mangino called the Sooners’ version of the same reverse pass. Receiver Mark Clayton took a toss and ran to his right. Hybl slipped out of the backfield and flashed open. A sure touchdown awaited, but the quarterback fell to the turf, bumped several yards upfield by a defender, and Clayton’s pass fell incomplete.
“Our hearts stopped when Oklahoma ran the play,” said Ron Brown, who watched from the sideline. “It was like, ‘Holy smokes, these guys have seen this play.’”
But it only strengthened the Huskers’ resolve, according to Crouch, to use the same trickery against Oklahoma.
“Let’s stick it in their face and run it,” Crouch said, “see if ours will work. I guess the rest was history.”
Not quite yet, though. The Sooners tied it at 10-10 before the half. Cornerback Erwin Swiney intercepted a long Hybl pass on the second play of the third quarter. Immediately after the change of possession, Nebraska called the jet sweep to Collins.
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This time, it gained 39 yards. And again, Klem leveled Williams, Oklahoma’s star safety.
“He came in and saw me from about 2 yards away and stopped,” Klem said. “He helped me make that block.”
Williams was tentative. “Those two plays completely changed the way he was playing our offense,” Klem said.
The big run led to another field goal and a 13-10 lead for the Huskers.
As a final touch, shortly before Nebraska put Stuntz’s left arm on display, he entered the game on a running play. Stuntz said he felt more comfortable after making an appearance.
“It was more than anything to get my blood flowing,” he said.
Actually, according to Brown, he was a decoy. “Oklahoma’s not a bunch of idiots,” the coach said. “We had to get him in the game so those guys had seen him.”
Finally came the call, with slightly more than six minutes left in the game on first down from the Nebraska 37. As Stuntz stood at the line of scrimmage, he said, two thoughts entered his mind — don’t jump early and catch the pitch from Collins.
‘’Even as you go back and watch it, I’m pretty late getting off the ball,” Stuntz said. “I caught the ball and it was wide open. I could see Eric streaking down the sideline.”
Williams hesitated at the sight of Collins on the sweep. By the time the safety diagnosed the reverse, he was too far from the action to blow it up.
Stuntz said he locked eyes for a moment with Oklahoma defensive tackle Kory Klein, who came off a block from Nebraska fullback Steve Kriewald and stood flat-footed as Crouch raced past. When Klein saw Stuntz slow his pace and raise his left arm to throw, the defender turned around and ran. It was futile.
Brown held his breath. “The emotion that went through me was, “You can’t miss him, Mike.’”
Stuntz hit Crouch in stride.
“When you’ve got a guy that wide open, you start thinking about it, and that’s the worst thing that can happen,” Stuntz said. “But I knew what I was doing. I’d thrown a million footballs in my life.”
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Crouch focused on the ball, knowing it spun in the opposite direction of a right-handed throw. The ball hit his hands and bounced for a second, but Crouch secured it and outraced OU cornerback Derrick Strait over the final 40 yards to the end zone.
“There were very few times I heard the crowd,” Crouch said. “But that was one of them.”
A near-consensus exists that the moment ranked among the loudest in the history of Memorial Stadium.
Stuntz was the first to embrace Crouch in the end zone.
Stuntz played split end, backup QB and free safety for the Huskers, but he’s best known for one trick play. (Courtesy of Megan Michael Photography)The points provided Nebraska’s final margin of victory. The Huskers ascended to No. 1 in the BCS poll and stayed there until a shocking Black Friday loss at Colorado credited as the start of the program’s downfall. The Sooners slipped against Oklahoma State, leaving the Buffaloes to play Texas for the Big 12 title.
Solich was fired two years later. He sat out for one season and retired at age 76 in July after 16 years at Ohio, citing a heart condition. Stoops retired after another 15 years in Norman and nine Big 12 titles.
Crouch got his Heisman, as did White, the 2003 winner who left the 2001 game at QB for Oklahoma in the first half and returned briefly in the third quarter to play on an injured knee.
Collins, the Nebraska running back at the center of the trick-play strategy, was convicted in 2009 of first-degree murder and other charges that stemmed from a 2008 shooting in Omaha. He’s serving a life sentence.
Stuntz completed 10 passes as a backup to QB Jammal Lord in 2002 and redshirted in 2003. In 2004 for new coach Bill Callahan, Stuntz remained a backup quarterback. He finished his career as a reserve free safety.
He keeps one memento from the 2001 game, a photo taken from the stands by his older brother, Ryan, of Mike releasing the pass. Crouch signed it for him.
Stuntz earned a degree at Nebraska in PGA golf management and worked in the golf industry for a short time after his football career.
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“As much as I enjoyed it,” he said, “I wasn’t super passionate.”
He returned to school to take prerequisites and split his time in medical school between Iowa and Ohio State, where his college girlfriend, Natalie Riedmann, was working as a pediatric resident. If her name sounds familiar, it’s perhaps from her role as the chemistry tutor on the NBC and VH1 reality series, “Tommy Lee Goes to College,” set at Nebraska in 2005.
Mike and Natalie married, and he completed his residency at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha before embarking on a career in ophthalmology. The Stuntzes moved from Nebraska to Tampa, Fla., this year, where they are raising four children aged 6 and under.
“It’s all worked out really well,” he said. “We’re really lucky.”
Luck, as Stuntz displayed 20 years ago, will only take you so far. The rest is about preparation and action.
(Photo of Eric Crouch on a 63-yard reception for a touchdown on a trick play in the fourth quarter vs. Oklahoma in 2001: Dave Weaver / Associated Press)
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