Long before the 1969 Texas — Arkansas game, SMU and TCU hooked up in what is still widely considered as the best game in Southwest Conference football history. In fact, there are many who feel this game is responsible for making the state of Texas the pigskin hotbed that it is today.

The Mustangs entered the game as the top-ranked team in the country and

Slingin' Sammy Baugh of TCU

were led by All-American halfback Bobby Wilson. The Horned Frogs were right behind SMU in the polls and featured an All-American of their own, quarterback Sammy Baugh. At stake was the SWC championship, a trip to the Rose Bowl and the right to lay claim to a share of the mythical national championship.

So just how big was this game? Grantland Rice, the greatest sportswriter of his generation, traveled all the way to Fort Worth from New York City to cover it. Dan Jenkins, the greatest sportswriter and sports novelist of our time, devoted an entire chapter to it in his novel Fast Copy. Those two facts alone are enough to confer legendary status upon any event.

A crowd of 37,000 crammed into Amon Carter Stadium, which seated only 25,000 at the time, and a nationwide audience tuned in on the radio. SMU's Bob Finley has been quoted as saying, "Fans were all over everything, the hillside and the grass. They crawled over fences, pushed gatekeepers out of the way."

Wilson scored twice, as SMU raced out to a 14-0 lead. However, Baugh rallied TCU and the score was tied at 14 in the fourth quarter. Momentum had apparently shifted to the Horned Frogs

Facing a fourth-and-4 at the TCU 39 yard line, SMU's Bob Finley faked a punt and connected with Wilson, who fought his way into the end zone to give the Mustangs a 20-14 victory. This play has become known as the "$85, 000 pass" in SMU football lore, as the amount the school received to play in the Rose Bowl. As a consolation prize, TCU was invited to play LSU in the Sugar Bowl.

In his article about the game, Rice said, "...over 37,000 wildly excited Texans and visitors from every corner of the map packed, jammed and fought their way into every square foot of standing and seating space to see one of the greatest football games ever played in the sixty-year history of the Nation's finest college sport."

But the story does not end there. The 1935 college football season was the last one before the Associated Press writers' poll was used to determine the mythical national championship. The Dickinson System, devised by University of Illinois Professor Frank Dickinson, named SMU as the 1935 national champions. This system crowned its champion before the bowl games, which was a good thing for SMU, who lost to Stanford 7-0 in the Rose Bowl.

The Williamson System, yet another method of crowning national champions, waited until after the post-season to release its final results. After TCU downed LSU 3-2 in a mud filled Sugar Bowl, that system named both the Horned Frogs and Tigers as co-champions.

So the SMU-TCU game has the distinction of being the only regular season college football games to feature two national champions. When the season started, no Texas team had ever finished atop the polls. All of a sudden, there were two. This epic battle is the game that truly put Texas college football on the national map.

So next time you are sitting in an astro-turfed, luxury box filled, football stadium with 90,000 of your closest friends, watching your favorite Texas college play, remember that it all started on November 30, 1935 in Fort Worth.