Oklahoma State’s Bedlam Demon Returns, Fueled by College Football Greed

In the fall of 2011, I set out to create a demon, and I succeeded.

I did it in a Starbucks. I was in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to write about Oklahoma State Cowboys football. Oklahoma State is the team I grew up cheering for. My parents both went there. We had season tickets when I was a kid. On Saturdays during football season, we’d make the hour-long drive to the stadium from our house in Ponca City. Odds are that if you love sports, you have some core memory from the time you first realized you loved it, like the loop that plays on your home screen when your operating system crashes and has to boot back up. This is mine: tiny Barry Sanders galloping down the field chased by what looked like 200 bewildered defenders, tiny referee signaling touchdown, brass band playing, flags waving under a twilight prairie sky.

That day in 2011, I was in Starbucks drafting a column about Bedlam, the underdog Cowboys’ annual prayers-up rivalry game against their powerhouse in-state rival, the Oklahoma Sooners. If you’ve thought about Bedlam at all recently, it’s probably because you’ve heard they’re about to end it. Oklahoma is moving to the SEC, and Oklahoma State isn’t invited. So unless someone very high up in the college football hierarchy is visited by three ghosts between now and Christmas, this Saturday’s game—the 118th in the series, with Oklahoma preserving a razor-thin 91-19-7 lead—will be the last regular meeting between the teams.

Which is sad, I guess, but this kind of thing happens all the time now. At some point the college football brain trust decided that the best way to solve the jigsaw puzzle of American geography was to keep shaking the box. Oklahoma isn’t in the Southeast? So what? Keep shaking; eventually all the pieces with valuable broadcasting rights will end up stuck together.

Back in 2011, though, Bedlam did not appear to be in any immediate danger of termination. That year, the only odd thing about the game was that Oklahoma State had a good chance to win it. The Cowboys were a top-five team, with long shot national championship hopes and a legitimate chance to win the Big 12 title. And they did go on to win the game, 44-10, behind a 151-yard, two-touchdown rushing performance from Joseph Randle. I watched it in the press box, feeling thoroughly 9 years old again. You’ve probably heard the expression “no cheering in the press box.” Turns out, you’re also not allowed to leap up onto the table, rip your shirt off, and dance an Irish hornpipe in the press box; ask me how I know.

Good game. Fun year. But pre-Bedlam, at Starbucks, I was thinking about what it feels like to be a fan of the lesser team in a long-running regional rivalry. You know that dynamic? One side is nationally prominent, a perennial contender. The other side is … not. Los Angeles Clippers fans get this. Manchester City fans used to get this before they all teleported to Bizarro Money Planet. NC State hoop fans. Everton fans. It’s the feeling you get when you’re not your biggest rival’s biggest rival. The feeling when you’re stuck in traffic for a couple of hours and all the chat on sports talk radio is about somebody else.

I was thinking about that feeling, and the complex of heartache and disaster and near misses and close losses that undergirds it, and I created a demon to explain it. I’d written about the demon once or twice before, but it was in the Starbucks that it became real, because it was in the Starbucks that I truly started to believe in it. The demon, I wrote, inhabited the lightless Balrog chasms beneath the earth. It was a creature of pure, seething malevolence. Its sole purpose was to crush the hopes of Oklahoma State sports fans and annihilate their capacity to feel joy. Its name was Squinky. Whenever a game-winning field goal sailed wide right, that was the demon’s tentacle flicking it—squink!—out of its true path. Whenever a receiver fumbled a game-winning touchdown, that was the demon—squink!—knocking him off-balance. The only way to destroy the demon was to defeat Oklahoma in Bedlam and send it howling back to the subbasement of hell.

Over the next few years, this idea took off among Oklahoma State fans, which tells you a lot about what it feels like to be an Oklahoma State fan. Because of course Squinky didn’t die. We won one big game, but a creature of elemental evil cannot be defeated so easily. People started printing DEATH TO SQUINKY T-shirts and handing them out before games. On forums, people would invoke Squinky after nail-biting losses. Oklahoma newspapers wrote about Squinky. I think the mayor of Stillwater tweeted about Squinky? In a small way, the demon I had imbued with wicked life while sipping a vanilla latte took on a life of its own. It became a sort of anti-mascot, an emblem of the misery meted out to the long-suffering sports fans of the world.

I’ve been remembering Squinky partly because the end of Bedlam is nigh—ends are always nigh when you’re talking about Squinky—but partly because of the ways in which college football has changed. It seems kind of quaint now, doesn’t it, that only a few years ago we imagined that the difference between underdogs and major programs was what happened in the games? In 2011, I was imagining the demon grabbing Justin Blackmon’s ankle or nudging the ball back an inch on a close third-down conversion. These days, with the whole sport increasingly filtering itself into a tiny handful of TV-friendly super-conferences on the one hand and legacy leagues for also-rans on the other, you’d have to think about the situation differently. College football teams still win and lose games, of course, but the real competition is bigger. It’s structural. These days I’d imagine Squinky in the office of a college president, nudging a marker on a whiteboard. I’d imagine Squinky flicking a century of tradition out of the hollow mind of an SEC administrator, then flicking his eyes toward the paper reading “TV contract.” I’d imagine Squinky rolling a pencil over to the genius who just came up with a formula for quantifying how much money can be wrung out of fans before they revolt.

It’s funny, isn’t it? In a way, realignment has made all of us fans of one of those lesser local rivals I was talking about. Or most of us, anyway. I’m sure there are still fans who only care about recruiting classes and playoff standings and NIL deals, and those people are probably fine with the SEC turning into a micro-NFL for people who own multiple jet skis. But I think many of us feel like we’re losing something, entitled Texas fans as well as beleaguered Kansas State fans, and many of us feel powerless against the forces that are taking it away. Our record against the Sooners is much more lopsided than 91-19-7. We’re showing up in our little team bus, with our little marching band; they’re showing up in BMWs, with the staff of eight law firms. We’re saying, “All the fun of college football is how random and irrational and nonsensical it is; it’s in the local traditions that everyone loves because they go back to 1919 and don’t make any sense; it’s in the histories that have evolved over 150 years and accrued weird meaning and beauty as they’ve grown.” They’re saying, “But we’ll get bigger BMWs if we ruin all that, and you’ll still watch.” And they’re right. We’re the small school. They’re the big school. And the big school almost always wins.

But I don’t know. The blare of the media cycle makes it seem like Georgia is bigger than God and Ohio State–Michigan will be must-see TV forever. And maybe those things are true, though I feel like God could have beaten Auburn in September without needing a late touchdown. But I also think you can only get so far trying to grow a product by taking away what people loved about it to begin with. The more the planners and dealmakers strive to optimize college football for maximum economic efficiency, the more they flirt with that limit. You can sell people an iPhone without a headphone jack. You probably can’t sell people an iPhone that is actually a rhinoceros.

In any case, I’m excited for Saturday. Oklahoma should win easily, as usual. But where there’s life, there’s hope, as the saying goes, and where there’s a recent history of the then-sixth-ranked Sooners being upset by Kansas, there’s life. Whatever happens, I’ll continue rooting for my silly, perpetually overmatched, perpetually overlooked team—I mean Oklahoma State, but also the fun parts of college football in general—and hoping it finds a way to survive against the bullies and demons in its path.