Oklahoma's Clint Ingram made a leaping interception at the 10-yard line of a Brady Leaf throw with 33 seconds left to preserve the Oklahoma Sooners' upset of the No. 6 Oregon Ducks.
Leaf had thrown a 3-yard touchdown pass to tight end Tim Day with 3:30 left to pull the Ducks to 17-14.
Oregon's defense held, and Leaf began another drive at his 22 with 3:04 to play. He threw a 38-yard pass to Terrence Whitehead, who zigzagged to the Oklahoma 34. On third-and-14 from the 39, Leaf rolled right, was flushed back to the left and dodged a tackler before side-arming a pass to Jeremiah Johnson for a 19-yard gain.
PHOTO: AFP
Two plays later, Ingram got in front of Demetrius Williams for the interception.
Leaf was booed when he came in for Oregon's third possession of the game, and again when a scoreboard graphic noted that he was Ryan Leaf's younger brother. Ryan Leaf, the bad-boy quarterback who played for the Chargers for three seasons, was perhaps the biggest bust in NFL history.
Brady Leaf had helped rally the Ducks (10-2) in three of their final four regular-season games.
The Sooners (8-4) have won six of seven. They were coming off consecutive losses in BCS championship games.
Oklahoma's Adrian Peterson heated up in the second half, finishing with 84 yards on 23 carries.
Rhett Bomar threw a 17-yard touchdown pass to fullback J.D. Runnells for a 10-7 Oklahoma lead with 9:20 to play in the third quarter.
Utah 38, No. 24 Georgia Tech 10
In the Bay area, Travis LaTendresse caught 16 passes for 214 yards and four touchdowns, Brett Ratliff passed for 381 yards and the University of Utah rolled up 550 total yards in a 38-10 victory over No. 24 Georgia Tech in the Emerald Bowl on Thursday.
Quinton Ganther ran for 120 yards and added a 41-yard TD romp in the fourth quarter for the Utes (7-5).
Ratliff, who completed 30-of-41 pass attempts, and LaTendresse, the game's offensive most valuable player, both set Utah bowl records.
LaTendresse, a senior from the Sacramento area who missed three late-season games with an ankle injury, seemed to be open all day while the Utes embarrassed the favored Yellow Jackets (7-5), who practically didn't show up to their ninth straight bowl appearance.
Each of LaTendresse's four TD catches of 14, 23, 25 and 16 yards came on simple post patterns down the middle.
Reggie Ball passed for 258 yards for Georgia Tech.
Florida State's leading tackler, the senior linebacker A.J. Nicholson, was suspended from the team on Thursday after a 19-year-old woman accused him of raping her at the hotel where the Seminoles are staying for the Orange Bowl.
Nicholson, a Butkus award semifinalist as one of the nation's top linebackers, was removed from the team by coach Bobby Bowden as Florida State prepared to play Penn State in the bowl game Tuesday night.
"A.J. will be sent home and suspended from this ballgame for violating a team rule and policy," Bowden said after practice Thursday. "That's about all I will say about it."
The police in Hollywood said they received a call around 3am Thursday from a 19-year-old woman who reported that she had been raped by a Florida State player, said Carlos Negron, a police spokesman. Negron said the player was later identified as Nicholson.
No charges have been filed against Nicholson, and an investigation continues, Negron said.
"We hope to talk to several coaches and players," he said. "This figures to take awhile. We want to make sure everything has been done perfectly before we decide what to do."
The police said the incident occurred at the Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa in Hollywood. The woman was taken to the Sexual Assault Treatment Center in Fort Lauderdale and was interviewed later Thursday by the police.
Nicholson, a 22-year-old from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has made 100 tackles this season, 19 more than the next-most productive Seminole. He is 6-foot-2 and weighs 235 pounds and has made 266 career tackles at Florida State.
He voluntarily appeared at the Hollywood Police Department headquarters early Thursday and spent several hours talking to investigators, Negron said, adding, "He was very cooperative."
an official mistake
A day after a wild, lateral-filled ending to the Alamo Bowl, David Parry, the NCAA's national coordinator for officiating, said that the officials should have thrown flags because both Michigan and Nebraska had too many players on the field as the final play unfolded.
Nevertheless, Parry said, the mistake did not affect the outcome of the game, because the penalties by each team would have offset each other, and because time had expired. Parry said that the officials should have explained to each team why the game had ended so abruptly.
The last play of Wednesday's game in San Antonio evoked memories of the 1982 ending to the California-Stanford game, when a Cal player scored a winning TD as he made his way through the Stanford band, which had prematurely stormed the field in celebration.
On Wednesday night, Nebraska was leading, 32-28, with 2 seconds remaining, when Michigan had the ball on second-and-10 at its own 36. Quarterback Chad Henne took the snap and passed to wide receiver Jason Avant.
What ensued was a chaotic play that included one forward pass, seven laterals, a fumble and a game-ending tackle at the Nebraska 13-yard line.
The confusion began when Michigan's Mark Bihl fumbled the ball in the middle of the play. Nebraska players and coaches, thinking that Bihl was down, stormed the field in celebration. But the referees had not whistled the play dead.
"Simply, what you had was too many men on the field by Nebraska -- a whole slew of them -- and Michigan had two or three extra men out there," Parry said in a telephone interview on Thursday night. "Since both teams had too many men and both teams fouled, it was an offsetting penalty, and the game was over. I think it might have been wise to throw penalty flags and to announce, to say, that it was an offsetting penalty; the game was over."
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier