Presented by TRI STATE ELECTRIC.
This Day In Sports…November 3, 2001, 25 years ago today:
Eli Manning throws six touchdown passes, five of them in overtime—but it isn’t enough as Ole Miss falls to Arkansas in seven OTs, 58-56. The game, the first in NCAA history to go seven overtimes, was tied 17-17 at the end of regulation. It lasted four hours, 14 minutes. Manning was a sophomore at the time; he’d go on to be the first overall pick in the 2004 NFL Draft. The Razorbacks were coached by Houston Nutt, in his fourth season after leaving Boise State.
Manning, the future two-time Super Bowl champion with the New York Giants, threw a three-yard touchdown pass to Jason Armstead with 4:50 left in regulation to tie the game. Both teams punted on their final possessions, and then the fun began. Manning and Arkansas QB Matt Jones dueled—overtime after overtime—at a time when beginning with the third OT teams were required to go for two after a touchdown. Each team failed to convert in overtimes nos. 3-5, then both got the two points in the sixth. In the seventh OT, the Razorbacks got theirs, but the Rebels did not after a pass from Manning to Doug Ziegler was stopped short.
According to the fan site Whole Hog Sports, the pizzas ordered for the Razorbacks to eat after the game had turned hard and cold by the time Arkansas finally won. The Hogs’ trainer found a Burger King that was still open on the way to Tupelo, where the team’s charter flight would depart, and Nutt bought 100 Whoppers for everybody on the team and the staff. Well-deserved after that ordeal.
The current practice of starting each team at the 25-yard line in overtime debuted in 1988 in Division I-AA (and lower divisions). Boise State played an OT at Northern Arizona that first season and won 24-21 when Broncos linebacker Scott Russell recovered a fumble. We telecast that game on KTVB, and when Russell pounced on the fumble, Larry Maneely and I (having never been through an overtime) looked at each other and said, “I think that’s it!”
Overtime was instituted across Division I-A in 1996 and has evolved since. There was another seven-OT game in 2018, with Texas A&M edging LSU 74-72 in the highest-scoring game in college football history. The sheer exhaustion of that night moved the NCAA to go to alternating two-point conversions beginning in the fifth overtime in 2019, and that was pushed up to the third OT in 2021. The longest overtime game since that latest rule amendment came in 2021, when Illinois beat Penn State 20-18 in nine OTs.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
