Instant classic?

No question, but classic enough for Iowa State radio personality John Walters to sign off the 2019 Cyclones-Oklahoma game broadcast with this?

Thanks for listening, and the next time Brock Purdy sees Jalen Hurts, it will be for an NFC championship.

“Sure, I did,” Walters said in jest this week. “I think I said that. I think I looked into that crystal ball.”

OK, maybe not. But what a game it was.

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I recall that Big 12 Conference showdown in Norman, Purdy and company rallying Iowa State from a 42-21 deficit heading into the fourth quarter. Heck, had it not been for a questionable non-call in the end zone on a two-point conversion pass to La’Michael Pettway, the Cyclones might have won. Instead it was a 42-41 loss in a game Cyclone fans won’t soon forget. (More on that later).

I was in the press box, like I was at all Purdy’s 48 games as the Cyclones’ quarterback. And like Walters, I didn’t predict that the two quarterbacks in that classic contest would be opposite each other when the 49ers face Philadelphia in the 2023 NFC championship game at 1 p.m. Sunday.

“That game epitomized Brock Purdy’s great career at Iowa State,” Walters told me this week. “You never felt you were out of a game when Brock Purdy was the quarterback.

“Even with Oklahoma leading 42-21 going into the fourth quarter, Brock led Iowa State to a 20-0 fourth quarter.”

This has been a great ride for Purdy, going from the final pick in the most recent NFL Draft to one win away from leading the San Francisco 49ers into the Super Bowl. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Purdy is 7-0 as an NFL starter since replacing injured Jimmy Garoppolo, so keeping with that theme, here are seven thoughts about the last time Purdy faced Hurts.

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Brock Purdy was better than Jalen Hurts in that Nov. 9, 2019 game

Three of Purdy’s five touchdown passes came in that 20-point fourth quarter, a period in which he completed 5-of-9 passes for 90 yards and rushed seven times for 36 more.

When his team needed him most, Purdy was the best.

“He’s always looking downfield,” coach Matt Campbell said of his then-sophomore. “He’s always trying to extend plays. You’ve got the guy one-on-one, and he makes you miss. All of a sudden, it’s a critical throw, and he throws the ball on the money. Some people just have that, and he does. He’s going to get better and better.”

Purdy finished with 337 total yards and six touchdowns (five passing, one rushing) and no interceptions in a heroic losing effort. Hurts had 341 yards and five touchdowns (three passing, two rushing) and an interception.

Epic? I’d say yes.

Campbell’s only decision was to roll the dice

“A hundred times out of 100,” he said without hesitation after the game. “Maybe more.”

It was the right call. Campbell called for a two-point-conversion attempt after Purdy’s 13-yard touchdown to Charlie Kolar pulled the Cyclones within a point with 24 seconds to play. Momentum was on Iowa State’s side.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Campbell said. “In. A. Heartbeat.”

Going for the win, when place-kicker Connor Assalley was 5-for-5 in PATs, showed just how much confidence Campbell had in Purdy.

“Offensively in the fourth quarter, we started clicking really well,” Purdy said after the game.

I recall Purdy taking the blame when that two-point play didn’t work

That’s Purdy. A team guy, the only fingers he pointed were at himself. And that’s what he did on that November day in Norman.

He could have talked about all the interception opportunities the defense had against Hurts, but no, he second-guessed his late-game decision that ended up with Oklahoma’s Parnell Motley taking a pass off Pettway’s midsection to seal the Sooners’ victory.

Purdy didn’t know Kolar was open on the play until seeing a replay after the game. He was pressured. He was hit as he released. He had to trust his judgment.

“I understand Charlie ended up opening up, so that’s on me,” Purdy said afterward. “I have to anticipate that better.”

There was contact on that two-point conversion pass, but enough to call a game-deciding penalty?

There’s still talk about that play. Yes, there was contact on that play, and without that contact Pettway probably catches the pass and Iowa State wins.

My first paragraph after the game was:

Did Iowa State get jobbed by Big 12 Conference officials at Oklahoma Saturday? Frankly, it was too close to call.

“The two-point play can certainly be whatever,” Campbell said after the game. “The fact of the matter of it is, they didn’t call the penalty. Whether it was or it wasn’t a penalty, I think it’s probably up to discretion.”

A penalty would have meant a conversion re-try from the 1-yard line.

“Brock threw it to Pettway, really threw a strike. The ball had a chance to be caught,” Campbell went on. “Bang-bang deal.

“We could say, ‘Was he held, was he not? Was there interference?’ But you’ve got to make a play in a tough situation, and we really weren’t able to make that play.”

Would a pass interference penalty have led to Iowa State getting a win? We’ll never know.

“Yeah … I’m not going to comment on that,” Purdy said after the game. “It happened the way it did.”

Oklahoma fans must have had somewhere to be. Many started leaving late in the third quarter.

Interesting they left early, considering what happened the previous time the Cyclones came to town in 2017. That was when Kyle Kempt replaced Jacob Park (who didn’t even make the trip). That’s when Kempt engineered one of Iowa State’s finest victories – a 38-31 success against the third-ranked Sooners.

‘It’s our job as coaches and players that we’ve got to play to our level, no matter what,’ Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley said after the 2019 classic. ‘That is certainly our job, and I would never put that on our fans or anybody else’s fans or any atmosphere or any stadium.’

He closed this subject with this:

‘Now, the flip side of that is we have one of the great stadiums in America, we have one of the great fan bases in America, and when it’s rocking in there, does our team feel that? Hell yeah they do. And when it’s not, do they feel that? Hell yeah they do.”

This game also was about Breece Hall

I recall telling someone after the game that Hall would be a star. Well, I think I recall saying that. Maybe I didn’t, but this certainly was one of the games en route to Breece becoming one of the Cyclones’ greatest rushers.

He ran for 132 yards against West Virginia and 183 against Texas Tech earlier that season, but could he do it on the road at Oklahoma?

Bingo. The freshman had 110 yards on 18 carries. He had 30 yards on six carries during the big fourth quarter.

He was Iowa State’s first running back with a 100-yard game against Oklahoma since Blaise Bryant in 1989.

That game included a ton of future NFL talent

Just among the starters, 18 have played in the NFL. That impressive list includes Iowa State’s Hall, Landen Akers, Kolar, Jake Hummel, Chase Allen, Enyi Uwazurike and Kene Nwangwu.

The list also includes Purdy and Hurts, of course. Who wins this time around?

Will a quarterback have to rally his team from a fourth-quarter, three-touchdown deficit?

Will the game be decided on a controversial pass into the end zone?

If it does, we’ll know it’s happened before.

Reach Iowa State columnist Randy Peterson at rpeterson@dmreg.com, and on Twitter @RandyPete

Voting for baseball’s Hall of Fame is already challenging enough. Good luck parsing the fog of WAR without any other distractions.      

Thankfully, one significant haze is about to clear.

Sixteen years ago, and just two years after his nebulous testimony before Congress slung a pathetic frame around baseball’s so-called steroid era, Mark McGwire appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot. And a process that was already complex yet defined by plenty of statistically-driven precedence became an impossibility.

Oh, we’re not just talking about the guys strongly tied to PEDs, but that’s not a bad place to start.

McGwire, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa – all would grace the Hall of Fame ballot between 2007 and 2022 and all would fall well short of the 75% required for induction. Sure, there were enough hot takes in that span to fuel a Nova Scotia winter, but they were relatively open-and-shut cases – so strongly tied to PEDs that numerous voters found their careers too compromised for Cooperstown.

From there, it’s a real headache.

There’s the kinda-maybes: A reported 2003 positive test for a PED somehow did not stop David Ortiz in the manner it did Bonds, Clemens and Sosa. He got in on the first try in 2022. And then there’s Gary Sheffield, who like Ortiz clobbered more than 500 home runs but because he worked out with Bonds and told investigators he borrowed some cream for his knees, was suddenly a ballot pariah. In an era when the electorate is supposedly getting so much “smarter,” Ortiz in and everyone else out makes no sense.

Let’s not forget the Whispers Guys, for which there’s so much smoke that there’s at least one smoldering fire, though not enough to keep any of them out of the Hall. On the advice of counsel, we won’t get into the hubbub surrounding (Redacted), (Redacted) and (Redacted).

And perhaps most unfortunately, there’s everybody else whose careers significantly intersected with the rough timeline of 1993-2004, who have no connections to PEDs but also do not have a slam-dunk Hall case. Tuesday night, one of those guys, Scott Rolen, earned election to Cooperstown. Good for him.

There are so many more – Carlos Beltran and Bobby Abreu, Andruw Jones and Jeff Kent and even likely 2024 inductee Todd Helton, all whose bodies of work are superlative, but drawn on a distorted canvas. It’s one reason why Fred McGriff’s ‘mere’ 493 home runs could not stack up, even though his career began in 1986 and was nothing but consistent from then on. Still, he had to earn induction via committee vote, and not the ballot.   

The steroid era didn’t just mess up the record books, it also screwed up metrics like WAR and adjusted OPS, which were supposed to have a leveling effect within an era and also across them.

But such measures are of little use when a large swath of players are so significantly enhanced by chemicals. And we still know so little about the steroid era with regard to who did what – the Mitchell Report was an introductory pamphlet, not a definitive tome – that we have probably venerated plenty of cheaters over the years.

In short, it’s been a damn mess. But relief is in sight.

In 2025, the great Ichiro Suzuki will be enshrined, joined on the ballot by CC Sabathia, who should eventually bull his way in. Sabathia logged 251 wins, his four winningest campaigns coming after PED testing was instituted.

And here’s the thing about that 2025 ballot: Just four players – Suzuki, Sabathia, the unstoppable Edwin Jackson and the inimitable Fernando Rodney – debuted before 2005, when the first PED suspensions were levied.

There may not be another Hall of Famer in the bunch, with perhaps 2008 MVP Dustin Pedroia making it in at some point. But all of them – Felix Hernandez (debut season: 2005) and a super-fun debut class of ’06 that includes Pedroia, Adam Jones, Ian Kinsler and Russell Martin – played the entirety of their careers in the drug-testing era.

OK, time for another reality check: PED testing doesn’t equal a clean game. Another guy who debuted in 2005, Melky Cabrera, proved that much when he both tested positive for testosterone and got caught up in the Biogenesis doping scandal, a startling double-double in 2012-13.

Biogenesis ensnared plenty of stars and only deepened the chemical fraud Alex Rodriguez committed against the game, beginning in at least 2001. And it was a sobering reminder that there’s plenty of ways around drug testing, so long as you don’t fall asleep after slipping that testosterone gummy under your tongue.

Biogenesis will enter the ballot in 2026, when former MVP Ryan Braun becomes eligible, just as the Hall puts forth a class that played the entirety of their careers in the testing era.

Alas.

PEDs will never be out of the game, but by all indications, they no longer define it. Soon, they will no longer define how we measure greatness, too.  

Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Pollard is on the mend.

Two days after he suffered a broken left fibula and high ankle sprain in Dallas’ 19-12 loss against the San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, Pollard underwent a ‘TightRope’ surgery on Tuesday to repair the issue, according to ESPN.

Pollard, one of Dallas’ most explosive weapons, had picked up 33 yards on eight touches prior to suffering the injury. The Cowboys gained only 21 rushing yards in the second half, as their offense struggled to finish drives against San Francisco’s defense.

Here’s everything you need to know about Pollard’s injury.

When did the injury happen?

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Late in the second quarter of the game, with 1:24 left to play in the half, Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott threw a checkdown pass to Pollard in the middle of the field. As Pollard tried to escape 49ers defensive back Jimmie Ward, he had his left foot caught underneath Ward’s weight as Ward brought him to the turf.

After being tended to on the field, Pollard was eventually carted to the locker room for X-rays, wearing an air cast around his foot and leg.

How long is Tony Pollard’s expected recovery?

According to NFL Network, the expected recovery time will be around three months, which should have him ready for portions of the offseason program, including minicamps in June and training camp in late July.

What complicates the timing of Pollard’s injury is that he is set to enter the offseason as an unrestricted free agent after playing four seasons on his rookie contract. Pollard, 25, secured his first Pro Bowl season in 2022, setting career highs in rushes (193), rushing yards (1,007), rushing touchdowns (nine), receiving yards (371) and receiving touchdowns (three).

Pollard was a fourth-round selection in the 2019 NFL draft.

What is a ‘TightRope’ surgery?

According to the National Institutes of Health, a ‘TightRope’ surgery is an alternative to a procedure that requires the insertion of screws to stabilize the wound, ‘with a reduced need for implant removal.’ In a ‘TightRope’ procedure, a braided cord is used to establish the desired tension for proper healing. The NIH calls the procedure ‘consistent and reliable.’

Shaq really, really, really has to stop betting his colleagues on the ‘NBA on TNT’ set. It never turns out fun for this guy.

He already had to eat frog this year after losing a bet on the TCU Horned Frogs. He also was forced to grow his hair back twice after losing bets on the set.

Now, he’s got hair again after losing a bet to Candace Parker. Again. But this time, it’s in the wildest place.

Shaq bet Candace that Joel Embiid would score 50 points when the Philadelphia 76ers faced off against the Los Angeles Clippers. Unfortunately for Shaq, Embiid didn’t hold him down. He didn’t score 50 in the Jan. 17 game, so Shaq had to come on set with his baby hair popping.

No idea how he acquired this hair, but I’m almost certain it didn’t grow considering where his forehead was the last time he grew hair. But, regardless, Shaq looks completely ridiculous.

Shaq is a man of his word, indeed. The baby hairs are poppin’. Then when Candace brushes it, too? Whew boy. I absolutely lost it. This man really has one patch of hair on his head.

They really got Shaq on the set looking like Phil and Lil off of Rugrats. What a time.