From the top of The Tunnel that leads into the floor of the Cotton Bowl it looks like no big deal. All you can see is end zone.

Then you start running and the world explodes around you.

Your eyes are subjected to ugliest color on Earth -- either Oklahoma crimson or Texas burnt orange, depending on what jersey you're not wearing. Your eardrums are pounded by the screams of 75,587 people and the blasts of the modified 12-gauge shotguns that the OU Ruf/Nek spirit group carries, though they will try NOT to put the barrel next to your earhole if you're a Sooner. You feel the world shake and start to understand why every Longhorn or Sooner who has taken these steps before you can never seem to find the exact words necessary to convey what has just happened.

You've just run down the tunnel at the Texas-OU game -- or OU-Texas game, depending on which side of the 50 you call home -- generally regarded as one of the greatest moments a college football player can experience.

And quite possibly one of the strangest.

	“	They made a mistake when they divvied up the tickets. They should have split the stadium longways. Texas is always the visiting team at the Cotton Bowl. ”
		— Barry Switzer, former Oklahoma coach

"I don't know how many times we'd get into a scrape, with banging, shoving and elbowing,'' said former Texas coach Fred Akers. "Luckily we didn't have an out-and-out brawl. Most of the team would have just as soon fight it out in the parking lot, or right there in The Tunnel."

OU coaching legend Barry Switzer shakes his head at the mention of The Tunnel, not because of what goes on there, but where it's positioned.

"They made a mistake when they divvied up the tickets,'' Switzer said. "They should have split the stadium longways."

Instead they split the Texas and OU halves of the stadium at the 50-yard-line and gave the half with The Tunnel to the Sooners.

"Texas is always the visiting team at the Cotton Bowl," Switzer said.

Switzer said The Tunnel was the scene of his most embarrassing moment in an OU-Texas game. In 1976, Gerald Ford walked out of The Tunnel for the coin flip with UT coach Darrell Royal on one side and Switzer on the other.

"Some redneck from Oklahoma stands up and shouts, 'Who are those two a------s with Switzer?'" recalled Switzer. "It embarrassed the hell out of me. I just kept walking straight ahead. I wanted to crawl in a hole. But if given the opportunity, I'm sure some redneck from Texas would have said that, too."

Royal, who claims he never heard the remark, said he always thought Switzer had made up the story.

"I think everyone would have known who the President of the United State was,'' Royal said. "They might have had a question about the other guys."

As Texas waits in The Tunnel, the Longhorns listen to the Sooner fans rattling the chain link fence and taunting them.

"In 1999 there was this old lady who flipped the bird and then threw a Dr Pepper bottle at us," said UT senior guard Beau Baker. "How many grandmothers resort to violence?"

Last year Texas linebacker and team captain De'Andre Lewis, so amped for the game, bolted out of the tunnel -- and promptly ran to the wrong sideline.

Some players try not to get immersed in the craziness.

"I pretty much had tunnel vision,'' said former UT receiver Keith Cash, apparently unaware of the pun, "but there was a lot of barking going on, talking about your mother and such."

	“	In 1999 there was this old lady who flipped the bird and then threw a Dr Pepper bottle at us. How many grandmothers resort to violence? ”
		— UT guard Beau Baker

"I'd always come out last,'' said former Sooner halfback Joe Washington, who played on the OU national title teams of 1974-75. "I was too little to get in any brawls. By the time I'd get though, that was taken care of."

Occasionally you don't encounter a brawler, just someone who plays one in the movies.

Johnny Walker, who played receiver for the Longhorns, recalls how before his freshman year in 1987 actor Gary Busey came to the team hotel the day before the game to meet the Longhorns.

Walker refused to meet him, telling his teammates, "I was so upset how he did Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon."

In the 1987 movie Busey played a drug lord's henchman who kidnaps Glover's daughter and tortures Gibson with electric shocks.

Moments before the game Walker was waiting in The Tunnel when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

It was Busey.

"Some of the guys said you wouldn't come up (and meet me) because of the movie," Walker recalls Busey saying. "That was just a role."

Busey then wished Walker luck.

"I shook his hand," Walker said, "and told him I didn't want to see him in Lethal Weapon II."

Non-lethal weapons, too, come into play as you leave the tunnel, particularly if you're wearing UT's colors.

"I'd be running out and the Ruf/Neks would be shooting off their popguns, or whatever those things are,'' said Peter Gardere, who quarterbacked UT to four straight series wins (1989-92). "They'd stick it right by my ear. Blam. Blam."

Nowadays the players don't get as much chance to mix it up in the tunnel. Since the early 1990s the teams don't file down the ramp side by side. This Saturday Texas, as the visiting team, is scheduled to leave its locker room first and then head down the ramp and out on the field. OU isn't scheduled -- and we say scheduled for a reason -- to leave its locker room until after Texas has departed.

"I wish we'd go back to the way it was,'' said former UT linebacker Brian Jones, now the sideline reporter for the Longhorn radio network. "You couldn't repeat anything that was said in there, but it was fun, wild and CRAZY."

The run out The Tunnel will also be significantly different this year. Instead of running out of the classic stadium ramp, with only a Red River Shootout tarp to protect them, the players will run through an inflatable blue-and-white Southwestern Bell tunnel that juts out 20 feet from the bottom of the ramp

Gone, too, are the days the media remembers with fondness, when the postgame interviews were conducted in the tunnel. Every year, without fail, the victorious band would be marching up the tunnel, playing "Boomer Sooner" or "Texas Fight" at full volume, and stop outside the converted storage closet housing the interview. Also without fail, it was at the exact moment the losing coach was speaking.

Now the interviews are done in a separate part of the fairgrounds and the bands are required to take the stairs.

These days The Tunnel belongs mostly to the spirit groups, who've been known to mix it up before, after and during the game.

Tom Beene, event coordinator for the Cotton Bowl during the State Fair of Texas, said a few years ago the Sooners sneaked past the Longhorn groups guarding the trailer for Bevo, the UT mascot, during the game and slapped a large padlock on the door.

After the game Bevo was a steer without a mode of transportation and, as sedated as he is during games, in no mood to hoof it.

"That was pretty impressive, considering the security around the trailer,'' Beene said. "It took quite a while to find some bolt cutters. Now we require them to bring bolt cutters.''

It's quite a checklist. Helmet. Ear plugs. Heart medication. Now bolt cutters. If you're taking a trip through The Tunnel on Texas-OU Saturday, forget any of them at your own risk.

Mark Wangrin covers the Big 12 for the San Antonio Express-News.