NEW YORK (AP) – The Boz was never getting into the College Football Hall of Fame.
“My name was on the ballot, but I wasn’t accepted,” Brian Bosworth said Tuesday.
Bosworth was an All-America linebacker and two-time Butkus Award winner at Oklahoma from 1984-86. He helped the Sooners win a national title in ’85. He should have been a Hall of Famer a long time ago, but the obnoxious persona he created, the brash-talking Boz, was not so well-received.
He failed a drug test that got him suspended from a bowl game. He taunted the NCAA. After he left Norman, Oklahoma, for an NFL career that flamed out quickly, he was not welcomed back.
The Boz is gone now, replaced by a 50-year-old man who has reconnected with his school, developed spirituality and found humility. That’s the guy who is going into the Hall of Fame, part of a class of 15 former players and two coaches who were set to be inducted Tuesday night by the National Football Foundation at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan.