Kansas cornerback Cobee Bryant’s three-interception game against Houston on Saturday etched his name in the record books, as he tied the highest single-game mark by any Jayhawk in the 134-year history of KU football.
Because he tied rather than exceeding the record, though, his name will remain alongside the other men who accomplished the feat: John Konek in 1951, Duane Morris in 1957 and, most recently, Bill Crank in 1958.
“I had a good game that particular game,” Crank told the Journal-World on Monday, the day Bryant was named Big 12 defensive player of the week. “But overall, I don’t sit around and tell stories to my friends or would-be friends about my days at KU and on the football field.”
That 1958 season — a year in which the Jayhawks went 4-5-1 in the first year of Jack Mitchell’s tenure at the helm — was the lone season in which Crank made significant contributions to the KU football team. He served as a two-way player at quarterback and defensive back.
“Those were the rules of the game back then and you had to play both ways,” he said. “It’s just what it was.”
Football ended up a rather brief chapter in his life, which has since included stints practicing law in Wichita and owning a lodge with his wife in Crested Butte, Colorado.
But he did remember all the while that he held the most recent instance of the KU single-game record, and said he found out Bryant had matched it via a recent phone call from friend and fraternity brother Joe Reitz.
“Congratulations to young Mr. Bryant,” Crank said. “I’m sure he will remember that as well.”
The 1958 game against Tulane in which Crank made his mark arrived at a significant juncture for both the Jayhawks and the Green Wave. Sixty-six years later, Crank recalled that Tulane quarterback Richie Petitbon had just been named “back of the week” — a recollection validated by a December 2016 issue of Tulane Magazine that attributes that honor to the AP.
The Green Wave, to that point winless, had just knocked off an unbeaten Navy squad 14-6. Per the Sports Illustrated vault, Petitbon had scored both touchdowns in that upset win, and his rushing totals had exceeded the entire Navy team.
“From our standpoint, I think it gave us a little more enthusiasm for the game,” Crank said.
Any momentum Tulane might have gathered came to a halt at Memorial Stadium in Lawrence, where KU beat the Green Wave 14-9 as Crank intercepted Petitbon three times.
Petitbon went on to play 14 years in the NFL, where he was a first-team All-Pro for the Chicago Bears, and later served as head coach in Washington.
Crank, meanwhile, although he was a sophomore, saw his football career come to an end for all intents and purposes shortly after the record-tying performance.
“I’m not sure if it was the next game or the game after — I just got up off the ground after running the ball once, and my knee felt weird,” he recalled. “It had a sting in it and I thought I had just maybe hit it and it would be OK. But it wasn’t OK. I had to have surgery at the end of the year. And the surgery was not successful, and so I really didn’t play. I was on the team but I really didn’t play any more after that.”
According to Sports Reference, he threw for 135 yards and ran for 375 as a sophomore but only accounted for 28 combined yards the next two seasons.
Crank, who went on to serve as mayor and town manager of Crested Butte, moved west with his wife in retirement, “where it’s still Colorado but it’s quiet and not near as much snow.” He has followed the Jayhawks only casually in the many decades since his stint on the team, acknowledging, “I probably am not as big a football fan as a lot of prior football players.”
“You always hate to see your alma mater kind of sink down kind of low (in) the product they put out on the field,” he said of the team’s performance in the intervening years, “but at the same time there have been a few years where they really were very good.”
AP Photo/Colin E. Braley
