RUSTON -- In 1984, before the 1999-2001 St. Louis Rams and before the now-commonplace run-and-shoot offense, Mississippi Valley State was college football's original Greatest Show on Turf.

The green, white, and red Delta Devils from tiny Itta Bena were nothing short of a national sensation. Led by future NFL Hall-of-Famer and first-team All-America receiver Jerry "The World" Rice and a clean-jerseyed quarterback named Willie "Satellite" Totten who got sacked only every other lunar eclipse, Mississippi Valley averaged 57 points a game, scored more than 80 twice and more than 70 on two other occasions and, in their only regular-season loss, scored 38.

Fun followed this team. Few games if any in Joe Aillet Stadium have been as highly anticipated as the one on a comfortable Nov. 24 afternoon in the fall of 1984 when Mississippi Valley visited Louisiana Tech in the first round of the I-AA playoffs.

Again, the Delta Devils averaged 57 points a game. Tech's highest offensive output all year was 34. The Bulldogs averaged less than 16 points a game, got shut out at Southern Miss, and won one game — against Northwestern State — just 5-0.

But the Bulldogs rallied from a 1-3 start to finish 7-4 with a share of the Southland Conference title. Still, on its home field, Tech was the underdog to that fall's football phenomenon.

"First of all their coaches came off the bus with satchels handcuffed to their wrists," said defensive backs coach and former Bulldog great John Causey, now retired in Ruston; that's how Delta Devils head coach Archie "Gunslinger" Cooley, liked to carry his team's game plan. "I thought we were about to play the FBI."

"Coming into that game and looking at game tape, you could see there were weaknesses on defense, places where we could attack," said Ruston realtor Joe Raymond Peace, former Bulldogs head coach and then the offensive line assistant. "But anybody who's averaging 57 points a game, you've got to respect that."

"What I remember most is the hype around that game," said safety Doyle Adams, now a pastor in Benton and the school's all-time career interceptions leader with 16. "The expectation was that we were going to get beat; we didn't think that."

"They came in here with that that 'point-and-a-half-a-minute offense," said Tech Athletics Hall of Famer Walter Johnson who, like Adams, is a member of the program's Top 50 Players in stadium history team. "And we beat them like…how bad?"

66-19, Walter. Thumped 'em good.

It was 10-6 at the end of the first quarter but 38-19 at the half, when this record-breaking offense had already scored its final points of the year.

"I think our defense just took it personally," said Karl Terrebonne, Tech's senior All-SLC receiver that year. "Our defense had really carried us that year; (the Bulldogs gave up an average of less than 12 points a game in '84). It was a huge deal to the defense that Rice had caught way more than 100 passes that year. They were out to prove that, 'Hey, you won't score 60 points on us.'
 
"They were tearing up people's butts all week in practice. If you were on offensive scout team that week, especially at receiver, it was miserable," said Terrebonne, retired from coaching in Texas. "We were out of school that week for Thanksgiving, so every night I'd get back to the dorm and (defensive players) Jon Paul Laque and Tank Landry and Alden Kelly, Napoleon Farrow, they'd all be in one dorm room watching film. Every night. It was a pride thing. And they were ready."

Totten completed 44 of 75 passes for 485 yards — each a I-AA record at the time —but was intercepted six times, twice by Kelly, twice by Adams, and twice by Harry Jackson.

"We did something nobody else did: we sacked the quarterback," Johnson said, who got the quick-triggered Totten once for minus-7 yards. He also had 10 tackles.
"We rushed just three but one of those was Walter Johnson; they were in Totten's face all day long," Terrebonne said. "For the defense, it was a pride thing."

Rice caught 9 passes for 155 yards, but he paid for nearly every one. And for ones he didn't catch.

"Farrow and Tank put a target on Rice," Terrebonne said. "This was the 1980s, so you've got blows to the head and when the ball's not going to him, they're still knocking him down. It got to the point where he didn't even look up on high passes.

"He might be the best ever in the NFL, but on one Saturday afternoon in Joe Aillet Stadium, he left the field crying," Terrebonne said. "You'll see a lot of Rice highlights, but you'll never see a highlight of him versus us that day."

Well…there is this one, one that lots of people seem to recall when talking about that game. It was only seconds before halftime. Tech led 38-12 when Rice caught a quick slant around the hash on the home side and turned upfield toward the south end zone for a 64-yard touchdown, a play that seemed to happen in a blink, a tiny sample size of what MVSU had been doing all season.

"Valley's driving, close to the middle of the field — I do remember this because he was so deceptively fast — and Rice catching that slant," said Doyle. "He's wasn't a blazer, but he had 'football speed.' Caught it and…gone."

"He looked like a deer running past all my defensive backs," Causey said. "We were really doing a good job on them; we had a lot of respect for those guys. They knew what they were doing. And it wasn't just Jerry Rice. But after that play I remember thinking, 'This guy is an animal.' Walking up the hill at halftime I'm telling the offensive coaches, 'Do not quit scoring! We can't play around with these guys.'"

Causey saw Rice a few years ago at an event in Las Vegas, introduced himself, and told him of his ties to Tech, and his memories of the Valley game.

"He looked at me and said, 'Wow,'" Causey said. "Then he said, 'I did not want to play football anymore after that game; you guys beat the heck out of us.'"

"We didn't stop Rice; he's the best wide receiver I've ever played against," Johnson said. "We contained him — and stopped everybody else."

But Valley couldn't stop any offensive Bulldogs. Tech turned the tables, and put "a Valley" on Valley.

"Turns out we were the team that scored 66," Peace said.

Behind Milton Roeder, Ken Hetherington, Clayton Shoemaker and the rest of the offensive line, David Green rushed for 179 yards and three touchdowns. Kyle Gandy passed just 18 times but completed 11 for 262 yards — that's a 24-yards-per-completion average — and three scores. Many of those were off play-action; Todd Breske had three catches for 119 yards, one a play-action streak down the west sideline and, 68 yards later, into the north end zone.

"They weren't as talented a group on defense as they were on offense," Peace said. "Their quarterback had a great arm and they had one of the finest receivers to ever play the game. They had some good-looking running backs. But offensively, we thought we could hold our own."

"We spotted a weakness in their man-to-man coverage and eight-man front and took advantage of it," said Tech offensive coordinator Billy Laird after the game; the former Tech quarterback star passed away three years ago. "The offensive line did an excellent job all day. This is probably the best day of offensive output I have been associated with."

Again, that's from a guy who was the first of the Woodlawn High great quarterbacks as well as a record-setter and conference champion at Tech.

"That was the first time our offense had scored 50 since I was a sophomore with (future CFL Hall-of-Famer Matt) Dunigan," Terrebonne said. "We had a great crowd (17,500). It was a beautiful afternoon. One o'clock start. A lot of students had come back from Thanksgiving; a lot of Grambling fans had come over. It gave us the ultimate confidence winning that first-round game to take us on to the national title game."

Tech would lose to Montana State, 19-6, in Charleston, S.C., three weeks later. But the week after the Mississippi Valley game, Tech knocked off Alcorn State in Jackson, Miss., 44-21. An offense that had averaged less than 15 points a game had scored 110 combined points in consecutive games.

Then the Bulldogs beat Middle Tennessee State in a tense and wonderful game, 21-13, on a bitterly cold day in Murfreesboro, before losing in a physical, tight game in Charleston.

"Mississippi Valley State is the biggest win of my career at home," said Terrebonne. "We had some really good teams in '82 and '84. A lot of the guys who played then, we try to get together every year at the beach and…funny, but the game that always comes up is the Valley game."

Maybe it's because it's such a wonderful memory, an underdog beating — by about seven touchdowns on a beautiful late-fall afternoon — college football's Story Of The Year.

"I thought our game plan was sound," said now retired-in-Ruston head coach A.L. Williams during the post-game interviews, "but not in my wildest imagination did I think that we would score the way we did."