Chances are Saturday’s Kansas-Central Michigan football game will last about three hours, give or take five minutes.

Of course, if the contest were being televised, it would consume even more time because of extra commercial breaks. Overtime would add to the length, too.

Nothing can be done, however, to take a dramatic chunk out of a college game. A 21â2-hour game is an impossibility.

And yet when I noticed that Kansas State was opening against Auburn on Saturday night I was reminded of the time nearly 20 years ago when the Jayhawks made the same trip to southeast Alabama.

What was so special about the Kansas-Auburn football game of 1988? Records aren’t kept in the category, but that game had to have been the fastest ever played in the modern era. The elapsed time was two hours and 17 minutes, or an eyebrow-raising 43 minutes shy of three hours.

Surely, it was a low-scoring game, you’re thinking. Nope, Auburn won, 56-7. In other words, even with 10 kickoffs, the contest didn’t last much longer than the average college basketball game.

In essence, then, the only way that KU-Auburn game could have been played in that short a time span was for the timekeeper to have a slow finger on the clock.

And that’s exactly what happened. With Auburn ahead 42-0 at halftime, the clock ticked on longer than it should have following incomplete passes, players running out of bounds, chains moving after first downs, etc.

Curiously, though, no one noticed at the time. That includes me and all the other sports writers who were covering the game that night in the Deep South.

About a week later, an Atlanta newspaper broke the story about the fast-moving clock. The supervisor of Southeastern Conference officials didn’t deny it, saying the unusual tactic was legal under NCAA rules because both coaches had agreed to it.

Auburn’s Pat Dye said he OKed the speed-up because the referee had come up to him prior to the start of the third quarter and told him first-year KU coach Glen Mason had initiated the idea.

According to Bobby Gaston, supervisor of SEC officials at the time, Mason had mentioned to the referee that he wouldn’t like to see any of his guys get hurt, so the ref went to Dye and the pact was completed.

Did Mason really beg for mercy? Mason never admitted as much, saying later he had made the comment to the ref because he was worried about the possibility of one of his players being struck by lightning.

Rain had fallen earlier in the day and it was cloudy that night, but no precipitation fell during the game. Nevertheless, Mason vowed he had seen lightning in the distance.

If Mason did throw in the towel that night, I can’t blame him. I covered Kansas football for 37 years and that ’88 bunch was the worst KU team I ever saw. Mason had a little talent on offense in his first season, but none – absolutely none – on defense.

Two good things did come out of that September evening, though.

One, the Jayhawks earned a $400,000 paycheck, the largest road guarantee in school history, and two, I had at least 45 extra minutes to pound out copy and make the Journal-World’s press deadline.