Bus rides, a blue shed and the Bison: The small Oklahoma college that helped make Brett Karhu

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It was less than an hour’s drive on OK-9, but it might as well have been a world away when Brett Karhu first made the trip.

After playing a weekday game in front of maybe 4,000 fans, the freshman defensive end hopped in a truck with a few teammates and made the 40-mile interstate trek to Norman, Oklahoma. There, he walked into the hallowed grounds of Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium to watch the Oklahoma Sooners, just another fan in a crowd with 80,000 of them.

Over the ear-splitting noise of the crowd, a quiet thought came to Karhu that made him think otherwise.

“‘I could play here,’” New Mexico’s defensive end said Wednesday. “I’d watch and be like, ‘I can definitely play here.’”

Saturday, he will.

Only a few years after his first trip into to that legendary stadium, Karhu is back in Oklahoma — this time as a team captain leading UNM as they look to upset the 24th-ranked Sooners.

The fifth-year defensive end was granted a restraining order by a New Mexico district judge in August, preventing the NCAA from ruling him ineligible. He previously sued the NCAA in July over the application of its new eligibility policy, one he contends wrongly denied him an extra year.

His next hearing is on Oct. 8. If Karhu (four total tackles and three sacks this season) receives a preliminary injunction, he’s likely to finish the rest of the year with UNM.

If not? That might just be it for Karhu’s college career, one that was never a sure bet to make it this far.

“I was upset that I got pulled out today,” Karhu said after UNM’s 70-7 win over Mercyhurst, “because I don’t know how many more chances I’ll get.”

Saturday, he gets another, and that’s enough in and of itself. But there’s a few reasons Karhu has thought about this game for so long. Why it packs a little more of a punch than even games against Michigan, UCLA or Minnesota.

They can be found less than an hour’s drive away at Oklahoma Baptist University, a small private school in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

“I went there just as your average freshman,” he said, “and a lot of grit was built there.”

After playing its first season in 1910, Oklahoma Baptist shuttered its football program in 1940 over an outstanding debt of $10,000. Over 70 years later, the school revived the program, modernizing Crain Family Stadium ahead of the Bison’s first season back in 2013.

But even by the time Karhu arrived in 2022, there were still reminders of that dormant period. The team’s locker room and weight room was in a building players called the “Big Blue Shed,” aptly nicknamed for its paint job and the fact that it was, well, a shed.

It also had wooden lockers. The working theory is that they dated back to the old days of Bison football.

“That old,” Karhu says.

In April of Karhu’s freshman year, an EF2 tornado hit Shawnee. No one was injured, but Oklahoma Baptist’s campus suffered damages worth tens of millions of dollars.

“All the football players (were texting) in the group chat,” Karhu remembered. “And we’re like, ‘we gotta go see if the shed got knocked down – we’re getting a new locker room boys!’”

Much to their disappointment, they found the Big Blue Shed still standing – without a scratch.

“The only building that didn’t get hit,” Karhu said, “was the Big Blue Shed. It was unbelievable.”

That was life as a football player at Oklahoma Baptist — 10-hour bus trips, blue sheds and “a bunch of guys that love ball,” Karhu said with a smile.

Growing up in Frisco, Texas, Karhu himself learned to love football from his grandpa, Hugo Wenshau. The Riga, Latvia native played defensive line at Division II Minnesota State-Duluth in the 1940s — with a crooked nose to show for it, too.

Karhu’s father died when he was three, leaving Wenshau and his wife, Mary, to help his daughter, Lisa, raise two young sons. After the family moved to Texas, Wenshau signed up Karhu and his older brother, Jack, for “as many sports as he could.”

“I think it was his way to get us to cope,” Karhu said, “looking back in hindsight.”

But old habits die hard, and Wenshau was always “a football guy,” Karhu said. He taught his grandson how to throw a football and instilled a key coaching point from the first time Karhu put the pads on at seven years old.

In short: always play through the whistle.

“If I wasn’t playing through the whistle,” Karhu chuckled, “I wasn’t getting McDonalds that night.”

Like many in Frisco, Karhu dreamed of playing college football. He picked his favorite team growing up — the Oklahoma Sooners — because his family would drive through Norman on trips back to Minnesota, taking time to pass by Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

“I saw the stadium and I was like, ‘that’s my team,’” Karhu remembered.

And by the time Karhu was a junior at Independence High School, playing in college looked like a real possibility. He made 77 tackles (22 for a loss) over his last two seasons as a Knight, posting 10 sacks as a senior in one of the toughest divisions in north Texas.

Despite those stats, Karhu struggled to find any traction with Division I schools. The usual message: Thanks, but we’re full.

“There (were) Twitter (direct messages from) D1 coaches like, ‘hey, we’re super interested in you, but we got these fifth- and sixth-year seniors that just got their years back,’” Karhu remembered. “‘It’s just congesting our rosters.’”

Karhu was, however, a “five-star D2 player,” he chuckled. He received offers from schools like Colorado School of Mines, East Central University and University of Texas-Permian Basin before taking a visit to Oklahoma Baptist in his senior year.

Karhu liked the campus. He liked the coaches. He even liked that they brought out a golf cart for Wenshau to ride during the visit.

But there was an initial feeling he couldn’t shake. His brother, Jack, earned a full ride at Yale, a Division I program – was Karhu letting everybody down by playing at a Division II school?

Wenshau stepped in.

“He kinda was like, ‘you’re never gonna get to where you wanna be if you go in with that mentality,’” Karhu said. “‘You need to embrace where you’re at and everything will take care of itself.’

“Once I got to OBU, I was like, ‘O.K., I’m here, I’m gonna try and excel where I’m at and we’ll look up and see where I’m at in a couple years.’”

As a freshman with the Bison, Karhu had to adjust. At Independence, he played noseguard and even some offensive line because he was the biggest kid on the team.

In Oklahoma Baptist’s native Great American Conference? Offensive lineman regularly towered over and outweighed the 6-foot-1, 226-pound Karhu.

“I realized pretty quick that I didn’t have that typical size for a (defensive end),” he said.

Karhu also had to learn how to see the game in a way he never did before. Where he could get by on size, strength and playing through the whistle high school, he now had to read the defense before even thinking about making plays.

“I had bad eyes, horrible eyes,” he added. “That was like, the main thing we worked on: What is the offensive line giving you, and where do your eyes need to be? And that’s the first step to making plays on the football field.”

That first year, Karhu found a way to do so as the Bison went 1-10. In the summer, he worked and trained in Shawnee, feeling as if he gained an edge by managing both – not many Division II players, he said, could afford a similar setup.

The balancing act paid off: As a sophomore, Karhu posted 40 tackles and 11.5 sacks on his way to a Don Hansen All-America honorable mention. The Bison finished 6-5 that year, the program’s most recent winning record to date.

At the end of the year, Karhu entered the transfer portal and committed to Memphis. A year later, he transferred to New Mexico. This summer, he received a restraining order allowing him to return.

Now he’s back in Oklahoma, in the most unusual of circumstances.

“It’s definitely full-circle,” he said, “for me personally.”

When Karhu talks about Oklahoma Baptist, he speaks with a sense of gratitude that’s hard to miss. The reasons why ae easy to place: After all, it was the place where he first met his wife, Hadley, a former Oklahoma Baptist cheerleader and STUNT competitor.

Where he lifted in the Big Blue Shed (it was later painted green) alongside players who went without athletic scholarships, paying out of their own pockets to play for the Bison.

“Those guys truly love ball,” Karhu said. “They push you every day.”

Where Wenshau watched him play for the last time, sitting in the front row at Crain Memorial Stadium.

“He couldn’t walk up the stands anymore,” Karhu said.

Wenshau died on March 19, 2024. He was 84.

“I talk about it all the time with my family – you know, how proud he would be,” Karhu added. “I pray before every game – I think it’s hard to say he’s not playing a role in this, in my opinion.”

Karhu admits the legal proceedings around his eligibility have been stressful. He tries to block it out of his mind, even if it's hard to not acknowledge the possibility of a ruling not going his way.

“I don’t want to take anything for granted,” he said, “because this could be stripped away from me just as quick as I got it.”

But for now, what was once an hour’s drive and a world away all at once is within Karhu’s reach.

Surreal doesn’t do it justice.

“Taking that field in (Gaylor Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, it’s gonna be awesome,” he said.

Sean Reider covers college football and other sports for the Journal. You can reach him at sreider@abqjournal.com or via X at @lenaweereider.

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