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buddyrabrahams · 7 years

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10 best coaches in college football

Who are the truly elite coaches in college football? Many coaches have an argument that they should be considered elite. Many have been successful in their careers, but a few go above and beyond, winning consistently no matter where they go. We have identified just who those coaches are.

With the 2017 season getting closer and closer, here is a list of the 10 best coaches in college football.

10) Tom Herman, Texas

One might argue that it’s too soon for Herman to appear on a list like this. After all, he has just two seasons as a head coach to his name, but he’s 22-4 in those two seasons, including a 13-1 inaugural season with the Houston Cougars. They slipped to 9-3 a season later, but even that year featured victories over two top-five teams at the time in Oklahoma and Louisville.

Though Houston lost a few surprising games during his tenure, Herman had them ready for the big ones. Herman’s Cougars never lost to an AP Top 25 opponent or a Power-5 foe, going 6-0 and 5-0 respectively. He parlayed his success into a move to Texas, where, by his own admission, he has his work cut out for him.

It may take time, but it’s hard to imagine him not being a success there.

9) Mark Dantonio, Michigan State

Dantonio’s star has indisputably fallen after a miserable 3-9 season in 2016 plagued by issues on and off the field, but one bad year doesn’t erase what he had accomplished at Michigan State before that.

When he took over the Spartans’ program in 2007, they were a middling group not on the national radar, being dubbed “little brother” by in-state rival Michigan. Despite no top-tier recruiting classes, Dantonio had the Spartans in the top 15 within four years, ultimately winning the school’s first Rose Bowl in 26 years back in 2014. In spite of losing numerous pieces from that team to the NFL, he followed up the Rose Bowl season with Michigan State’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff two years later.

Dantonio boasts a 90-42 career record at Michigan State and three Big Ten titles. It’s fair to say that he’ll have the Spartans bouncing back from their terrible 2016 sooner rather than later.

8) Bob Stoops, Oklahoma

Sooner fans aren’t always happy with Stoops, but he gives the Oklahoma program remarkable consistency and a chance to compete for a championship virtually every season. Stoops has a remarkable ten Big 12 titles to his name in 18 years at the school and has never once missed out on a bowl game. In 11 of his 18 years, his Sooners have finished in the top ten, appeared in four BCS Championship games, and he’s the only BCS-era coach to have won all four of the traditional “BCS bowls” — the Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Fiesta.

Stoops’s detractors do have some valid criticisms.

Despite being in regular contention, he has only won one national championship, and that was back in 2000. He’s just 9-9 in bowl games, with a sub-.500 record in BCS/College Football Playoff appearances. Still, there’s something to be said for consistency, and Stoops has never had an outright bad season. Oklahoma is pretty much guaranteed to be a factor nationally under him.

7) Jimbo Fisher, Florida State

Jimbo has been nothing but a success since succeeding Bobby Bowden as Florida State coach. He once led the team to 29 consecutive victories across three seasons, including a national title in 2013. The departure of quarterback Jameis Winston for the NFL only proved a temporary stumbling block; Fisher led the teams after his departure to consecutive 10-win seasons, including an Orange Bowl win in 2016.

In seven seasons at Florida State, Fisher has gone 78-17, posted a 5-2 mark in bowl games, and never finished a season ranked outside of the top 25. He was given the extremely difficult task of succeeding an iconic coach, and he has done so with distinction. Moreover, he’s committed to Florida State, having dismissed interest from a top SEC school twice.

6) Chris Petersen, Washington

Petersen rose to national prominence on January 1, 2007, when his remarkably gutsy playcalling — who could forget the Statue of Liberty play? — led the unheralded Boise State Broncos to a Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma, completing a 13-0 season. Peterson ended up going 92-12 at Boise, adding another BCS bowl win along the way, before finally being tempted away by Washington.

It took Petersen two seasons to get the Huskies into their stride, but they did so in 2016, romping through Pac-12 play on the way to a College Football Playoff appearance. It marked his third BCS/CFP appearance in 11 seasons as a head coach, none of them coming at traditional power programs. He’s one of the brightest offensive minds in the nation, and he has the Washington program trending toward sustained national prominence.

5) Gary Patterson, TCU

When Patterson took over the Horned Frogs job in 2000, the school was in the Western Athletic Conference, on the verge of a move to Conference USA. The TCU program has grown in a major way in the decade and a half since, and Patterson has masterminded every step of it. Their rise from one of college football’s “mid-major” programs to Big 12 contender under Patterson is no coincidence.

A brilliant defensive coach, Patterson has a number of signature achievements.

TCU’s time in the Mountain West established them as a national power, with Patterson taking the school to two BCS bowls, including a 13-0 season in 2010 capped with a Rose Bowl win and a No. 2 end-of-season rank in both the AP and Coaches Poll. Some feared that a move to the Big 12 might be too much for the school, but Patterson proved the doubters wrong with a 12-1 season in 2014 and an 11-2 follow-up the next year, both seasons ending with top-ten rankings. He’s succeeded with TCU at pretty much every level of competition.

4) Dabo Swinney, Clemson

Swinney’s time at Clemson has essentially made “Clemsoning” a thing of the past, with the program becoming one of college football’s consistent best. After Tommy Bowden failed to post double-digit wins in any of his years at Clemson, Swinney did it in his third full season of 2011 and has done it every year since. Clemson has won six of their last seven bowl appearances under him, with the only loss coming in 2016’s National Championship Game.

The numbers say it all for Swinney: an 89-28 career record and consecutive title game appearances, with the second resulting in a national championship. Plus, the guy seems like an absolute blast to play for.

He could move even higher on lists like this if his success continues.

3) Jim Harbaugh, Michigan

Love him or hate him, there is no denying that Harbaugh is a serial winner. He turned the University of San Diego into an FCS power, made Stanford a top-five team in just four seasons, and promptly jumped to the NFL, where he went 44-19 with the San Francisco 49ers, with an NFC championship in 2013. Frankly, nobody would bat an eye if he went back to the NFL; he’s proven he can win there.

That said, Harbaugh seems perfectly happy at his alma mater of Michigan.

True to his reputation, he returned them to credibility the instant he set foot on campus in 2015, and quickly restored them to national power status on the field as well. He beat expectations with a 10-3 season in 2015, and had the Wolverines in College Football Playoff contention for virtually the entire 2016 season. He’s a gifted recruiter who loves to do unconventional but really cool things with his players, and Michigan will be a national power as long as he’s at the helm.

2) Urban Meyer, Ohio State

A three-time national champion at two different schools, Meyer’s resume speaks for itself. He won at Bowling Green; he moved to Utah and promptly posted an undefeated season in year two; he jumped to Florida and posted one of the most successful stretches in college football history. One of two coaches with multiple titles, he took his magic to Columbus, where he grabbed a program struggling after the Jim Tressel-era scandals and promptly won 61 of his first 67 games at Ohio State and won the national championship in his third season there. It took until his fourth season with the Buckeyes for him to lose a regular season conference tilt.

Meyer’s impact has been felt throughout college football, with his acclaimed spread offense sparking a revolution. He’s a top-level recruiter who has replenished Ohio State with bags of talent every season no matter who leaves for the NFL. The same will be true in 2017.

1) Nick Saban, Alabama

There can be only one, and Saban remains at the top of the coaching mountain.

He’s a five-time national champion, including three in four seasons between 2009 and 2012. He has made Alabama the unquestioned top program in college football, going 114-19 under his tenure — not counting five vacated wins due to violations committed under predecessor Mike Shula. In fact, six of Saban’s 19 career Alabama losses came in his first season there — he’s lost just 13 games in the last nine years.

Saban’s Alabama teams churn out tons of NFL talent, perpetually finish in the top ten, and always contend for the national title. His standards are ridiculously high, but are vital in pushing his ridiculously talented teams to the next level. The guy has been talked about in the same sentence as Bear Bryant and even floated as the best collegiate coach ever. There can be no disputing his spot on this list.

from Larry Brown Sports http://ift.tt/2pXMTEW

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junker-town · 7 years

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How Mike Gundy came home and built Oklahoma State football

(with a little help from T. Boone Pickens)

STILLWATER, Okla. — “Sorry I’m late. We’re trying to figure out why we got our asses kicked on Saturday.”

Mike Gundy is only 10 minutes late for our scheduled chat, but considering this is game week, anything short of cancellation feels early.

Gundy’s Oklahoma State Cowboys just lost their first game of the year, a glitchy, unlucky 44-31 defeat to TCU. But there’s no time for wallowing: they have to get ready for a Saturday night track meet in Lubbock.

It wasn’t that long ago that a 13-point home loss to a top-15 team would be considered a sign of progress for an aggressively directionless Oklahoma State program. From the time the Cowboys joined the Big 8 in 1960 to when Gundy was hired as head coach in 2005, OSU finished the season ranked in the AP poll just five times.

Two of those finishes came with Gundy behind center.

Since Gundy’s hire, the Cowboys have risen to an entirely different level of sustainable success. They won their first Big 12 title in 2011, destroying OU and coming within an eyelash of the BCS Championship game. They have won at least nine games in seven of their last nine seasons and will probably do so again this fall.

They have found this level of success under an unrepentant Okie. And the sneaky brilliance of Gundy the Okie, along with Oklahoma State’s cultivation of another famous alum — the billionaire T. Boone Pickens — is at the heart of how the coach has led the program to new heights.

Yes, you know about the hair. You know about “I’m a man.” But focusing on one story and a hairstyle obscures the essence; Gundy is Okie to the core. That means wood grain in his office. It means hunting on the weekends. And it might mean coyote traps, too.

“He had this coyote trap,” Oklahoma State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich says of his boss. “It was a thing that had like a squirrel’s tail on it, and it would whip around like this [makes fast, circling motion] and made this crazy noise. It made the sound of a bunny dying. It’s the worst sound you could ever hear. And he turned it on, and this thing would go crazy. He’d get a kick out of that.”

Or there was the stray dog Gundy once found. “He had him trained in a day, I think,” Yurcich says. “The dog did everything he told him to do — I’m like, ‘This guy is the head coach ... he’s a dog whisperer...’”

Gundy’s success is undeniable. So is the fact that he is always 100 percent himself.

“We have created a monster that now you have to feed.”

Oklahoma State athletics

Before.

Google Earth

After.

This is a new OSU. I grew up in Oklahoma (my parents graduated from Midwest City High School 15 years before Gundy), and I attended high school and college games at what was then Lewis Field from 1993 through the mid-2000s. I visited again recently, and it took a long time to get my bearings. This place has changed.

The harder it is to get somewhere, the harder it is to work up the motivation to leave.

Granted, the small-town vibe has not. Stillwater is still a town of under 50,000 people. It’s still structured so that virtually everything OSU-related that you need is within about two minutes of two streets — the east-west Hall of Fame Ave. and the north-south Main St. The athletic facilities are still but a short walk from the vaunted Eskimo Joe’s and the downtown area.

It’s also still a chore to get to town, about an hour’s drive north and east of Oklahoma City. The harder it is to get somewhere, the harder it is to work up the motivation to leave.

The small city means the new facilities carry even more gravitas. What is now Boone Pickens Stadium now holds close to 60,000. The football offices, housed on the west side of the stadium where only bleachers used to stand, are immense.

“It’s an unbelievable transformation,” says Dave Hunziker, the voice of Oklahoma State football and basketball. “Back when I arrived here [in 2001], a crowd of 36,000 or 37,000 was considered a nice crowd. Now it’s 56, 57,000 on a weekly basis.”

“For a long time here, we would have 32,000 faithful that would come to the games,” Gundy says. “Well, now we have 35,000 people that tailgate. This place is full. The RV lot is full. The RV parking lot used to be a gravel parking lot. There was two people in there.”

These fans certainly don’t expect to lose to TCU at home anymore.

“We have essentially created a monster that now you have to feed,” Gundy says.

“You can go just about anywhere, and it's going to be about the same.”

Gundy could have easily ended up about an hour and a half south in Norman. That was the original idea as he was wrapping up his senior year at Midwest City High in 1985.

“I eventually committed to OU,” he says, “but Jamelle Holieway was starting there and won the [1985] national championship. He had three years left, so I was smart enough to say, look, their defense is always gonna be awesome, and he just won a national championship. They only play Texas and Nebraska every year, that have the same level of talent as them. How am I ever going to break in and be the starter?

“Because of my ties to my family and not wanting to be too far away, I started looking real seriously at Oklahoma State.” It worked out pretty well for everyone involved.

Despite head coach Pat Jones’ run-heavy tendencies, and despite the presence of incredible backs like Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas, Gundy still finished his career as the conference’s all-time leading passer. But OSU’s star power inadvertently revealed its limitations.

Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images

In the 1980s, the school employed Jimmy Johnson (who left in 1984 to take over at Miami) and Jones, fielded offenses with Gundy, Thomas, Sanders, and Hart Lee Dykes, and fielded defenses with Leslie O’Neal and Dexter Manley. Stars, all of them. But between 1977 and 1994, the Cowboys went 0-17-1 against Oklahoma, and between 1962 and 2002, they went 0-35-1 against Nebraska. Those brilliant teams of ‘87 and ‘88 went 0-4 against the Sooners and Huskers and 20-0 against everybody else. And after flying close to the sun in the late-1980s, they ended up getting burned by the NCAA and dealing with years of sanctions.

Things change. OSU won three of its last five against Nebraska before the Huskers left for the Big Ten. And while the Cowboys still lose more than they win against OU, they’ve beaten the Sooners four times since 2001.

Gundy’s return has a lot to do with it. And it was a winding road for him to come back home. He joined Jones’ staff directly out of college and was named offensive coordinator before he turned 27. But thanks in part to NCAA sanctions, Jones’ tenure ended poorly in the mid-1990s. Gundy set off on his own.

He spent one year as Baylor’s receivers coach under Chuck Reedy before a 4-7 season left everybody unemployed; he then spent four years under Ron Vanderlinden at Maryland before suffering the same fate.

“Being fired twice taught me a lot. It made me realize that having a job in coaching, it's not greener everywhere else. All the issues I thought Oklahoma State had, well, Baylor's got problems and Maryland's got problems. I realized that you can go just about anywhere, and it's going to be about the same.”

In 2001, Miles brought him back to Stillwater as offensive coordinator. And when Miles took the LSU job after four seasons, Gundy replaced him as head coach.

“Slow blinkers, hard to play the game.”

To John Smith, maybe the greatest amateur wrestler of all time, there is value in playing other sports and failing at them. “It’s humbling. You can be great at wrestling, but you can’t hit a baseball. That’s how it was for me.” He thinks it can lead to you appreciating your own gifts, and your best sport, a bit more.

That’s not necessarily something Mike Gundy would know about. “You know, Mike was good at everything,” Smith says. “I think he went with the sport he was best in, but Mike was a good basketball player, good baseball player, he won junior high state [in wrestling] when he was in junior high. Just an all-around good athlete.”

Smith is a former national champion and Olympic gold medalist. Just two years after his second Olympic gold in 1992, he was leading the OSU wrestling program to a national title as head coach. His Cowboys won four in a row from 2003 to 2006. He is the most accomplished Oklahoma State athlete of all time.

Smith was two grades ahead of Gundy and ended up attending Del City High, Midwest City’s chief rival. But the Gundy and Smith kids grew up around each other and birthed one hell of a Mid-Del dynasty.

OSU Athletics

Gundy and Hart Lee Dykes

Two of John’s brothers (Leroy and Pat) and two of his nephews (Mark and Chris Perry) all won national titles on the mat. Meanwhile, Cale Gundy succeeded Mike as quarterback at Midwest City, attended Oklahoma, and now serves as OU’s offensive co-coordinator. Every coach says he builds a family environment. Thanks to two coaches in particular, “family environment” is almost literal in Stillwater.

“The best thing my dad ever did was force me into wrestling,” Gundy says. “I’m not a very big person, but it changed my strength, changed my balance, changed my work ethic. And I was good at it. John and I grew up together and traveled around the country wrestling in difference places. That did a lot for me.”

Depending on who you ask, though, Gundy ended up sticking with either his best sport ... or his second-best sport. His first love was baseball, and he played for Gary Ward’s Cowboys as a freshman, but this was a tricky time to distinguish yourself in Stillwater on the diamond. Ward’s team was in the middle of an astounding 16-year Big 8 title run, and his primary positions, shortstop and third base, were filled by studs: Robin Ventura and Monty Fariss. “So when they started, I came back to spring [football] and never went back.”

He wishes he hadn’t. “Biggest mistake I have ever made. I finished at 6'0, 190, and I was probably big enough to play and get drafted and go take a chance if that was what I wanted to do. I wasn't big enough for football.”

And yet, football has paid off pretty well. Gundy believes, like many other coaches, that experience in many sports, instead of single-sport specialization, is a good indicator of future football success. Versatility in athleticism can be important, but versatility of the mind matters, too. “The guys who play multiple sports are almost always your best athletes,” he says.

“Besides, the game's changed so much that you're gonna need guys that are cerebral players. You've gotta think so much now, and you've gotta think fast. Slow blinkers, hard to play the game.”

“He wants you to think he’s just some country hick.”

Playing multiple sports certainly helped, but Gundy’s athletic success also came between the ears. Don’t let the hair fool you. Even if you’re smaller than everybody else on the field, you can make a lot of ground by out-thinking everybody.

“He’s unbelievably smart,” Hunziker says, “and one of the ways he’s smart is, he’s got a lot of people fooled. They just think he’s this Okie — and I say ‘Okie’ in a stereotypical way. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Every decision he makes, every day, is calculated.

‘Oh, it’s all about the mullet. It’s all about rattlesnake hunting.’ In the meantime, he’s figured out four new ways to do things a lot of people haven’t even thought about yet.

“He thinks through everything he does, and he’s so innovative here. Offensively, the things they did back in 2010-11, the start of the diamond formation, that spread like wildfire. What he decided to do in terms of conditioning and deciding that hitting during the season, having full-bore scrimmages and tackling a lot, was counter-productive. People thought that was nuts! Now everybody does it.”

The list of innovative ideas is long, and Hunziker knows them all. “But again, people think, ‘Oh, it’s all about the mullet. It’s all about rattlesnake hunting.’ In the meantime, he’s figured out four new ways to do things a lot of people haven’t even thought about yet.”

Every Okie man and woman thinks they have wit and common sense just because Will Rogers lived there. Most of them are painfully incorrect. Most think only others need to heed “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging,” or “Never let yesterday use up too much of today,” or “I never met a man I didn't like.”

That said, the OSU program was built by not one or two, but three straight-forward, common-sense Okies. And Gundy might have actually been the least important of the three.

“Man, I'm glad I wasn't very smart.”

Before this run could begin, the school first needed to make the perfect athletic director hire. It didn’t have to look very far. Mike Holder was hired to replace Harry Birdwell in September 2005, just two games into the Gundy era. Holder led the OSU men’s golf team to eight national titles in over three decades as head coach, and he showed similar prowess in a much larger role.

“I think Coach Holder’s done a great job of hiring coaches,” Smith says. “There’s been some of these sports that historically we’ve never been competitive in” — cross country, tennis — “all of a sudden, we’re competitive. I think that’s a big difference in the overall performance of our athletic program.”

Indeed, OSU has finished in the top 30 of the Learfield Cup standings for five straight years, peaking at 13th in 2016. “Those things don’t happen with 17 programs,” Smith says. “It’s gonna be hard to fall in there unless you’re running 20 or 30 programs. It’s effort on his part to ensure to some of our coaches, ‘We’re behind you, and we care as much about your sport as any sport.’

“A lot of things seemed to come together [on his watch], and that wasn’t an accident.”

Holder, a native of Ardmore, Okla., has been around Stillwater even longer than either Smith or Gundy. Nobody could have known what the OSU program needs better than him.

Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

“When I took this thing over,” Gundy says, “I was 37, and I was just so stubborn and had so much energy and was so confident that I wasn't smart enough to know this was a damn hard job. I loved OSU, I believed in myself, and I said we could do this.

“Now, once we kind of accomplished it and I got my second contract, I started to look back and think, ‘Man, I'm glad I wasn't very smart.’ This is really hard. What I had the first three years here was, our athletic director, Mike Holder, he never wavered for one second. Any time something got brought up, he said ‘He's the right guy, he's our coach, end of story.’”

Holder is what you might call a coach’s AD. That makes sense considering he was a coach to begin with. Giving his charges room to breathe and running cover for them has paid off more often than not.

Long-term comfort allowed Gundy to avoid short-term patches. “That propelled me into not trying to cut corners and bring a bunch of JUCO kids in and get the quick fix,” he says. “There are no quick fixes at Oklahoma State. Everything that we do has to be well-thought through, the planning has to take place. We can't burn a couple of years — we'll struggle for five more. He allowed me to do that. And then we started winning, and after that there weren't any issues.”

Holder’s biggest accomplishment, however, didn’t have anything to do with his coaches. It was in turning a certain mega-booster into a master-booster.

In December 2005, he convinced alum T. Boone Pickens, who had already earned naming rights to the stadium for previous contributions — among other things, he had donated $70 million in 2003 — to drop an extra $165 million on athletic upgrades. The next year, Pickens contributed another $100 million the academic arm of the school. At this point, he’s contributed over $500 million to his alma mater.

And to think, Pickens would have been a Texas A&M alum if he hadn’t lost his basketball scholarship.

“You're not gonna get results if you don't shoot the gun.”

In the personality department, it takes quite a bit to outshine Gundy. Pickens might the only guy who can do it. A native of Holdenville, Okla., Pickens conquered the corporate world in the 1980s, perfecting the art of the hostile takeover while wearing plaid shirts on book covers and sporting a thick accent.

Pickens holed up in his Texas offices, combined the wisdom gleaned from analytics, research, patience — “Don’t rush the monkey, and you’ll see a better show,” he says in The First Billion Is the Hardest, a book in which he also says “The higher a monkey climbs a tree, the more people can see his ass.” — and decades of experience to pick his targets, then showed up on Wall Street to buy all the shares of your company. He combined an even temperament with common sense and made a metric ton of money, for both himself and shareholders, in the process.

In a way, Pickens and Gundy have gone about their business in similar ways. Neither has worried himself with conventional wisdom, and both have tried to stay a step ahead. As Pickens says in The First Billion, “My strategy [in the 1970s] was the same as today: staying current on every possible source of information, investing on the fundamentals of supply and demand, and sticking with my conviction over the long haul.” Thanks in part to Pickens’ investment and Holder’s resolve, Gundy had the time and space to do the same.

Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

T. Boone Pickens, 2016

“Mike Holder essentially got me this job,” Gundy says. “Boone essentially financed the product. And then I ran the organization. Boone is the main force — if he wouldn't have said, ‘I'm gonna build 'em a new stadium, build 'em a new facility,’ I don't think we could have attracted enough kids here to have the success that we've had.

“Holder was essentially like water dripping on a rock, year after year after year, he finally got him to say okay, here's your $300 million. That's what Holder does. He wore the guy out.”

Gundy’s favorite Booneism has quite the Will Rogers vibe: “A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan any day.”

“I use that all the time with our team, with my kids at home — and it is true,” says Gundy. “When you're in charge, when you're parenting or coaching or running an organization, if you don't have direction, nobody has direction.

“...He'll also say this: You have to aim and fire. You can just aim and aim and aim and never pull the trigger. He said you're not gonna get results if you don't shoot the gun. There's too many leaders, people in charge, that cannot make a decision based on what will happen from that decision. He said, if it's wrong, just fix it.”

Just fix it. From Pickens’ first autobiography, Boone: “There’s usually more than one way to solve a problem. When you’re in trouble, you look at your pluses, stay cool, and ask yourself how you can get your cart out of the ditch.”

Gundy might have become known for a 2007 outburst and a magical 2011 run, but his greatest ability is getting his cart out of the proverbial ditch.

In 2009, when his Cowboys finished a disappointing 9-4 after reaching as high as fifth in the country, he hired offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen and revamped his offense. Two years later, they nearly won the national title.

In 2014, in the middle of a treacherous five-game losing streak, he went with a youth movement, basically handing the offense over to two freshmen, quarterback Mason Rudolph and receiver James Washington.

And in a Saturday night track meet in Lubbock late this September, following a disappointing loss, Washington, now the second-leading receiver in school history. caught nine passes for 127 yards. Rudolph, the all-time leading passer, scored the game-winning touchdown with a minute left. Getting the cart out of a ditch in 2014 helped the Pokes to avoid one in 2017.

John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Read more of the interview between Connelly and Gundy.

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junker-town · 7 years

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For better and worse, Bob Stoops was new-school on the field and old-school off it

The OU coach constantly evolved his team, but didn’t show that level of careful thinking when it came to discipline.

When Stoops came to Norman, OU hadn’t finished above .500 in five years. Nick Saban was entering his fifth year at Michigan State and had just a series of six-win or six-loss seasons to show for it. Urban Meyer was receivers coach at Notre Dame; Dabo Swinney receivers coach at Alabama. Tulane was coming off of an unbeaten season.

Things change, even in a college football universe that sometimes moves with glacial speed. The names changed, and the sport changed, but there OU was, winning every other Big 12 title for what seemed like eternity. He was as constant a figure as the unrealistic fans he served.

I was driving through Oklahoma City back from Texas on January 1, 2000, the day after Oklahoma had lost to Ole Miss in the Independence Bowl. In front of a crowd of nearly 50,000 in Shreveport, in their first bowl since a 1994 Copper Bowl pasting, OU had trailed 21-3 at halftime, stormed back to take a 25-24 lead with two minutes left, then fallen via 39-yard field goal at the buzzer. I have no idea why I was listening to sports talk radio, but a man called in to rail on the Sooners, their rinky-dink offense, and their gutless defense.

I like to imagine that this guy calls the same station to deliver the same rant after each OU loss. He finished the call with the three magic words every fanbase recognizes from local sports radio and message boards. If the Sooners were going to keep this know-it-all coach around, with these know-nothing assistants, then they were settling for mediocrity.

Coaching is the ultimate thankless profession, particularly in the Internet era. But you're paid handsomely for the derision. Stoops, in particular, is paid really well. He has won 160 games in 15 seasons, nine top-10 finishes, and four BCS bowls, and he begins Year 16 predicted to make the first College Football Playoff, land top-10 finish number 10, and win conference title number eight.

Somebody, somewhere, will call that mediocrity. Oklahoma seems okay with it.

From a national title win in his second year to a Playoff bid in his second-to-last, Stoops’ 18-year Oklahoma career was defined by on-field renewal.

Their down periods were down months, and no matter the state of the Big 12, Stoops’ Sooners were the face of the conference.

When you stick around for 18 years, a lot is going to change. Stoops entered a Big 12 that had in its inaugural years been dominated by Big 12 North teams. South teams had won two of the first three titles, sure, but both came via upset wins.

Nebraska had won three national titles between 1994-97 and was about to generate three more top-10 finishes under Frank Solich.

Colorado had hit a bump but was just two years removed from three straight top-10 finishes and five in eight years. The Buffaloes would nearly make the BCS title game in 2001.

Kansas State nearly made the national title game in 1998, falling short only due to a conference title game upset. The Wildcats had won 59 games in six years and had three top-10 finishes in the last four years. They would have three more such finishes in the next four years.

With help from recent Texas hire Mack Brown, Stoops transformed the conference and reversed the geographic balance. When the Big 12 led the spread offense train, Stoops’ Sooners were the front car. When the Big 12 nearly fell apart in the early-2010s, OU was still the most likely title-caliber squad.

Stoops hired young coaches, identified early trends — from the air raid to the mid-2000s spread to the nickel defense — and won as consistently as any coach not named Saban or Meyer.

Lincoln Riley broke down at last week’s press conference. The new OU head coach was a quarterback at Texas Tech in 2002 and spent his entire career under either Stoops (2015-present), Stoops disciple Mike Leach (2003-09), or Leach disciple Ruffin McNeill (2010-14).

Oklahoma is no stranger to hiring an exciting head coach; Bud Wilkinson was just 30 when he took over in 1946, Barry Switzer was 35 in 1973, and Stoops was 38 in 1999. Riley was just the latest young assistant to get early breaks on the Stoops tree.

Brent Venables was 28 when Stoops made him his defensive co-coordinator in 1999. Leach, Mike Stoops, Bo Pelini, Josh Heupel, and Chuck Long were under 40 when given primary roles. Stoops’ first staff featured six assistants under 40 and three under 30. In a way, this was paying it forward; he had been 30 when Kansas State’s Bill Snyder made him defensive co-coordinator in 1991.

Stoops valued quality of experience over quantity. He valued hunger, confidence, and new ideas — "I want guys that I feel will be head coaches, that kind of ability, that kind of attitude,” he once told me — and he made sure that assistants didn’t work to burnout stage. He was conscious of wanting to remain healthy and have a life to live after coaching. That made him an assistant coach’s dream boss.

He lived the sleep-in-the-office lifestyle as an assistant for Bill Snyder at Kansas State, and then he learned in his three years working for Steve Spurrier at Florida that it was possible to win and spend time with your family. ... When assistants came from other programs to work for Stoops at Oklahoma and he encouraged them to get out of the office and see their families, their reaction was almost universal. I didn’t know it could be like this.

The tradeoff was that if a hire wasn’t working, he reserved the right to a new hire. In 2015, he replaced Heupel, his title-winning quarterback who was fielding good but not great offenses, with Riley. In 2012, he let Venables leave for Clemson after what was perceived as a defensive funk. (Not every move was a good move, but he was unafraid of change.)

Stoops was a great mentor for new-school coaches, but make no mistake: he was old school. And that was a problem sometimes.

First, he expressed the oldest of old-school views on matters like player compensation.

"I tell my guys all the time," Stoops says, "you're not the first one to spend a hungry Sunday without any money." [...]

"You know what school would cost here for non-state guy? Over $200,000 for room, board and everything else," Stoops said. "That's a lot of money. Ask the kids who have to pay it back over 10-15 years with student loans. You get room and board, and we'll give you the best nutritionist, the best strength coach to develop you, the best tutors to help you academically, and coaches to teach you and help you develop. How much do you think it would cost to hire a personal trainer and tutor for 4-5 years?"

When it came to disciplinary issues, he was thoughtful enough to treat every incident as its own unique case. Whatever nuance he showed, however, went out the window when it came time to explain his decisions. He grew testy and impatient when challenged, and didn’t care much about PR battles.

He proved willing to grant second chances and sacrifice short-term win totals. He dismissed All-American defensive tackle Dusty Dvoracek for the 2004 season — one that began with massive national title hype — following a nasty assault incident, then brought him back in 2005. He dismissed starters Bomar and J.D. Quinn in 2006 following NCAA allegations of improper benefits. He suspended all-conference tackle DeMarcus Granger before the 2008 Fiesta Bowl after an alleged shoplifting incident.

However, he publicly appeared unwise when it came to violence against women.

After an apparent blessing from Missouri coach Gary Pinkel, he took on Dorial Green-Beckham in 2014 following the star receiver’s dismissal from Mizzou. (Green-Beckham went pro after a mandatory redshirt season and never suited up for the Sooners.)

He suspended five-star running back Joe Mixon for a season, instead of dismissing the eventual star outright, following a well-publicized assault of a woman in Norman.

He recruited another eventual star, Dede Westbrook, despite previous domestic arrests.

Linebacker Frank Shannon was suspended — not by Stoops, but by the school itself — for alleged sexual misconduct. When his suspension was up, he was welcomed back to the team.

That at least three of these players had All-American potential probably helped their cases, but in a vacuum, the decisions could be defended as opportunities to help the players grow as people. In Dvoracek, he had the perfect example of what a second chance can do for somebody.

Stoops didn’t hurry to defend these moves, however, and the resulting perception was one of a program that didn’t treat issues with the gravity they deserved.

And in Mixon’s case, even if the intent was to give him a second chance, shielding him from media for over a year only made things worse.

Since he punched a woman in the face so hard that she had to have eight hours’ worth of reconstructive surgery, he hasn’t had any incidents worse than yelling at a parking attendant. But he punched a woman in the face so hard that she had to have eight hours’ worth of reconstructive surgery.

And it was caught on camera. And he was shielded from media for almost two years afterward, which had the effect of reviving the incident over and over with no resolution.

(Stoops appeared to acknowledge late in 2016 that dismissal of Mixon would have been the right course, though it’s fair to note that this is a lot easier to say after a player’s career is over and after he has helped you win games.)

In recent months, Mixon has set out to become the type of rehabilitation case we say we want to see. He served his suspension without incident, and he and his victim made public peace with each other.

The best-case scenario is that Mixon, Green-Beckham, etc., become Dvoraceks: examples of people who made extreme mistakes but became role models for others.

But Stoops’ reputation needs repair. It will be further sculpted by how these former players develop (or don’t) off the field.

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