Published: August 30, 2008 01:55 am            

Stoops at 10 years deserves a top 10 list

Commentary

Ten years.

Ten years on the job for Bob Stoops.

Almost a hundred wins against about 20 losses. Three trips to the national championship game and five Big 12 titles. A Heisman Trophy winner and two runners-up.

It’s been an occasionally wild ride.

It calls for a top 10 list.

Not of bests, or worsts, or players, or opponents, but just stuff, in no particular order.



10. The cult of Bob

Stoops has become part of the landscape, the nomenclature and vernacular.

The visor, for instance. It is Stoopsian, his calling card and a fashion statement, all at once. He wears shorts to press conferences and khakis on the sideline, but catching Stoops without a visor is like spotting President Lincoln without a beard.

And his motto: “No excuses.”

First spoken on the steps of Evans Hall. He was explaining a philosophy offered a slogan instead. It’s still going. Like Steve Martin’s “Excuse me” and Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife, please,” Stoops will be associated with the phrase forever.

The last part of the cult of Bob is the Stoops accent. Maybe everybody skips their pronouns in Youngstown, Ohio, and describes things as having occurred “in a good way,” as in, “Thought, played well today, in a good way.”

Really, who needs “I” or “We.”



9. Louisville

It’s the great forgotten game of the Stoops era, and yet it foreshadowed the era. Because the Cardinals were supposed to be good and just how good could OU be one season removed from John Blake, Joe Dickinson and Dick Winder taking over in Lubbock just to send Blake out 5-6 with his best and last season.

At Papa John’s Stadium, Josh Heupel threw for 429 yards and OU rolled 42-21 on Sept. 25, 1999. Only that game made narrow losses at Notre Dame and the Cotton Bowl the next two weeks so unbearable, because it was already clear Sooner football was back.



8. Continuity

Stoops has been here since he arrived, (duh!) yet so has Brent Venables and Bobby Jack Wright and Cale Gundy and Jackie Shipp. Meanwhile, those who’ve left have never done so at the cost of continuity, because Mike Leach bled into Mark Mangino, who bled into Chuck Long, who bled into Kevin Wilson; while Venables and Mike Stoops were like brothers all along.



7. Jason White

He is the best player and the best story of the Stoops era. Hardly the only one, but still. The rare six-year guy who never played a full season until year five, when he was the best quarterback in America. Just as good the next season, it took a teammate, Adrian Peterson, to keep him from making it two straight Heisman Trophies.



6. The losses

There haven’t been many, but so many of them have been stone cold killers. Les Miles didn’t just get under Bob Stoops’ skin, he beat him twice when the Pokes weren’t that good. Maybe Miles got into his head.

Two national-title game losses and two more BCS defeats at the Fiesta Bowl have been bad medicine. The last time the Sooners won in late December or early January, Rhett Bomar was MVP of the Holiday Bowl.



5. Consistency

Losses aside, the Sooners are on a nine-year run nearly unprecedented in modern college football. OU has won at least 11 games six times in eight seasons. For more on consistency, find John Shinn’s article in today’s section.



4. Red October

It was a 63-14 victory over Texas, a 41-31 win at Kansas State (still the most emotional prevailing of the Stoops era) and a 31-14 victory over Nebraska, all in the space of a month that sent OU back to the top of the polls for the first time in forever. No team will put a run like that together again, because not only does it require coming from nowhere but also playing the Nos. 10, 2 and 1 programs in the nation consecutively.



3. The big plays

My favorite remains Heupel finding Curtis Fagan over the middle when Fagan stepped out of a blur in the secondary to catch a 37-yard touchdown pass in stride against Nebraska, but nobody will ever forget what Roy Williams did at Texas, what Torrance Marshall did at Texas A&M or what Jason White (and Mark Bradley) did at Texas A&M.

Simply put, at the height of the Stoops era, certain players have stepped forward and done it all by themselves. There’s a lesson there, too. Sometimes, the team is not enough. Sometimes, it takes one guy.



2. National title

Joe Posnanski, the best sports writer in America, called it Stoops’ Mona Lisa, the 13-2 Orange Bowl victory over 13-point favorite Florida State. Of course, Stoops tried giving all the credit to brother Mike, Venables and the players.

Whatever, it was a magical night, from Bobby Bowden pulling his hair out trying to account for Roy Williams, to Stoops telling the nation at mid-field when it was over that OU has a long history at the Orange Bowl, so why be intimidated, just like he’d been there the whole time, riding the pine for Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer, playing alongside Joe Washington in the silver shoes he painted as a Youngstown youth.



1. All of it

Really, it’s its own thing. From the top of the mountain to heartbreaking defeat to every year seeming like it might be the year. Even in ’05, when nobody knew what to expect, they were comparing it to 2000, when nobody knew what to expect.

Stoops may be annoyingly private, privately paranoid, and just the guy you need when you’re looking for a short and meaningless quote on the subject of anything beyond Less Miles, the Oregon Debacle or some other slight of respect or justice. But like clockwork he fills the stadium and the state with fans forever enamored by what’s about to happen only because the possibilities appear perpetually endless.

Ten years in, they are again.

Clay Horning

366-3526

cfhorning@normantranscript.com

        

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