Published: September 18, 2007 12:42 am            

The difference between Stoops and Gundy

Commentary

For all the odd little things Bob Stoops occasionally insists upon, one thing need not be questioned.

The Oklahoma coach can close a practice with you. He can play coy with injuries. He can keep his freshmen off limits even during those small windows of time media is let through the door to give you, the fan, a look inside your favorite team.

He can do a lot of things that drive folks like me nuts. But the man can really coach.

As for Mike Gundy, well, the jury best be out for the Poke Nation. Because if not, if it’s already in, it’s over. Might as well go hire somebody else.

The conundrum for Stoops when it comes to pleasing the press box crowd is there’s not a lot he can do any more that’s anywhere near his wheel house. After winning a quartet of Big 12 titles, a national championship and playing for two others, it becomes hard to impress the knights of the keyboard.

We’ve seen it all before.

That leaves schtick and Abe Lemons Stoops ain’t. So it’s a good thing Gundy’s around to give everybody a little perspective.

“I never read the paper or watch TV or go on the Internet,” the Oklahoma State coach said at his weekly press conference Monday in Stillwater. “When I go to work it’s dark and when I go home it’s dark.”

Well, good thing for me, because I don’t need Gundy hunting me down. But from the looks of it, bad thing for the Pokes, who might have benefited from some life, any life, from their head coach the other night.

If all that going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark and the lack of sleep it’s causing is what had Gundy on the sideline in geography only at Troy, by all means, sleep in.

Against Troy, and I can only speak for every last moment the camera was trained on him, Gundy looked like he was on another planet, one that had invented head gear and microphones but not yet football.

He looked like it was some other team than his Cowboys that was getting schooled by the Gulf Region Trojans. He looked like the game was being played around him, but he had no role to play in it. Like it was happening to somebody else.

It’s a look I know well.

It was John Blake’s look.

No fire.

No emotion.

No passion.

No nothing.

Or, is that know nothing?

Compared to Gundy the other night, Dennis Franchione is Abbie Hoffman or that character Al Pacino played in “Dog Day Afternoon” screaming “Attica, Attica, Attica.”

That’s not Stoops.

For good or ill and his track record says good, Stoops is in players’ faces, coaches’ ears and officials’ mugs, involved from start to finish on game day, from shaking the hands of his Sooners as they stretch to telling Sam Bradford “Don’t be cocky,” as the freshman quarterback walks into the frame live, from the Owen Field turf, for his very first post-game before-signing-off interview.

Clearly, Stoops has the emotion, passion and fire, but just as clearly it is more than that. He’s grabbing a player, running to an official or quizzing a coach not only because he’s completely aware of everything going on around him, but just as aware of how everything going on around him should be going on around him.

The best coaches, of course, like Steve Martin on Let’s Get Small, can juggle in their minds.

At best, Gundy was in denial.

Even ESPN’s sideline reporter was taken aback by the lack of the Cowboys’ being taken aback.

OU could always lose a game like that, even embarrassingly so. But Stoops would never go quietly.

Probably why it won’t happen.

Clay Horning

366-3526

cfhorning@normantranscript.com

        

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