deweydw
10/10/2008, 07:37 AM
This is in the Houston Chronicle this morning.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/college/6050355.html
Uplifting Sooner Nation
Coach Bob Stoops’ no-excuses attitude and his evenhanded relationships with his coaches and players have made Oklahoma the team to beat, especially in Dallas
By DAVID BARRON Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 10, 2008, 12:24AM
Nick de la Torre Houston Chronicle
Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops has a better winning percentage through ten seasons than Barry Switzer or Bud Wilkinson had.
RANKINGS
AP | USA Today Top 25 | BCS NORMAN, Okla. — When it comes to the exacting details required of a football coach, they don’t come any better than Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops.
“He’s a Virgo,” said Oklahoma City cab driver James Woosley, a member in good standing of the demanding, voracious gaggle known as Sooner Nation. “They can spot a typo in a roadside billboard from a half-mile away.”
But when it comes to public pronouncements of a personal nature, Stoops is no more enlightening than nature’s largest black hole, located, oddly enough, in the constellation Virgo.
“I’m not real reflective in this week when it comes time to play,” he said. “I always feel fortunate and grateful to be at a place with good people and to have the success we have had. But this week, I’m sticking to what we do, concentrating on what we do.”
And so it falls to others to contemplate Stoops’ accomplishments, at the relatively youthful age of 48, as he prepares for the 10th time to lead the No. 1 Sooners into Dallas to play the fifth-ranked Texas Longhorns. Fortunately, it doesn’t require much reflection to recite the high points.
Plenty of success
He is the eighth coach (four at Texas, three others at OU) to reach double digits in the Red River Rivalry. In nine-plus years, the Sooners are 102-22. His three post-Barry Switzer predecessors (Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger and John Blake) were 54-46-3. He has a national championship and five league titles, plus 24 All-Americas, eight NFL first-round draft choices and nine bowl appearances to his credit.
More specific to this week, he came to Norman with nary a clue about the nature of Texas vs. Oklahoma but managed, in part by force of personality, to alter the nature of the rivalry. He is 6-3 against the Longhorns to 2-7-1 for his predecessors, and his wins have been by an average margin of 22 points.
“Bob got the rivalry going by approaching it with a chip on his shoulder,” said ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit. “Texas was Texas, and Oklahoma at the time was trying to become Texas, and I think Bob looked at it as if ‘We don’t care who you are. This is a battle.’
“Texas had the advantage in ability in the early years, but Oklahoma played with a nasty streak and turned it into a street fight. It became a helmet game. Even when Texas was more talented, you wondered if they could deal with the mental toughness of Oklahoma.”
Vince Young interrupted that reign of mental toughness in 2005, ending the Longhorns’ streak of five straight losses under coach Mack Brown to Oklahoma. By then, though, OU had erased any real or perceived talent deficit and emerged as one of the nation’s best teams from August to December.
Recruiting the country
The Sooners have prospered, in part, by advancing beyond the formula used by Switzer, who annually signed top players out of Texas but also dipped into New Orleans, Los Angeles and Miami.
Under Stoops, the Sooners have gone global. Their two-deep roster on offense includes players from 13 states, and they continue to recruit well in Texas with such players as receivers Manuel Johnson from Gilmer and Juaquin Iglesias from Killeen and safety Lendy Holmes from Dallas.
“We get a higher percentage because of all the success and all the coverage,” Stoops said. “We’ve been in big games, and all of that together, plus our style of play on both sides of the ball, is what kids want.”
Stoops also is a shrewd judge of coaching talent. Five of his former assistants, most recently Kevin Sumlin at the University of Houston, are now Football Bowl Subdivision coaches.
“He creates an environment of accountability and responsibility,” Sumlin said. “He allows guys to work, and he then directs the actions of the team and the direction of the football team from there. I think that what he does first is go out and get the very, very best people that he can who he thinks fits best with him personality-wise.
“Everyone there listens, and everybody has respect for each other. But in the critical moments, there is one guy in charge. There’s a certain edge that those guys play with and a certain edge that they have. Over 10 years, you can see that he’s developed that.”
Only one blot on his record
Woosley, who was born in 1950, the year OU won its first national championship under Bud Wilkinson, said Stoops won points with a good first impression.
“He came in and said there weren’t going to be any excuses, and then he overachieved,” Woosley said. “Now, he’s the crown prince. The only reason he isn’t the king is because he lost two national championship games.”
Bowls are the only chink in the Stoops legacy. He is 4-5 in bowls, including back-to-back Fiesta Bowl losses to Boise State and West Virginia in the wake of BCS title-game losses at the end of the 2003 and 2004 seasons to LSU and USC, respectively.
Even in defeat, though, Stoops’ attitude has remained consistent, said Bobby Jack Wright, a former assistant coach at Texas who is one of four members of Stoops’ original coaching staff in 1999 still at OU.
“We’ve had some great wins, and the next day, he’s right back down to earth,” Wright said. “And on the occasions when we’ve had disappointing losses, he’s been the same. That says a lot about the way he approaches this business. He does not ride the waves. He’s not up in the peaks or down in the valleys.”
One odd aspect of the Stoops era at OU is that he and Brown have avoided the ill feelings that marked the Switzer-Darrell Royal era.
“With the increased media attention, (coaches) have bonded, and we more or less have each others’ backs as opposed to the media sitting there biting at all of us,” Stoops said. “It’s, hey, ‘Why do we need to help them?’ ”
For his part, Brown said: “He’s been like coach (Bud) Wilkinson and coach Switzer. He’s given them a chance to be really, really good every year. He’s done exactly what they asked him to do. They were a program that was up and down and struggling at times. They asked him to come back and get them in the top 10, and he’s been able to do that.
“I don’t know that they’d swap him, let’s put it that way.”
And Texas fans, for the most part, don’t loathe Stoops in the same way they loathed Switzer.
“It’s hard to dislike a guy that you know is a good guy and a good person, even if he’s your enemy one day out of the year,” Wright said.
“I hate Bob Stoops” threads on most college chat boards are less likely to harp on substance than one-liners like this on a TCU board: “I hate Bob Stoops because he knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, but he won’t tell anyone.”
Switzer doesn’t mind the comparisons in this regard.
“I was maybe a little more brash,” he said. “Maybe Bob just hasn’t been around long enough. But if he keeps whipping their (butt), I promise you that they won’t like him.”
Chronicle staff writers Joseph Duarte and Michael Murphy contributed to this report.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/college/6050355.html
Uplifting Sooner Nation
Coach Bob Stoops’ no-excuses attitude and his evenhanded relationships with his coaches and players have made Oklahoma the team to beat, especially in Dallas
By DAVID BARRON Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 10, 2008, 12:24AM
Nick de la Torre Houston Chronicle
Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops has a better winning percentage through ten seasons than Barry Switzer or Bud Wilkinson had.
RANKINGS
AP | USA Today Top 25 | BCS NORMAN, Okla. — When it comes to the exacting details required of a football coach, they don’t come any better than Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops.
“He’s a Virgo,” said Oklahoma City cab driver James Woosley, a member in good standing of the demanding, voracious gaggle known as Sooner Nation. “They can spot a typo in a roadside billboard from a half-mile away.”
But when it comes to public pronouncements of a personal nature, Stoops is no more enlightening than nature’s largest black hole, located, oddly enough, in the constellation Virgo.
“I’m not real reflective in this week when it comes time to play,” he said. “I always feel fortunate and grateful to be at a place with good people and to have the success we have had. But this week, I’m sticking to what we do, concentrating on what we do.”
And so it falls to others to contemplate Stoops’ accomplishments, at the relatively youthful age of 48, as he prepares for the 10th time to lead the No. 1 Sooners into Dallas to play the fifth-ranked Texas Longhorns. Fortunately, it doesn’t require much reflection to recite the high points.
Plenty of success
He is the eighth coach (four at Texas, three others at OU) to reach double digits in the Red River Rivalry. In nine-plus years, the Sooners are 102-22. His three post-Barry Switzer predecessors (Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger and John Blake) were 54-46-3. He has a national championship and five league titles, plus 24 All-Americas, eight NFL first-round draft choices and nine bowl appearances to his credit.
More specific to this week, he came to Norman with nary a clue about the nature of Texas vs. Oklahoma but managed, in part by force of personality, to alter the nature of the rivalry. He is 6-3 against the Longhorns to 2-7-1 for his predecessors, and his wins have been by an average margin of 22 points.
“Bob got the rivalry going by approaching it with a chip on his shoulder,” said ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit. “Texas was Texas, and Oklahoma at the time was trying to become Texas, and I think Bob looked at it as if ‘We don’t care who you are. This is a battle.’
“Texas had the advantage in ability in the early years, but Oklahoma played with a nasty streak and turned it into a street fight. It became a helmet game. Even when Texas was more talented, you wondered if they could deal with the mental toughness of Oklahoma.”
Vince Young interrupted that reign of mental toughness in 2005, ending the Longhorns’ streak of five straight losses under coach Mack Brown to Oklahoma. By then, though, OU had erased any real or perceived talent deficit and emerged as one of the nation’s best teams from August to December.
Recruiting the country
The Sooners have prospered, in part, by advancing beyond the formula used by Switzer, who annually signed top players out of Texas but also dipped into New Orleans, Los Angeles and Miami.
Under Stoops, the Sooners have gone global. Their two-deep roster on offense includes players from 13 states, and they continue to recruit well in Texas with such players as receivers Manuel Johnson from Gilmer and Juaquin Iglesias from Killeen and safety Lendy Holmes from Dallas.
“We get a higher percentage because of all the success and all the coverage,” Stoops said. “We’ve been in big games, and all of that together, plus our style of play on both sides of the ball, is what kids want.”
Stoops also is a shrewd judge of coaching talent. Five of his former assistants, most recently Kevin Sumlin at the University of Houston, are now Football Bowl Subdivision coaches.
“He creates an environment of accountability and responsibility,” Sumlin said. “He allows guys to work, and he then directs the actions of the team and the direction of the football team from there. I think that what he does first is go out and get the very, very best people that he can who he thinks fits best with him personality-wise.
“Everyone there listens, and everybody has respect for each other. But in the critical moments, there is one guy in charge. There’s a certain edge that those guys play with and a certain edge that they have. Over 10 years, you can see that he’s developed that.”
Only one blot on his record
Woosley, who was born in 1950, the year OU won its first national championship under Bud Wilkinson, said Stoops won points with a good first impression.
“He came in and said there weren’t going to be any excuses, and then he overachieved,” Woosley said. “Now, he’s the crown prince. The only reason he isn’t the king is because he lost two national championship games.”
Bowls are the only chink in the Stoops legacy. He is 4-5 in bowls, including back-to-back Fiesta Bowl losses to Boise State and West Virginia in the wake of BCS title-game losses at the end of the 2003 and 2004 seasons to LSU and USC, respectively.
Even in defeat, though, Stoops’ attitude has remained consistent, said Bobby Jack Wright, a former assistant coach at Texas who is one of four members of Stoops’ original coaching staff in 1999 still at OU.
“We’ve had some great wins, and the next day, he’s right back down to earth,” Wright said. “And on the occasions when we’ve had disappointing losses, he’s been the same. That says a lot about the way he approaches this business. He does not ride the waves. He’s not up in the peaks or down in the valleys.”
One odd aspect of the Stoops era at OU is that he and Brown have avoided the ill feelings that marked the Switzer-Darrell Royal era.
“With the increased media attention, (coaches) have bonded, and we more or less have each others’ backs as opposed to the media sitting there biting at all of us,” Stoops said. “It’s, hey, ‘Why do we need to help them?’ ”
For his part, Brown said: “He’s been like coach (Bud) Wilkinson and coach Switzer. He’s given them a chance to be really, really good every year. He’s done exactly what they asked him to do. They were a program that was up and down and struggling at times. They asked him to come back and get them in the top 10, and he’s been able to do that.
“I don’t know that they’d swap him, let’s put it that way.”
And Texas fans, for the most part, don’t loathe Stoops in the same way they loathed Switzer.
“It’s hard to dislike a guy that you know is a good guy and a good person, even if he’s your enemy one day out of the year,” Wright said.
“I hate Bob Stoops” threads on most college chat boards are less likely to harp on substance than one-liners like this on a TCU board: “I hate Bob Stoops because he knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, but he won’t tell anyone.”
Switzer doesn’t mind the comparisons in this regard.
“I was maybe a little more brash,” he said. “Maybe Bob just hasn’t been around long enough. But if he keeps whipping their (butt), I promise you that they won’t like him.”
Chronicle staff writers Joseph Duarte and Michael Murphy contributed to this report.