College Football

How Bob Stoops brought back the standard at Oklahoma, and how it endured

Published Mar. 21, 2024 4:50 p.m. ET

Bob Stoops' first taste of college football was more like college football's first taste of Bob Stoops.

Stoops started at defensive back at Iowa as a true freshman, then started every other year of his college career, winning team MVP in his senior year of 1982. Like many great players in his era, he excelled because he hit … hard. In fact, as R.J. Young shares in a new video essay about the rise of Oklahoma football under Stoops, the former Sooners head coach once hit Purdue wideout Mike Harris so hard he broke Harris' nose.

"I was feisty," Stoops wrote in his autobiography, "No Excuses." "You weren’t going to intimidate me. You hit me with a two-by-four, I’ll go find a crowbar and hit you back."

Stoops attributed that mentality to his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, but as Young points out, it was perfectly suited for Norman, Oklahoma, too. In December 1998, Stoops took over a team that had not had a winning season in five years and remade it into a program that combined high-octane offense from the wizardry of Mike Leach and the innovative Air Raid minds that followed with a simple, no-nonsense defensive strategy that punished opponents for taking risks.

In just his second season, Stoops had led Oklahoma to the mountaintop — a BCS national title game victory over Florida State. Over the next decade and a half, Stoops went on to become the winningest head coach in Oklahoma history and make 10 BCS Bowl appearances and an appearance in the College Football Playoff.

When Stoops stepped down after the 2016 season, he organized one of the smoothest transitions possible, promoting 33-year-old offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley and handing Riley the keys to a loaded roster led by senior quarterback Baker Mayfield, who would soon win the Heisman Trophy.

The next few years would bring Oklahoma continued success, but also postseason disappointment, stunning betrayal and even Stoops' (temporary) return to the sideline. Now, as new head coach Brent Venables tries to re-institute that standard, Young takes a deep dive into the Oklahoma Sooners program to explain just what that standard is — and how Stoops rebuilt it both on and off the field.

You can check out Young's full essay below, and be sure to subscribe to the No. 1 College Football Show wherever you get your podcasts for all of Young's analysis.