College Football

Oklahoma's Isaiah Thomas on his time as a Sooner, Lincoln Riley's departure

Updated Apr. 19, 2022 3:50 p.m. ET

By RJ Young
FOX Sports College Football Writer

I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Former Oklahoma defensive end and NFL Draft hopeful Isaiah Thomas is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, too.

I graduated from Memorial Senior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thomas graduated from Memorial, too.

I earned a master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma after graduating with a bachelor's degree from the University of Tulsa. Thomas enters the draft as an alumnus of OU.

Like me, he was raised in the backdrop of a city that is proud of its football and proud of its football players. He’s the latest in what has become a distinguished list of Tulsans who have made their way from the Tulsa public school system to the best football league in the world.

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Las Vegas Raiders running back Josh Jacobs is also a TPS kid. He graduated from McClain High School.

Former Dallas Cowboys running back Felix Jones is a TPS kid. He graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, the school Michigan Wolverine and safety Dax Hill, who hopes to join Thomas as a selection in this year's draft, graduated from.

What makes Thomas unique is that he came out of Memorial — a high school known not for its football players but for its basketball players. Indeed, the Chargers have won six of the past eight 5A boys' basketball state championships, and not long ago, Thomas believed he was destined to be a player on one of Memorial coach Bobby Allison’s title-winning teams.

"My freshman year was [Allison’s] first year," Thomas said, "and he's won five since then. So every other year he's going to win one. And so, I'm like, ‘This is gonna make or break me. Like, I'm gonna make it to the league.'"

However, Thomas' dreams of playing in the NBA were dashed when he stopped growing — at 6-foot-5.

"I’m a guard in basketball," he said.

Instead, he turned out to be a dominant defensive lineman at a football program without the prestige of its basketball counterpart. Still, his film popped, and he received his first offer to play college football at the FBS level from Missouri.

Not long after that, Bob Stoops, then the head coach at OU, reached out. Thomas visited and was offered.

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That simply doesn’t happen for Memorial football players. That’s how special Thomas is.

"It was, like, the biggest thing that ever happened to me," he said.

And me.

I lived and died with Thomas' play on the field, the teams he played on and the players he played with. He was a freshman when OU lost to Georgia in the Rose Bowl.

"My freshman year," he said, "that was my most memorable loss I ever had. That game was amazing to me."

He was a junior when the Sooners rallied to beat Baylor after trailing 28-3 in Waco but suffered a humiliating loss to LSU in the Peach Bowl.

"Oh, my god," he said. "That really opened my eyes to that 2019 [LSU] team because we knew they were great. But I'm like, ‘Man, Joe can't be like this.’"

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Thomas was a senior who had just played his final regular-season game when Lincoln Riley walked into the team meeting room at 2 p.m. on the Sunday following a loss to Oklahoma State to tell his team that he had decided to become the head coach at USC.

"Oh, I was heartbroken, man," Thomas said.

He understands that coaches have their reasons for leaving one school for another, and it happens often.

"But it's just more so how he left," Thomas said, "telling us that he got the call after the game, thought about it overnight, slept on it, made the decision that day. So that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Knowing the type of guy Riley was, it just wasn't him on how he did it."

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It was Riley who told former OU defensive coordinator Alex Grinch that Thomas was a player, and it was Riley who was quick to point it out when Thomas went from playing a handful of snaps per game in 2019 to becoming one of the Big 12’s best defensive linemen in 2020, with 8.5 sacks and 13 tackles for loss while playing both defensive end and defensive tackle.

"Riley always stood on the table for me," Thomas said. "He always had my back. I specifically remember team meetings when he would point me out."

Riley held Thomas up as the kind of player who stuck with the program, stuck with the team, kept working and rose to the top of the depth chart.

"He always used me as an example in a positive way," Thomas said. "So it was just mind-boggling how he left, knowing the type of guy he was."

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Riley was Thomas’ guy, even though he first committed to Stoops, and Thomas turned out to be one of Riley’s guys. I understood that. I respect that.

Thomas, like me, is from Tulsa. He’s an Oklahoman. He wore that university across his chest, bled for it, defended it.

That’s what Tulsans do. We fight for ours, and we back ours to the wall.

I’m grateful that Thomas — a man I greatly admire and share a common bond with — told me this story because it drove home what I always suspected to be true: By his players, Riley was beloved.

He was loved.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.