Stooping to Conquer

There are two things missing from Oklahoma’s remarkable return to college football prominence:

Mugs and thugs.

The last time the Sooners played for a national title, in 1987, Coach Barry Switzer’s boys were painting the town the color of their jerseys: red.

The Sports Illustrated cover shot we recall from that era is an OU quarterback being led away in handcuffs after a cocaine bust.

The statistic that comes to mind is the three-year probation the NCAA handed down in the wake of Oklahoma players turning Bud Hall into a scene from “Animal House.”

Switzer resigned after the 1988 season and Oklahoma football as we knew it turned in its keys.

That Oklahoma is 12-0, rated No. 1, and playing Florida State in the Orange Bowl on Wednesday night in search of its seventh national title is, well, a return to the way it’s supposed to be in Norman.

That Oklahoma got to this point two years removed from the worst four-year run in Sooner football history is almost unbelievable.

But perhaps the best news is that Oklahoma got here without keeping police chiefs up at night.

Oklahoma President David Boren, the former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator, was looking for a throwback coach two years ago when he helped negotiate the deal with Bob Stoops at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.

Switzer wasn’t what Boren had in mind.

“Stoops is very much in the Wilkinson image,” Boren says.

Before Barry, of course, there was Bud, who became Oklahoma coach in 1947 and picked a state up by its bootstraps.

Wilkinson won three national titles and 12 consecutive Big Eight Conference titles in 17 seasons in Norman, restoring pride to a state that had seen its biography played out in movie-house newsreels and the pages of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“We had gone through the terrible trials of the Dust Bowl that had really been so psychologically damaging to the state,” Boren, a native Oklahoman, explains. “People were losing their farms and businesses. The image of the Okies having to head west were very difficult times.

“Really, Bud Wilkinson and the Sooners were the first real comeback for Oklahoma.”

Bob Stoops is in charge of Comeback II.

There is no denying Switzer’s indelible legacy. In his reign, 1973-88, he won more games than Wilkinson and as many national titles, three, but his less-than-elegant manner and departure sent the program spiraling into descent.

Boren, a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, returned to Oklahoma in 1994 with a different mission.

“We don’t ever want to go back to the era of win at all costs,” he says. “And we don’t ever want to go back to the time in which OU is a football school. We want to be known as a great academic institution, where we also love to win at football. And I sure do want to win.”

It was former OU president George Cross who, in the 1960s, while pleading for more money from the legislature, stood up in the state house and said, “we want a university that the football team can be proud of.”

Boren is greedy. He thinks Oklahoma can have it all.

He has spent much of his tenure on the academic side, leading a $500-million academic fund-raising drive. Since 1994, endowed professorships have almost tripled at the school.

But, until Stoops, football was a missing piece in the mosaic.

“It’s perfectly all right to have a football team the university can be proud of,” Boren says, “and to have a university the football team can be proud of.

“Now, we’ve got both. That’s really the right goal.”

It didn’t seem like priorities were in order Oct. 9, when Boren canceled classes two days after Oklahoma’s 63-14 wipeout victory over archrival Texas.

Boren said he called the “Snow Day” to celebrate a remarkable month in which the school also received the largest collection of French Impressionist paintings ever given to a public university and the conclusion of the fourth-largest academic fund-raising drive for a public U.S. university.

“It was saying, ‘We’re back as a football program,’ ” Boren says, “but it was also a celebration of those things coming together at once.”

It also appeared to be football business as usual Oct. 29 when, the day after Oklahoma defeated Nebraska, Boren doubled Stoops’ contract from $675,000 to $1.4 million.

Boren says the extension had been in the works for weeks and was a preemptive move to keep other schools from hiring Stoops.

“If I have to end up making an offer to pay you what you’re worth as a counteroffer, I failed,” Boren said. “We ought to be there first.”

Make no mistake, though.

Football is still important at Oklahoma, it’s just different.

The star linebacker, Rocky Calmus, says he is a quiet guy who likes to keep to himself, a far cry from the days of linebacker Brian Bosworth, who wore his mouth on his sleeve.

The Sooners talk about humility these days, about family.

Stoops is 40, with a wife and three young children. On Wednesday nights during the season, the coaches have “Family Night” to help unite coaches with their spouses and kids during the busy football season.

Sooner Search

Boren and Athletic Director Joe Castiglione suspended their coaching search after they met with Stoops in 1998.

The choice was clear.

Oklahoma was hip-deep in a football funk, a crisis that began in 1995 with the hiring of former Miami coach Howard Schnellenberger, who was ousted after a 5-5-1 season in which he alienated just about everyone.

Boren said he personally recommended Schnellenberger’s termination, but things got worse with the next hire, John Blake, a young assistant on Switzer’s Dallas Cowboy staff.

Blake was an OU man, said all the right things and meant well, but he was a disastrous choice. The Sooners went 12-22 in Blake’s three years and he was fired on the recommendation of a 4-2 vote by the school’s trustees, a decision that was televised statewide.

Stoops was certainly one of the top available coaching prospects, defensive coordinator under Steve Spurrier at Florida, but most figured Stoops was headed to his alma mater, Iowa, to succeed Hayden Fry.

But Iowa botched its behind-the-scenes play, and Oklahoma swooped in.

“I saw in his eyes he wanted to win when he first got here,” senior defensive back J.T. Thatcher says of Stoops. “It didn’t take long. First day we met.”

Calmus was a freshman on Blake’s 5-6 team in 1998.

“OU was at a low point, pretty much the lowest,” Calmus says. “We had the players but really didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what to think. I was a kid, the end of my freshman year, I was at the low point of my football career. But going into spring I saw what he brought to the table, and the confidence just started building.”

Stoops started from scratch.

“Let’s not worry about whether we can win one game or 11,” he said. “Let’s worry about getting through winter conditioning to get as strong and as fast as we can.”

The wins came like a Sooner wind. Oklahoma finished 7-5 last year and has followed with this season’s perfect swarm.

“I did believe we could do it this quick,” Stoops insists. “We never set a specific time line on when we would win a championship, when we need to be 12-0 or 13-0. We just went about the business to improve.”

Stoops was ready for this assignment. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, one of six children. His father, Ron, was defensive coordinator for 28 years at Cardinal Mooney High.

“Just being in the locker room as a young person growing up was something I’ve always enjoyed, without ever having it forced upon me.” Stoops says. “It is something that we would always ask our dad. ‘Can I go? Can I go? Can I go?’ And he always said ‘yes’ and threw us in the car.”

Bob Stoops was a four-year starter at Iowa for Fry.

He says now that “I probably wouldn’t recruit me today,” but Stoops in fact was a two-time all-conference player and a vicious hitter at defensive back.

He is an amalgam of the men he has worked under: his father, who died in 1988, Fry, Bill Snyder at Kansas State and Florida’s Spurrier.

“Little by little, a little bit of all of them sort of creeps into you, and you don’t even know that you’re sort of acting like them sometimes,” he said. “It just sort of happens, I believe.”

Of all the personalities, though, it was Spurrier’s that most resonated.

“Coach Spurrier, without question, has been the biggest influence to me, next to my father,” Stoops says.

Stoops spent three years on the Florida staff and was defensive coordinator on the Gators’ 1996 national title team.

Spurrier imparted to Stoops an unwavering confidence.

“He has a genuine positive outlook on life,” Oklahoma offensive coordinator Mark Mangino says of Stoops. “He doesn’t allow anyone to be negative. One time it rained at practice, the field was a swamp, and he says, ‘Just pick your feet up higher.’ Every day is a good day for Bob Stoops. The players see that and they respond to it.”

Stoops was a defensive specialist under Spurrier, but his genius has been the way he has transformed Oklahoma on offense, turning memories of Switzer’s vaunted Wishbone on its ear.

Last year, Stoops hired Mike Leach from Kentucky to install Hal Mumme’s wide-open passing attack.

When Stoops found the quarterback to run it, junior college transfer Josh Heupel, Oklahoma was back in the football business.

In one season, the Oklahoma offense went from one of the Big 12’s worst to its best. Heupel threw for 30 touchdowns as a junior, landing Leach the coaching job at Texas Tech.

Yes, a lot has changed at Oklahoma over the years.

Most of it for the better.

“We don’t aspire to be the OU of 20 years ago, or 25,” Boren says. “We aspire to be a Michigan, a Stanford, a Duke. We will no longer be known just as a football school.”

We’ll see how that goes after Wednesday.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Orange Bowl

Oklahoma (12-0) vs. Florida State (11-1)

When: Wednesday, 5 p.m. PST

Where: Pro Player Stadium, Miami

TV: Channel 7

At Stake: BCS national title