-
Jake Trotter, ESPN Senior WriterAug 30, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
- Jake Trotter covers college football for ESPN. He joined ESPN in 2011. Before that, he worked at The Oklahoman, Austin American-Statesman and Middletown (Ohio) Journal newspapers. You can follow him @Jake_Trotter.
AS OKLAHOMA ATHLETIC director Joe Castiglione drove to church the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving in 2021, he received the most stunning phone call of his professional career. Lincoln Riley was on the other line. Out of nowhere, the Sooners coach told Castiglione he was considering leaving for USC.
Castiglione never made it to church. Two hours later, in a meeting with Castiglione and OU president Joseph Harroz Jr., Riley made it clear he had already decided to bolt for Los Angeles.
Earlier that year in July, OU and Texas, just as stunningly, announced they would exit the Big 12 together and join the SEC. Over the following four months, and even then in their final meeting, Castiglione said Riley had never expressed any reservations about OU’s impending move to the SEC. Riley has never used that as a reason for going to USC, either.
Still, Riley’s unexpected departure sowed a narrative that he didn’t believe in OU’s ability to compete where “It Just Means More.” Pundits and opposing fan bases since have piled on with skepticism, as the Sooners prepared for their SEC debut. One national radio host recently suggested that the Sooners could go the way of Nebraska — and completely disappear as a power on the way to irrelevance in the SEC.
“There are underlying tones about the move we’ve made, for whatever reason,” said Castiglione, OU’s athletic director since 1998. “It pisses you off. … We just take it as fuel.”
Since the turn of the millennium, no football program has won more games than the Sooners. OU captured the 2000 national championship, played for it again in 2003, 2004 and 2008 and advanced to the playoff in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Since 1996, the Sooners were Big 12 champions or co-champions 14 out of a possible 28 times.
But OU, which opens the season Friday against Temple (7 p.m. ET, ESPN), is set to face what could be the toughest regular-season slate in program history. Its inaugural SEC campaign features six preseason top 15 opponents — including No. 11 Missouri, No. 5 Alabama and No. 13 LSU consecutively to close the year.
Will such a rise in competition prove the doubters right and transform the Sooners from conference contender to conference afterthought?
Or, can OU turn its SEC membership into an asset — and emerge as strong as ever?
The early signs out of Norman suggest the latter to be possible. The Sooners have set a fundraising record. They’ve already nearly doubled their football support staff. But, most crucially, they’ve surged on the recruiting trail, especially along the offensive and defensive lines, where SEC titles are determined.
“Oklahoma isn’t intimidated as a football program,” said coach Brent Venables, who replaced Riley three years ago. “We’re running towards the SEC.”
TOM OSBORNE DIDN’T think it was possible for Nebraska to suffer one losing season, much less seven in a row.
After years in Lincoln as an assistant under Bob Devaney, he took over as head coach in 1973. Over the years, the Big Red Rivalry between OU and Nebraska usually decided the Big Eight title and a coveted spot in the Orange Bowl. The legendary Osborne eventually led the Cornhuskers to three national titles in the 1990s before retiring in 1997. A decade later, he became Nebraska’s athletic director and helped guide Nebraska’s move from the Big 12 to the Big Ten.
“At the time, the South Division of the Big 12 had agreed in principle to join the Pac-12. And we hadn’t known anything about it,” said Osborne, now 87. “We knew Colorado was trying to leave. We knew that Missouri was trying to leave. We were looking at the fact that, well, we’re going to be sitting here on an island. We felt the Big Ten represented stability and we didn’t like the fragmentation of what appeared to be the Big 12. That’s why we left. We had a lot of connection to Big 12 schools and didn’t particularly want to leave them, but we just felt like things weren’t holding together very well.”
OU and Texas backed out and never went to the Pac-12. But in 2011, Nebraska officially joined the Big Ten. Two years later, Osborne stepped down as athletic director.
The Huskers seemed positioned to be a perennial contender alongside Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State. Then-coach Bo Pelini won nine or more games in Nebraska’s first four seasons in the Big Ten.
But according to Nebraska’s then-lofty standards, that wasn’t good enough. After the 2014 regular season, Nebraska fired Pelini. The Huskers have enjoyed just one winning season since.
Osborne pinned Nebraska’s dramatic fall on a multitude of factors, most notably a failure to adjust to a style of play fit for winning in the Big Ten, the loss of a key recruiting base in Texas, coaching instability and fan impatience.
“Frank Solich was a good coach and did well, but they fired him with a 9-3 season,” Osborne said of his longtime assistant and later successor, who took the Huskers to the 2001 national title game a year before being let go. “That didn’t bode well.”
Between 2007 to 2009, Nebraska also signed 24 recruits from the state of Texas, including star running back Rex Burkhead, who played 10 years in the NFL. But the Texas pipeline dried up, damaging Nebraska’s overall talent level.
“Situated where we are in the middle of the country, there’s a tendency to go everywhere,” Osborne said. “But once we left the Big 12, I think it did hurt our recruiting in Texas to some degree.”
After firing Solich, the Huskers dumped their identity as a power rushing team and tried to win by throwing in the Air Raid-heavy Big 12. But in the Big Ten, Nebraska’s decline in the trenches proved fatal.
“In the Big Ten, it’s a little bit different philosophy. Run-dominated, possession. … and you have a lot of weather days that aren’t conducive to throwing the ball around,” Osborne said. “And I think many of our coaching staffs didn’t adjust to that very well. What we were doing when I was there, we’d fit well in the Big Ten because we were very run-oriented and tried to play good defense. But then [years later] it was kind of a bad fit, really.”
The Huskers have hope again under second-year coach Matt Rhule. He signed one of the top quarterback recruits in the country in Dylan Raiola, the son of former Nebraska All-America center Dominic Raiola, who was part of Osborne’s final recruiting class in 1997. Last week, Nebraska named Dylan Raiola its starter. The Huskers are hoping he can lead them to their first winning season since 2016.
“I think that Matt Rhule is a very hard worker and a good recruiter and relates well to players,” Osborne said. “I think that Matt will get things turned around. If we can just get a little bit of momentum, we can start turning the corner again.”
In 2021, only two months after OU’s SEC announcement, the Sooners and Huskers played for the first time since the 2010 Big 12 championship game, after which Nebraska left for the Big Ten. During halftime, OU commemorated the 50-year anniversary of the 1971 “Game of the Century,” by honoring players and coaches from that game.
“Even though Nebraska and Oklahoma were rivals, it was always a healthy rivalry, and that was kind of unusual in college football,” he said. “Michigan and Ohio State, those people tend to hate each other, and it was never that way between Nebraska and Oklahoma.”
Osborne is pulling for the Sooners, with hopes they can avoid the fate in the SEC that Nebraska suffered in the Big Ten. But he said OU fans will need to be patient and give Venables the chance to succeed.
“I would really caution people in Oklahoma not to pull the trigger too quickly because there will be an adjustment,” he said. “I think that Oklahoma will find it’s a little bit different territory and there’ll be a lot of changes and some things that they’re not used to seeing. … It’s important that people bear that in mind and give [Venables] a little bit more leeway. Because if you start just rotating coaches every three years, that usually ends up being disastrous.”
OKLAHOMA AND NEBRASKA share many similarities. They reside in lightly populated prairie states, yet own two of the strongest brands in college football history.
But where Nebraska has struggled in the Big Ten, the Sooners see opportunity in the SEC — especially with recruiting.
Bob Stoops brought the Sooners back to prominence, leading OU to a national championship in his second year as coach. But over the years, he found it increasingly more difficult to sign the blue-chip recruits along the defensive trenches that preferred the SEC.
“We’ve been short, primarily on the defensive side, whether it be D-line, or just overall,” said Stoops, who retired from OU before the 2017 season. “A handful of guys, tops — like three, four, five recruits … getting those certain guys to make that difference, to get over the hump and win a national championship.”
The Sooners, however, are now beginning to get those blue-chip defensive line recruits again.
This year, OU landed David Stone, the No. 1 defensive tackle prospect in the country. Stone became OU’s first 5-star defensive tackle signee since 2006, when Gerald McCoy joined the Sooners and turned into an All-American before becoming the No. 3 pick in the 2010 NFL draft.
In the 2024 class, the Sooners also beat out Florida, Ohio State, Miami and Texas to snag 312-pound tackle Jayden Jackson, who has become OU’s first true freshman defensive line starter since Tommie Harris in 2001; like McCoy, Harris became an All-American and first-round pick.
“Since Jayden got here, he’s really shown a different level of maturity,” Venables said on his weekly radio show. “He shows up every day. … He’s got incredible discipline.”
Stoops noted that, unlike Nebraska, which “has no recruiting base” in the Big Ten, OU will keep its Texas recruiting pipeline rolling in the SEC. The Sooners will own one of the SEC’s marquee rivalry games against Texas in Dallas. OU, which defeated the playoff-bound Longhorns last year, already has nine commitments from the Lone Star State for the class of 2025, including five-star offensive tackle Michael Fasusi. As a result, OU has recruiting class that’s on track to finish ranked in the top 10 again.
“I always felt [joining the SEC] would get us those extra four or five guys,” Stoops said. “They want to play in the best league. It’s going to give us a boost.”
STOOPS, LIKE VENABLES, takes issue with the notion that OU should be intimidated by the SEC. Stoops points out that since 2000, the Sooners boast an 8-6 record against SEC opponents. That doesn’t include the Sooners’ conference record against Missouri and Texas A&M, which both left the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012.
“We beat the hell out of Missouri, all of a sudden now we’re supposed to be afraid of them?” said Stoops, whose Sooners defeated the Tigers in the 2007 and 2008 Big 12 title games by a combined margin of 62 points. “A&M, we had them beat 77-0 in the middle of the third quarter [in 2003]. That was a long time ago. But still, have they changed that much? Have we changed that much? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Over the past three years, Castiglione and the Sooners have been laying the bedrock to hit the ground running in the SEC, too.
Beginning in August 2021, he and other OU officials toured SEC campuses — including Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Tennessee and Texas A&M — with officials from those schools to determine where the Sooners needed to close the gap.
Castiglione said OU has since increased its football-related personnel staff by 40%, including analysts and strength coaches. The Sooners recently promoted former Stoops All-America linebacker Curtis Lofton to general manager. This year, OU also started a partnership with former Philadelphia Eagles executive Jake Rosenberg, who will help the Sooners transition to the “salary cap” era of college athletics. Over the past year, OU posted a school fundraising record of $110 million in donations to its athletic department.
As a show of strength this summer, and to preemptively eliminate any potential coaching controversy during its entry into the SEC, OU’s board of regents also approved a six-year extension for Venables worth $51.6 million, making him one of the 15 highest-paid coaches in the country. Venables can earn $250,000 by winning the SEC title game.
“We’re fully aware of the level of competition that we are going to face,” Castiglione said. “But we’re competitive too, and we’re going to do what we can in our way to continue to support our programs, to be successful, both in the conference as well as in the postseason.”
ON JULY 1, nearly three years to the month after first making the announcement, OU celebrated its official entry to the SEC. Banners with the SEC logo adorned the campus. Electronic billboards with the phrase, “It Just Means More,” popped up all around Oklahoma City. The school held a 5K to underscore how it was, according to Castiglione, “running to the SEC.” From the SEC Network dais, Venables shouted “Boomer,” as hundreds of fans responded with “Sooner” from behind him.
Venables came with Stoops to OU in 1999. As co-defensive coordinator, he helped engineer the hard-nosed defense that, a year later, shut down Florida State‘s offense in the Orange Bowl to secure OU’s first national title in 15 years. Venables won two more national championships as Clemson‘s defensive coordinator, twice defeating Alabama.
When Riley left, hiring Venables back became the obvious decision for Castiglione and the Sooners.
“He knows what it’s going to take to compete in this league,” Castiglione said. “And he knows what it takes to put a program on a championship level.”
Nebraska might no longer be on a championship level in the Big Ten. But bolstered by its bold SEC move, OU is banking on returning to that championship level, sooner rather than later.
