Oklahoma Football: Recruiting Doesn’t Stop With Players’ Roster
By Chip Rouse
Sooner fans didn’t know what they really had when first-time head coach Bob Stoops took over the Oklahoma football program in 1999. Seventeen years and 179 victories later, they should be counting their blessings at the enormous payoff.
Stoops is beginning his 18th season at Oklahoma. Other than Bill Snyder, who Stoops coached with and for in his college coaching career, the Sooner head coach and Kirk Ferentz at Iowa, are the longest active head coaches at the same institution in college football.
Both Stoops and Ferentz have been at their respective schools for 17 seasons and both coached at Iowa in the 1980s, along with K-State’s Snyder, as part of the Hayden Fry coaching tree.
Snyder has been the head coach at Kansas State for 24 seasons, but those 24 seasons are broken into two separate stints: one for 17 seasons (1989-2005) and another from 2009 to the present.
Under Stoops, Oklahoma won its seventh national championship in 2000 in just his second season as the Sooners’ head coach, played in four national championship games in the BCS era and was one of the four playoff teams last season in second year of the College Football Playoff. In addition, the Sooners have won nine Big 12 championships while Stoops has been head coach and posted 13 seasons with double-digit wins, 11 of which featured 11 or more victories.
The Sooners have never had a losing season in Stoops’ 17 seasons at OU, and during that time frame he became the winningest of the 21 head coaches in Oklahoma’s long and illustrious football history.
All of this as preamble to say that success on the football field is not only the product of recruiting talented prospects and sustaining that effort to keep the player pipeline full and flowing, but also recruiting and retaining top head-coaching hires, who in turn surround themselves with and a complementary corps of highly talented and experienced assistants.
On Tuesday this week, the Oklahoma Board of Regents rewarded Bob Stoops and several of his assistants for past successes and future expectations with contract extensions and a bump in pay.
According to the Dallas Morning News and multiple other media sources, Stoops contract has been extended through 2021. The OU head coach is expected to make an estimated $5.5 million in pre-bonus earnings in 2016. Those earnings will increase by about $200,000 per year, which would mean that Stoops would receive $6.5 million excluding bonus income in 2021.
Stoops is currently the fourth highest-paid college coach, according to the USA Today salary data base for college head coaches, with an annual reported salary of $5.4 million in 2015. Only Alabama’s Nick Saban ($7.1 million). Jim Harbaugh of Michigan ($7.0 million) and Urban Meyer of Ohio State ($5.9 million) made more in salary in 2015 than Stoops.
The contracts of offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley and defensive coordinator and assistant head coach Mike Stoops were extended through 2018.
Riley, the recipient of the 2015 Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant, also received a $400,000 pay increase, according to information in the USA Today salary data base, that will raise his annual wages to nearly $900,000 per year. That will make the 32-year-old Riley the highest paid offensive coordinator in the Big 12.
Mike Stoops also will make around $900,000 in the coming season, but he was already making $850,000, at or near the top of the conference for defensive coordinators.
Pay raises ranging from $25,000 to $40,000 also were approved by the Board of Regents for football assistant coaches Cale Gundy (wide receivers/tight ends), Kerry Cooks (cornerbacks/safeties), Tim Kish (linebackers), Dennis Simmons (wide receivers/special teams) and Jay Boulware (running backs).
The regents also approved $2 million in additional funding for the renovation work at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.