High-powered, nationally recognized collegiate programs like Oklahoma football generally don’t turn to candidates who have never been a head coach to fill a vacancy at the top of the program.
That may be the general lay of the land among the elite programs in college football, but it has not been the case at Oklahoma, where the top three head football coaches in the school’s history have all been young when they assumed the head coach’s post and all came from the coordinators’ role or the position of assistant coach.
Last Wednesday, when Bob Stoops announced he was stepping down as head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners after 18 of the most successful seasons in OU football history, 33-year-old Lincoln Riley became the successor to one of the premier head-coaching positions in college football.
This is Riley’s first job as a head coach, but he is not new to college coaching. This will be his 12th season as a coach in the college football ranks. Riley is the youngest head coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision, but he is not the youngest head coach to lead the Sooners. Legendary Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson was 31 and an assistant coach when he was named head coach of the Sooners in 1947. Chuck Fairbanks was 33 when he was promoted to the head coaching position at Oklahoma.
Barry Switzer was offensive coordinator under Fairbanks and 36 when he took over for Fairbanks in 1973. Stoops was 38 and the defensive coordinator at Florida when he was brought in as the new head coach of the Sooners in 1999.
So from a historic perspective, hiring head coaches in their 30s and without head-coaching experience has worked out very favorably at Oklahoma. Wilkinson, Switzer and Stoops combined won 492 of nearly 600 games, a very impressive winning percentage of .823 over 51 seasons.
“That’s who I would have hired. Perfect fit. You couldn’t hire anyone else.” –Former Oklahoma head coach Barry Switzer on the promotion of Lincoln Riley to Sooner head coach
Those three Hall-of-Fame-caliber Sooner head coaches were on the sidelines for 51 of the past 70 seasons on Oklahoma football. Over the time frame of the Big Three, OU football won 7 national championships and 36 conference championships. Not a bad half-century of work, and all of that at the hands of three first-time head coaches.
On the day of Stoops’ announcement that he was stepping down, the former head coach and the incoming head man acknowledged that they see similarities in each other.
Riley said he was more like Stoops than the two other head coaches for whom he has worked (Mike Leach at Texas Tech and Ruffin McNeill at East Carolina).
“He (Riley) is more like me than some of the other coaches we’ve had around,” Stoops told Oklahoma City Oklahoman sports columnist Berry Tramel on the day of his announcement. “I think there’s just a leadership quality you recognize when players are really listening to a guy and really taking to heart what he is saying.”
Riley came to Oklahoma in 2015 with an already impressive resume. As wide receivers coach at Texas Tech, a couple of his pupils were NFL wide receivers Michael Crabtree and Danny Amendola. In his final season as offensive coordinator and assistant head coach at East Carolina in 2014, the Pirates ranked third in the FBS in passing offense and fifth in total offense, and in the top-10 in several offensive categories in three of the four years previous to that.
In Riley’s first season at Oklahoma, in 2015, with Heisman finalist Baker Mayfield at quarterback, the Sooners ranked fourth in the nation in scoring (43.5 points per game) and seventh in total offense (530 yards per game). Riley received the Broyles Award that season as the nation’s top assistant coach.
And the 2016 OU offensive numbers were even better: third nationally in scoring and No. 2 in the country in total offense, all under Riley’s leadership.
Joe Castiglione, the Oklahoma athletic director and Riley’s new boss, said this past week in an article in the Oklahoman that Riley “is far more prepared than some are at 43. He has a lot more experience that some might have at 38 or 40. That’s the way the coaching world is.
“It might come at 24, might come at 28, might come at 34. You never know,” the Sooner athletic director said.
Asked what he thought about the Sooners’ new head coach, Barry Switzer, himself a former offensive coordinator, told the Oklahoman’s Tramel, “That’s who I would have hired. Perfect fit. You couldn’t hire anybody else. The guy runs the playbook, recruits the quarterbacks. He’s the guy. You want somebody to keep continuity. Same quarterback, same system, same recruiting.”
A strong vote of confidence from the second winningest coach in Oklahoma football history (next to Stoops, of course).
Of course, time will soon tell how smart and wise a decision it was to advance Riley into the top post of the eighth winningest team in college football history.
Riley may not be the best choice among the potential candidates to become the next head football coach at Oklahoma, but from all indications, he is absolutely the right choice.