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Oklahoma football: Stewart Mandel and his outrageous OU take

By Timothy Bailey

University of Oklahoma's new football coach Brent Venables laughs during his official introduction in the Everest Training Center on the University of Oklahoma campus Monday, December 6, 2021.Venables 06
University of Oklahoma's new football coach Brent Venables laughs during his official introduction in the Everest Training Center on the University of Oklahoma campus Monday, December 6, 2021.Venables 06 /
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Oklahoma football twitter is powerful! They bring the heat and the engagement to Twitter, and it was quite clear that The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel was looking to drive a little bit of traffic to his social on Wednesday.

He picked the Oklahoma Sooners to go 7-5, and 5-4 in Big 12 play. As we all know, this is a pretty far-fetched scenario, but to each their own right?

The really funny part was that he picked Nebraska to go 4-8, and 2-7 in conference play.  What does that mean exactly? Well, that means Stewey picked both Oklahoma and Nebraska to lose non-conference games, they can’t just lose to each other. So one user asked about the conundrum. Perhaps it was just an oversight on Mandel’s part and he’d correct the issue. Here is the hilarious exchange between Mandel and another Twitter user:

Listen, Nebraska has been down but the Huskers aren’t going to lose to North Dakota, who I might add is not a good FCS team they finished with a losing record last season, and typically hover around the .500 mark. This is a middling FCS program, going up against a talented but also middling FBS opponent. This isn’t North Dakota State or James Madison and it’s not Appalachian State vs Michigan back in the day.

At the end of the day do I think Mandel actually believes what he typed up in his article, that Oklahoma will finish 7-5? I do not! The Sooner fanbase is easy engagement, and the Athletic needs all of the engagement that it can get. Mandel knows by just sprinkling in a prediction he doesn’t even think is realistic, he will get Sooner Nation to rise up and argue with him. It’s working and to me, it’s both genius and hilarious. But if you are truly frustrated by his work then the only way to make it stop is to ignore it. The most clever part is when he is “wrong” he will get additional engagement from the “backlash” of being “proven wrong”.

The Oklahoma Sooners are not going to skip a beat under new head coach Brent Venables. The Sooners have bigger fish to fry, like when they are going to bring back the all-crimson alternative jerseys, what Stewart Mandel says will have no impact on the field of play. But Oklahoma QB Dillon Gabriel will, and so will Jaden Davis, and Justin Harrington. The emergence of the super talented line of scrimmage play Oklahoma will feature on both sides of the ball.

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