Bob Stoops’ resume at Oklahoma is as lengthy and distinguished as any head coach in college football history, and he keeps adding to it.
The OU head coach is entering his 18th season on the sidelines at Oklahoma and has been at his job the longest of any active football head college coach in the country who has continuously served at the same school. (Bill Snyder, one of Stoops’ longtime coaching friends former boss, has been the head coach at Kansas State for 24 years, but that was over two runs of 17 and seven years).
Stoops is already the winningest head coach in Sooner football history with 179 victories and 13 seasons out of 17 total with 10 or more wins. This season he moves to No. 2 on the Sooner head coaches’ list insofar as time on the job. Only the legendary Bennie Owen, who seemingly coach every Oklahoma athletic team in the early part of the last century, including football for 22 seasons was at the job longer than Stoops.
The late, great Bud Wilkinson coached at Oklahoma for 17 seasons, accumulating 145 wins, three national championship and conference titles along the way. Next comes Barry Switzer, perhaps the most popular and controversial head coach in OU football history and the father of the Oklahoma version of the Wishbone offense.
Switzer headed the Sooner football program for 16 seasons, from 1973 to 1988. He won 157 games, second most in school history, including three national titles of his own and 12 conference championship (all in the Big Eight).
Early on in his time at Oklahoma, Stoops was rumored to be leaving or at least being discussed as a coaching replacement at other elite college programs such as Florida, Ohio State and Notre Dame. At the time, a case could easily have been made for why the Oklahoma head coach would be interested in leaving Norman for what some might consider to be greener pastures or higher-profile, head-coaching opportunities.
Some thought he would be tempted to return to the University of Florida, where Stoops served as the defensive coordinator under his mentor Steve Spurrier, when that job came open in 2004. Or that Ohio State would be an attractive job for the native Ohioan when Urban Meyer’s predecessor, Jim Tressel, was fired in 2010 as the Buckeyes head coach. Interestingly, it was Meyer who took the aforementioned open position at Florida.
Through it all, Stoops has remained committed to the University of Oklahoma, Sooner football and the Sooner Nation, even though many fans and critics of OU football more recently have argued that he may have overstayed his welcome in Norman.
Count Stoops among those who are surprised that he has been at Oklahoma as long as he has. “I never envisioned it to be that long,” the Sooner head coach told Ryan Aber of the Oklahoma City Oklahoman in an interview last season.
“But I also knew when I accepted this job that it wasn’t a job that you do well and go to another place, or leave and go to a better school. I felt this was the better school.”
As a matter of full disclosure, I am not among those enormously fickle, anti-Stoops crusaders who subscribe to the patently ludicrous notion that someone could come in right now and do a better job at Oklahoma than Bob Stoops. If that was even valid, who would it be?
Seventeen seasons in the same coaching job in college football, even at programs with a sustained history of success, is incredibly rare. I, for one, am especially grateful that the Stoops era has endured as long as it has and that Oklahoma football continues to evolve and remain among the nation’s best.
For those of you who are unmercifully down on Bob Stoops, I can only conclude that 13 10-win seasons, nine conference championships and four appearances in the national championship game and one of the four playoff teams in the second season of the College Football Playoff are not good enough for you.
I ask you, again, who out there and willing to come to Oklahoma would be a better fit and do a better job than that?