Replacing Mike Stoops is a quick, but not a full, defensive fix

Mike Stoops is out and Ruffin McNeill is in as the new defensive coordinator at Oklahoma.

That is a big deal at any school, but an even bigger deal at one that has had just two defensive helmsmen in the last two decades and whose ousted DC is the brother of the winningest head coach in Oklahoma’s storied football history.

Bob Stoops, who is the career leader in coaching wins at Oklahoma (190) retired in June 2017 after 18 seasons on the Sooner sidelines, including one national title and 10 Big 12 championships. Mike, who was in his second stint at the defensive coordinator of the Sooners, elected to stay on as part of Lincoln Riley’s staff.

When Bob Stoops took the head coaching job at Oklahoma, in 1999, he brought along his younger brother, Mike, and Brent Venables, both of whom had been at Kansas State when Bob was defensive coordinator under Bill Snyder. For the first four seasons of the Stoops coaching era at OU, Mike and Venables shared the DC responsibilities. When Mike left the Sooner football family to become head coach at Arizona at the end of the 2003 season, Venables took over as defensive coordinator.

Venables remained in that role at OU until 2012, when Bob Stoops brought brother Mike back to Oklahoma following his firing at Arizona. Venables was experiencing considerable public scrutiny of his own over the Sooners’ defensive struggles when Mike returned to Norman. It wasn’t really clear to anybody, except perhaps Venables, how things were expected to work with Mike back on staff sharing the overall defensive responsibilities.

We all know how it ultimately worked out. Mike returned to his old role leading the Sooner defense, and Venables, seeing the writing on the wall, went on to bigger and better things in the same role at Clemson, which has rolled the Sooners twice since then and been in the College Football Playoff each of the last three seasons and is a prime Playoff contender again this season.

Things were never the same for the younger Stoops, nor for the Sooners, the second time around. What once was considered an elite college defense, in the early years of Bob Stoops’ time at Oklahoma, with Mike leading the defensive unit, has tumbled all the way to near rock bottom in practically every measurable statistical category. According to current NCAA statistics, OU is 79th in points allowed (27.3), 96th in total defense (412.2 yards per game), 106th in pass defense (264 yards per game allowed) and dead last in the Football Bowl Subdivision in Red Zone defense.

“We’ve got a really darn good football team right now that’s got a chance to make a really good run…I had to best align us to get that done, and I felt like this was the best way to do it.” —Head coach Lincoln Riley

It is unclear what the Sooners’ former head coach, himself a defensive-minded coach, would have done faced with the same set of circumstances as his hand-picked successor. Regardless. it is clear that Lincoln Riley had a very difficult decision to make over the weekend following yet another deplorable defensive performance, against a Texas offense that many consider to much more pedestrian than it was made to look by OU on Saturday.

While it is abundantly clear that it was time to make a change on the defensive staff and that Mike Stoops is probably not the right person to fill the coordinator role at this point in time, it is also important to understand that a change in defensive coordinators is not an immediate cure-all to the Sooners’ defensive performance.

Making a coaching change at midseason is a risky proposition and definitely doesn’t translate into an immediate remedy that removes all the underlying issues that contribute to the bigger problem. That generally takes some time, and Oklahoma is in the middle of a season with six games and a postseason still remaining. Sooner fans should not expect any major changes in the overall schematics of the defense, and the available roster personnel remains the same.

What we can expect, though, and what Riley is hoping for, is the spark and a renewed spirit and purpose that comes with an attitude change and a new way of looking at things.

Ruffin McNeill, a veteran college coach with extensive football experience and a proven track record leading and working with defenses, is the one charged with getting that process started while Riley considers candidates to fill the defensive coordinator post going forward.

Until the most recent top-10 recruiting class (the 2018 class), Oklahoma football recruiting over the past three-to-five years has been more top heavy with offensive talent. And it shows in the big offensive numbers Oklahoma has put up over the past four seasons. The Sooners recruited very well defensively with the 2018 class, and I would expect to see that trend continue in the near term in an attempt to rebuild and rejuvenate the Oklahoma defense into the stellar, hard-nosed unit it once was.

The much-maligned Oklahoma defense, which has become a running joke among college-football experts, is primed for a re-engineering, and that long over due process is now underway.

Oh, and by the way, the Sooners are still a very good football team that is going to be extremely difficult to beat in the remaining games this season.