Oklahoma football: Why Bill Bedenbaugh is the best o-line coach in the country

A match made in heaven

Stoops clearly remembered that day when he decided to move on from co-offensive line coaches James Patton and Bruce Kettle a few months later. Bedenbaugh was charged with getting Oklahoma’s edge back up front.

For two years he did exactly that as Oklahoma football found a resurgence on the ground highlighted by 212 yards on the ground in a 35-21 revenge win over Notre Dame in 2013,  a dominating performance against Alabama in the 2014 Sugar Bowl and Samaje Perine‘s NCAA-record breaking 427-yard day against Kansas in 2014.

While the Sooners toughness up front had been restored, the 2014 season was one of disappointment with just the third five-loss season in Stoops lengthy coaching career.

Something else was about to change. Lincoln Riley was brought in to restore the Air Raid to the Sooners program. He was a Mike Leach disciple and had run a more traditional version of Leach’s original scheme at East Carolina.

While many outsiders might have wondered how Bedenbaugh’s hard-nosed approach to coaching his linemen would meld with Riley’s high-flying philosophy, they need only look at the pair’s mutual history to understand that the Sooners were on the verge of something special.

Bedenbuagh himself is an Air Raid disciple. In fact he’s one of the first. Playing his football at Iowa Wesleyan under Hal Mumme and Mike Leach in the early 90s, Bedenbuagh was part of the early experimental days of the scheme. It’s something he would learn even more about as he made his way to Texas Tech in 2000 as a graduate assistant. He moved his way up to offensive line coach in 2005 and served on the same staff as a young Riley for three years.