Oklahoma football: ‘Big Game Bob’ debuts on FOX ‘Big Noon Kickoff’
By Chip Rouse
The same week the Oklahoma football kicks off the 2021 season, ‘Big Game’ Bob Stoops kicks off a new career as a college football studio analyst.
Stoops joins the college football studio crew for FOX Big Noon Kickoff this season. He is sliding into the seat held for the past couple of years by another highly successful college coach, Urban Meyer, formerly of Ohio State and Florida and now head coach of the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars.
The winningest head coach in OU football history, Stoops makes his debut as a network TV analyst on Thursday night as part of the pregame broadcast crew for the game between Minnesota and Ohio State in Minneapolis. Two days later, he will be in Madison, Wisconsin, for Penn State at Wisconsin.
Stoops told Berry Tramel, sports columnist for The (Oklahoma City) Oklahoman, in an interview recently, he never thought while he was coaching that he would ever find himself in a television career. He said after he retired from college coaching, he started receiving calls about a potential career serving as a college football analyst on television.
At first, Stoops said, “I told ’em, ‘If I was interested in working weekends, I had a pretty good job (referring to his time coaching at OU).'”
Stoops sees his job with FOX as providing a coach’s perspective. “Their interest in me is that,” he said. “No one else has that.”
Stoops said he has already warned his bosses at FOX: “When it comes to Lincoln Riley and Oklahoma, I’m a homer. Don’t expect me to be anything but.”
We’ll get to see that for ourselves on Sept. 18, when the featured game for “Big Noon Kickoff” on that date will be Nebraska at Oklahoma and the 50th anniversary of the 1971 “Game of the Century” between these same two teams.
The former Oklahoma head coach joins a FOX studio crew that includes host Rob Stone and a couple of USC football alums, Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush. Leinart and Bush were both part of the top-ranked USC team that rolled over No. 2 Oklahoma, 59-21, in the 2005 BCS National Championship game. You know there is going to be conversation amongst the team about that.
Stoops’ connection to college football began 42 years ago as a freshman safety on the University of Iowa football team. Following assistant coaching jobs at his alma mater, at Kansas State and at Florida under Steve Spurrier, he landed in Norman, Oklahoma, and his first head-coaching assignment, a gig that would last 18 years and included a national championship and 10 Big 12 championships.
In June 2017, Stoops announced his retirement after 18 seasons with the Sooners. Two years later he returned to coaching, but this time at the professional level as the head coach of the Dallas Renegades in the return of the Xtreme Football League in 2020. The COVID-19 outbreak in the early part of 2020 brought a premature end to the XFL season after five games.