There might have been some truth to those "Brokelahoma" jokes, but new Oklahoma athletic director Roger Denny has plans to make sure the Oklahoma Sooners are no longer a laughing stock in the SEC.
Just days after deciding to keep OU men's basketball coach Porter Moser for at least another season because he didn't feel like Moser had a fair shot at success with the lack of financial backing he was getting from the university, Denny on Monday was on Dari Nowkhah's show on KREF radio and revealed that the Sooners in general have had a problem with undersourced teams.
Roger Denny shares blunt reality of OU resources compared to rest of SEC
"Coming out of the Big 12, maybe Oklahoma was big, bad Oklahoma that was running program budgets in the top 1 or 2 or 3 in the conference, but the SEC is a different environment, and we've got to be prepared for that," Denny said. "Looking at the list right now in front of me, we have (six) sports (of 21) right now operating with budgets outside of the top 10 in the SEC. So every one of those is a priority for us. We cannot accept that. And so that's our goal. ...
"So you look at our performance, you feel really good saying that we're out-performing our resources. We certainly don't have six sports that are performing in the bottom half of the league, but we've got six budgets that are outside of the top half (that includes football), and so we can't be satisfied by that. We have to go do everything we can to get those coaches resourced properly so that they can go out and meet the expectations that we've laid out of winning championships."
Denny officially replaced Joe Castiglione as AD in February and boldly proclaimed during his introductory press conference that the Sooners deserved dynasties, and he made it clear then that he knew that meant an "all-out commitment." In today's time in college athletics, that means more money than ever, not just for shiny new facilities, but to actually buy the talent needed to win championships to create those dynasties.
"Now more than ever, the correlation between the resources that you put into a program, which now includes the amount of NIL opportunities that your student-athletes have, is higher than ever with program success," Denny said.
Nowkhah asked specifically about the men's basketball program getting more resources, and Denny assured that money wouldn't be taken from a different program where one sport suffers for another's gain. That means flat out, though, that OU has to come up with more cash to make Denny's dreams for all sports a reality.
First, Denny did admit there are some areas where OU could reallocate resources between money spent on NIL, facilities, staffing and more. Denny made it clear, though, that when deciding where the most money should go, the highest return on investment is NIL for athletes.
"We don't necessarily want kids to come here solely because of what we're offering from an NIL perspective, but we sure as heck can't lose kids because we can't give them the NIL opportunities that they've earned," Denny said. "And that's where we've got to get right as a (men's basketball) program."
At this point, OU fans just have to trust that Denny will find the resources the Sooners need to fuel these giant ambitions. Regardless, it should be comforting for the fan base to know that its athletic director feels the same way and isn't content with the state of OU athletics.
There hasn't been any excuses from Denny and just settling for the way things are during this ever-changing time in college athletics, whether that's for a men's basketball program at its low, or even for a football program that just made the College Football Playoff.
"The football program's in a great position, no question, but I said it in my introduction here, our expectation is championships," Denny said. "So that's where I'd like for football to be is on a stage in Las Vegas next year. That's where I want us to be, and so that's the task at hand. ...
"Just like in basketball and just like in every one of our sports, we're gonna continue to do everything we can to push the needle so that, again, I have not shied away from this, expectation is championships, and that's for that program (football) and every one of them."