How Bob Stoops’ willingness to adapt fueled his 18-year run at Oklahoma

Sometimes, coaches whose expertise is on one side of the ball can struggle letting the other side of the ball flourish. Defensive stalwarts can want an offense to simply ground and pound with a physical nature. A high-flying offense can score quickly and put the defense back on the field without much of a break.

Bob Stoops, who retired after 18 seasons at Oklahoma on Wednesday, didn’t ignore the other side of the ball or make its life harder. He embraced it full-on, and he wasn’t afraid to innovate. It was critical to his coaching success, starting with his departure as a Kansas State defensive coordinator after the 1995 season.

Stoops went from Kansas State to Gainesville to be a defensive coordinator at Florida. In Stoops’ first scrimmage at UF in 1996, Steve Spurrier baptized him.

“He said to me, after about the fourth or fifth touchdown, he says, ‘Bobby, we gonna be able to force a punt this year?’ Honest to God. Then true to him, we come in the locker room afterward, getting showered up, and he says, ‘Hey, Bobby, don’t worry about it. You’re not going to see anybody like us.’ He was right. He knew it. And we didn’t.

“That’s the same year, we’re in a staff meeting, now it’s closer to our first game, about two weeks ahead of the game, he says, ‘Boy, we don’t have a punter. But don’t worry too much. We won’t be punting a lot.’”

At Oklahoma, he went to an even more aggressive aerial attack then the Fun ‘n’ Gun. As usual, necessity became the mother of invention, and the air raid iteration in Norman was born. From SB Nation’s Bill Connelly:

The story has always been that Stoops wanted the offense he hated defending the most, and that’s true. But there was more to the decision than that.

“I didn’t feel we had the players for [slowing it down and grinding away] to happen. I thought we’d have to build to that. I felt this would be the fastest way for us to make an impact offensively.” One other thing: “I needed to attract quarterbacks. At the time, we didn’t have one on campus. That offense attracted Jason White, Josh Heupel, and Nate Hybl. All three of them came that winter.”

The year before Stoops arrived in Norman, the Sooners were dreadful. They then shot to the top of college football and stayed there nearly every year since, in terms of offense, and won tons of games.

Part of this is the plug-and-play nature of the type of offense he was running. Stoops’ first offensive coordinator was current Washington State coach Mike Leach, an air raid early adapter. The other part of that success was, of course, landing the right players.

And it worked, as Stoops churned out consistently amazing offenses at OU. Last year’s was No. 1 in the country in S&P+ behind star QB Baker Mayfield. The man who succeeds Stoops will be his offensive coordinator, Lincoln Riley.

But OU would balance the attack to even things out. With studs like Quentin Griffin, Adrian Peterson, and DeMarco Murray, they offered a decent dose of the run. Less aerial, but often just as potent.

Stoops’ Sooners would see two of their QBs win Heisman trophies, in Jason White and Sam Bradford. Both played in and lost BCS National Championship games, but they triggered vaunted attacks that scored points in droves. Bradford’s 2008 squad was typically notable in its up-tempo nature. FOX famously had a shot-clock-style graphic in the 2009 championship game to clock how quickly the no-huddle offense could get plays off:

Offense purred at OU all the way until his final season when WR Dede Westbrook and QB Baker Mayfield became teammates who both were finalists for the Heisman Trophy. This time with a Lincoln Riley coached offense.

He went back to where he started in his final two seasons at OU.

“So I looked back, and I thought, ‘Well, here we are. I made it popular 17 years ago, and it worked, and then here 17 years later, I’m the only one not doing it.’”

These days, it’s the QB-centric rushing attack that gets the job done as well as being back to a more air raid focused passing attack. The Sooners are still getting the job done on the offensive side of the ball. It’s because of Stoops’ willingness to adapt and fix whatever’s broken. His program was always better for it.