Mike Stoops walked into the small interview room at Jones AT&T stadium after one of the worst defensive performances in college football history dressed smartly in a blue sport coat, his multicolored tie slightly loosened at the neck.
The questions started before he had fully settled into his chair.
“Well,” Stoops started, then paused. He rubbed his left hand across his brow, taking one more moment to compose himself before answering questions. He hadn’t been able to find answers for the last several hours, with Texas Tech quarterback Patrick Mahomes gaining an FBS record 819 total yards.
“They had guys running free pretty much all night,” Stoops said. “Just very disappointed in our effort and our coaching and just everything. It’s unacceptable.”
A year ago, Stoops had the best defense in the conference, but this season started off poorly and has gone downhill since. It began with the failure to stop Houston’s Greg Ward on third down and culminated with one of the worst defensive performances in college football history in Lubbock.
“Just total breakdowns in technique,” Stoops said in Lubbock. “Guys running post routes wide open. I’ve never seen that in my whole life. I’ve never seen that many guys open in one game.”
The Sooners have rebounded in recent contests, holding the typically powerful Baylor Bears to just 24 points in a rout last week.
But Stoops knows he still hasn’t found all the answers.
“Every time you think you’ve got all the answers, you’re going to get slapped. That’s just the world we live in, whether it’s me, whether it’s a player,” Stoops said following the season opening loss to Houston. “You get too full of yourself, you can be overly confident too and not prepare the right way, then you’re going to get humbled.
“This game, you’re one game, one play away from always getting humbled.”
Emotions
Mike Stoops is a visibly emotional man. Whether he's on the sideline or in a coaches booth, his reactionary face has always been a draw for television cameras.
Those emotions shine through in practice as well, which freshman linebacker Caleb Kelly, who was recruited by Stoops, learned the hard way when he got to Norman.
“Coming in, I was really excited, and then once he started yelling at me, I was shocked because I thought I would be treated a little different, like more of a human I guess I could say,” Kelly said with a laugh. “And then I woke up and saw that that’s what football is and that’s what it’s going to be here and at the next level. Once I got used to that, I feel like our bond started getting better.”
Older players say Kelly wasn’t around for the most intense version of Stoops. As Stoops has gotten further into his second stint with the Sooners, he has settled down a bit.
“When I first came, he was just a crazy wild man,” senior safety Ahmad Thomas said. “But now he’s more calm.”
And despite the yelling, players feel comfortable stopping by his office and talking to him in the middle of the day.
“It’s always open. The only time I’ve seen it closed is when he was talking to another player, and then he opened it right back up right after,” Kelly said. “He’s always there. He’s here from 6 a.m. … If we worked as he would, there would be no mistakes.”
But there are mistakes, and when there are enough of them, Stoops’ new mellower side dissipates.
“They just been on our ass every day, all day,” junior linebacker Emmanuel Beal said when asked about how Stoops had changed since the Texas Tech game. “They’re trying to make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice.”
Arizona days
Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops faced questions of nepotism after the Texas Tech game. He was asked if he was protecting his brother, Mike, whose defense was struggling, while Texas coach Charlie Strong had jettisoned his defensive coordinator following similar early-season struggles.
It wasn’t like this during Mike’s first stint in Norman. An assistant from 1999-2003, Stoops became one of the hot names in college football coaching circles, helping the Sooners to the 2000 national title and another title game appearance in 2003 before being hired at Arizona.
Once in Tucson, he was able to use the cache he’d built up at Oklahoma to make the Wildcats, a historically moribund program, competitive in the Pac-10.
“We did a good job keeping whatever talent we could locally there and had a pretty decent pipeline in California, too,” said Oklahoma linebacker coach Tim Kish, who was on Mike Stoops’ staff at Arizona. “We brought in some good players, some great coaches, great coaching staff, and administrative helped as much as they could, and Mike did a great job leading the program and being the face of the program.”
His tenure peaked when his 2009 team was poised to become one of the best in school history, a 6-2 start putting the Wildcats in the middle of a chase for what would have been the program’s first Pac-10 title.
Mike Stoops’ team rose to No. 18 in the AP poll but fell on the road to California. The next week, Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli threw a last minute touchdown to tie the game then slipped through two Arizona defenders on third and goal in double overtime, killing the Wildcats’ Rose Bowl dreams.
“Arizona’s a different place, too. I mean, that’s a place that didn’t win forever,” said Oklahoma offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh, who was also at Arizona with Stoops. “And he did a hell of a job there. They didn’t really appreciate it like they should have, you know what I mean. Hell, we were one play away from winning the Pac-12 — it was called the Pac-10 back then — and Arizona’s the only school in the Pac-10 to never win it. And we’re one play away. So we did a lot of good things. He did a lot of good things.”
But just as the 2016 Sooners’ defense couldn’t keep the momentum of 2015, Mike Stoops’ Wildcats would never get another chance at the Rose Bowl.
They would go on to lose to Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl then went 7-6 in 2010. The team started 1-5 in 2011, and Stoops was fired mid-season.
A new era
Mike Stoops came back to Norman following his firing. He was met by a much different conference, one that had perfected the spread-based offenses that Oklahoma helped introduce to the league at the turn of the century.
The rest of the country has now adopted these offenses, and dominant defenses are much more rare than in decades past. Occasionally, the right combination of talent and coaching produce a top defense like the Sooners had in 2015.
“Obviously, I think he’s gotten a lot better, but I felt like that just because he’s molded us. It makes him look a lot better over the years,” senior linebacker Jordan Evans said. “Some people have questioned our defense. The next year our defense was amazing and that was all credited to him.”
Other years, all the pieces aren’t there for his team, and Mike Stoops can still find some games, like his alma mater Iowa’s recent 14-13 win over No. 3 Michigan, where he can see the kind of football he grew up with.
“That was old-school football that was at its finest,” Mike Stoops said. “You could actually see 22 guys in one camera shot. I don’t know when the last time you could say that about one of our games. We go from this sideline to that sideline. You need three cameras.”
Not even the entire Big Ten conference plays that style of football anymore. Former Oklahoma offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson has Indiana on the cusp of a second straight bowl game with the same offense that Jason White and Sam Bradford won Heisman Trophies in, and Ohio State’s power-spread system put 45 points on the board in Norman on Sept. 17.
"That's just the world we live in, and we know it," Mike Stoops said before the Sooners’ game against TCU. "It's not the easiest time to play defense in college. Just because of the game is spread, the tempo, the amount of plays, everything. It's just different. You can't get into sub-packages. They make you play with the same people. There's just a lot of things now that are different.
"I'm not a big fan of what's going on now. It's, you know what I mean, it's like basketball on grass. It's just the way we play it. You can't put any sub-packages, you gotta play this, they don't let you sub. Run to the line, let people run and pass, it's very difficult. It's a different game, but it is what it is."
As the season has unfolded, injuries and attrition thinning out his depth chart, Mike Stoops has been forced to shuffle between various personnel groupings, trying to find the right answers for the high-powered offensive systems like Texas Tech’s that attack him — and his defense — from all directions.
