Bob Stoops Plan For A Winner Was Not A Long Range Plan

Jan. 3, 2001

By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer

MIAMI - Bob Stoops never had a long-range plan.

He doesn't believe in them. It might be because Stoops was so successful so soon at every job he held before arriving at Oklahoma. Or because he is such a quick study himself.

Or maybe, when the father and coach who taught you everything important about life and football suffers a fatal heart attack while working a game, well, that makes you hurry just that little bit more.

Whichever it was, Stoops walked across the floor of the Orange Bowl as Wednesday night segued into Thursday morning as the coach of the national champion Sooners.

In just his second season on the job.

At the tender age of 40.

By smothering a Florida State team that was the dynasty of the 1990s, with an offense that was supposed to be state-of-the-art well into the new century.

"To be honest with you," Stoops said, "we fully expected to play that way."

He had just lifted the crystal glass football from atop the championship trophy and passed it to the kids celebrating behind. Gatorade from the obligatory drenching still dripped off his cap. Oklahoma's perfect season was now in the record books, its seventh national championship secured with a 13-2 win over the Seminoles.

"It's easy to say," Stoops said above the roar behind him, "that Oklahoma is back." Yet when Stoops turned up in Norman, no one dreamed Oklahoma would be back so soon.

He was a smart, tough, All-Big 10 defensive back at Iowa who patiently built a reputation as an even smarter, tougher defensive coach everywhere he worked afterward. As a graduate assistant at his alma mater, during a quick stopover at Kent State, during a long layover at Kansas State, where in seven years Stoops rose to become coordinator and turned the 1995 Wildcats into the nation's best defense.

He left Kansas State after that season to take the same job at Florida under Steve Spurrier, but his magic hardly waned. In his three seasons there, the Gators won a national championship, a Southeastern Conference championship and made three bowl appearances. Stoops' defense consistently ranked among the top 15 in the country. During that run, he beat Florida State and coach Bobby Bowden twice.

Maybe that's why Bowden was hardly surprised when another brilliants Stoops defensive effort steamrolled his Seminoles again.

"We simply could get nothing going offensively. They did a great job of confusing us defensively. I'd say he made all the right moves tonight," Bowden said.

But Stoops almost didn't get the chance. Oklahoma is one of the most storied programs in college football, a place where a coach walks by cases filled with trophies and halls echoing with the successes of predecessors named Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer.

And when athletic director Joe Castiglione named Stoops as the man to restore that glory in December 1998, the choice was met with almost deafening silence. He couldn't have been better regarded inside football circles, but he was hardly known outside them.

Besides, Oklahoma had won 12 games in the previous three years. But then Stoops took the microphone and with a confidence those close to him never find surprising, he said the Sooners would be ready to compete with anybody on their schedule.

Not in two seasons, or three, or five. But next season. Then he took Oklahoma to a 7-5 finish and made believers of every Sooner past and present.

"You could see right away this guy has what it takes," Switzer said. "Personality, smarts, toughness - it was part of his package from the start. He was clearly a young man who didn't have to be shown things more than once."

Stoops got that from his dad. Ron, the defensive coordinator at Cardinal Mooney High for 28 years, and Dee Dee raised four sons and two daughters and no one who watched them grow up in Youngstown, Ohio, ever doubted the boys would follow in their father's footsteps.

Bob brought Mike along to help with the defense when he got the job at Nebraska, leapfrogging his oldest brother, Ron Jr., into the big-time. But all of them were forged the same way - watching the love and dedication that Ron Sr., poured into his work. Ron Jr. was coaching against his father in 1988 when Ron Sr., suffered a fatal heart attack on the bench.

It was one of the first things Bob recalled in the moments following his greatest triumphs.

"He was a long-time defensive coach and he was very special to me and my brothers," Stoops said. "The good Lord has a good coach up there."

And Ron Sr., would be proud to know that he left a pretty fair one behind.

Oklahoma won by playing swift, smashmouth football, but they did it with a calm that paid tribute to the man pulling the strings. Just three minutes into the game, when a fumble by Andre Woolfolk gave Florida State's high-octane offense the opening it needed, Sooner linebacker Torrance Marshall picked off a Chris Weinke pass and stole the momentum right back.

The Sooners mixed up the defensive schemes throughout, patiently taking away more and more of Weinke's passing lanes and forcing him into more and more high-risk gambles. The biggest play of the game was made by Derrick Strait - like Stoops, a defensive back. Strait tipped a pass away from the Seminoles' Anquan Boldin on a fourth-down-and-10 from the 35-yard line midway through the final quarter that turned the ball back to Oklahoma on downs.

The Sooners then marched down the field to score, locking up the championship Stoops knew would come soon enough.

"We play well in the Orange Bowl," Stoops said.

He was only 20 when Switzer's Sooners beat Bowden and Florida State in this bowl game in successive years, 1980-81, too young to know then that he would one day extend the tradition.

"No one can say anymore that was then," Stoop said. "This is now."

University of Oklahoma Athletics

Bob Stoops Plan For A Winner Was Not A Long Range Plan

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