Following Stoops’ playbook
After failing to talk head football coach Bob Stoops out of retiring, University of Oklahoma president David Boren decided to do the same thing, announcing Wednesday his retirement effective June 30.
NORMAN — Dressed in a navy suit with a crimson-and-gold striped tie, David Boren took a seat on the aluminum bench in between tight end Mark Andrews and left tackle Orlando Brown on the sideline during last Saturday’s football game.
If the university president plopping down on the team bench between two massive football players surprised anyone around, they didn’t show it.
Other than being about 55 years older than the guys sitting on either side of him and wearing a collared shirt, Boren hardly seemed out of place.
By this point in his nearly 23-year tenure, Boren was as much a part of the football team — and any athletic team, for that matter — as the head coach, the athletic trainer or the water boy.
It might not have been that way when he arrived in November 1994, but he made himself part of the fabric of the Sooners’ athletic department and integrated the department into the rest of campus life in the same way.
As he sat there taking in Oklahoma’s blowout of Tulane, Boren let his mind wander.
Most of the 86,290 crimson-clad people surrounding him had no idea that he’d announce his planned retirement just four days later, giving a brief 10-minute speech in front of a standing-room only crowd in Holmberg Hall to deliver the news that he would leave his post on June 30, 2018.
But Boren knew. He’d known for a while that his tenure was coming to an end.Surrounded by the program he helped resurrect in the stadium that transformed under his guidance, Boren reflected on his tenure as Oklahoma’s second-longest serving president.
He remembered the times in the early years where he was scared to leave his seats early, fearful he would be accosted with unsolicited advice about the football program.
“I usually would sit in my seats until everyone else had emptied out of the stadium,” he said, “because if I left, I got all sorts of calls of, ‘fire the coach,’ or all sorts of advice about what we should be doing.”
He thought about the decision to hire athletic director Joe Castiglione and the pair’s subsequent move to bring on Bob Stoops, the young defensive whiz who had never held a head coaching job, to be the new face of a struggling football program.
He thought about all the successes that came in the Stoops era — one national championship, 10 Big 12 titles, 190 wins. And he thought about the countless successes of the other athletics programs, the hiring of other vital coaches like women’s basketball coach Sherri Coale and softball coach Patty Gasso.
He also thought about the times that things weren’t as easy, about the SAE scandal that threatened to crack the university’s bedrock.
A few months earlier, Boren had a similar moment of thought and reflection. He sat in his office with Stoops, brought by Castiglione to Boren’s office so the president could once again talk him out of leaving the university — and instead, Stoops’ words made Boren consider his own future.
Boren listened as Stoops laid his thoughts bare — his feelings about stepping aside, his desire to live a full and healthy life after coaching, stepping away from the stresses of the job, and how Lincoln Riley was the right person at the right time to replace him.
“You know, this could be a national championship year,” Boren asked Stoops. “Don’t you want to be the one to win that national championship?”
“No,” Stoops replied. “The important thing is the program wins it, and we have the right person to be head coach.”
Eventually, Castiglione nodded to Boren, signaling it was time for the president to talk Stoops out of leaving just as he had when plenty of suitors made runs at the coach in the past.
“I found myself saying, ‘Well, Bob, I can’t argue with your reasoning,’” Boren remembered Wednesday. “‘I understand. It’s the right decision for you personally, but certainly it’s a very generous decision in terms of the way you’re looking at the program.’”
That left Boren thinking.
“Well, he did it,” Boren thought. “Maybe it’s time for me to do it.”
So 105 days after Stoops stepped down, Boren made his own announcement.
He stepped to the podium at 2 p.m. sharp, wearing the a tie that looked an awful lot like the crimson-and-gold striped one he sported on the bench four days earlier and grinned at the crowd.
It was his time.