Lincoln Riley and the art of the halftime speech
NORMAN — Most Saturdays, Lincoln Riley waits until the final minutes of halftime to address the Oklahoma football team. Not last week. With his team down 21-10 after two quarters in Manhattan, Kansas, Riley had a message for his team — one that couldn’t wait.
This wasn’t going to be about fixing alignments or refreshing tackling techniques.
No, what this team needed was a good, oldfashioned tongue-lashing halftime. A come-to-Jesus speech kind of halftime.
And that’s exactly what he gave them as soon as they filed into the locker room.
“That was probably about as hot as I run,” Riley said after the 42-35 win. “I knew we were close and had gotten a little bit of momentum there at the end of the first half. I was very confident, but I knew that we were going to have to take our intensity level, our mentality to another level in the second half.
“You can come in as a coach, yell, scream, do whatever you want, they either respond or they don’t. And our guys, not that they responded to me, they responded to the situation and the challenge that we had after not playing our best in the first half.”
While some coaches downplay the importance
of a halftime speech, Riley isn’t one of them. He believes in the power of the two-minute talk, and he watched his guys respond to it by outscoring the Wildcats 10-0 in the third quarter.
“I’ve always thought the pregame (talk) kind of builds up through the week,” Riley said. “I think the halftime one for me maybe is a little bit more important, just because you don’t know what’s going to happen in the first half. … You’ve got to be adjusting on the fly. Maybe it went really well. Maybe like at Kansas State, it didn’t go as planned, but you’ve got to be able to adjust.”
To Riley, the key to a halftime talk is reading the room and understanding exactly what the team needs in that moment — and it’s not always fire and brimstone.
That’s something Riley learned from Bob Stoops.
J.D. Runnels remembers the 2002 game at Missouri when Stoops realized his team needed a little comic relief to shake off an uninspiring first half.
At that time, the Tigers’ visitors locker room was pretty cramped, and the Sooners were uncomfortably crammed next to each other.
After breaking down the adjustments with offensive and defensive coaches at halftime, the Sooners huddled together with Stoops.
The head coach boiled it down for his team: a team with a visitors locker room that small didn’t deserve to beat the Sooners.
“The team laughed it off but also let out some pretty loud roars,” Runnels said, adding that it was the only time he could remember Stoops criticize another team. “I knew then we would find a way to win.
“I’ll never forget celebrating in that tiny locker room after that victory — and mostly because Bob let out the elephant in the small room.”
Not every OU coach shares Riley’s approach to halftime.
Barry Switzer, for one, didn’t put much stock in whatever he said to his players at halftime — or during pregame. If OU was ahead by a wide margin, Switzer used the break to make recruiting calls or order a couple sandwiches.
“I think it’s overrated,” Switzer said. “Halftime speeches, pregame. ‘Win one for the Gipper,’ that’s Hollywood. You don’t win football games that way. No coach gives an emotional speech that wins the game, that makes the team make a difference in the ballgame. It’s all the things you talk about from Monday through Friday that make it happen.”
Even so, for Riley and his team, the passionate plea at halftime in Manhattan from Riley and a couple of the team leaders did the trick.
“It was not a schematic halftime for any of the three sides of the ball,” Riley said. “It was a ‘we need to pick up our intensity level, we need to pick up our physicality if we want any chance of winning this game,’ and our coaches did a good job with them and our guys responded.”