What about Bob?
A year ago today, Stoops retired as the Oklahoma football coach. How has his life changed?
NORMAN — Bob Stoops pulled into the long driveway of his home just off Interstate 35 a couple of weeks ago. Behind his vehicle, he pulled a 10-foot, plastic bass boat, freshly purchased from Bass Pro.
When Stoops got up to the house, his wife was waiting. Carol Stoops just shook her head.
“Never been to Bass Pro” before, Stoops said, telling the story. “I didn’t even know how to fish. I gotta have a few of my buddies teach me how to fish a little bit.”
Stoops sounds like a guy with a little too much time on his hands. And he doesn’t disagree. That’s exactly what he wanted. A year ago today, June 7, 2017, Stoops shockingly resigned as the Oklahoma football coach, handing the reins to Lincoln Riley and walking away from a program he built back, quickly, to national prominence and over 18 seasons mostly kept the Sooners there.
It’s been quite a year for the Sooners. A Big 12 championship. A Heisman Trophy for Baker Mayfield. An epic Rose Bowl that OU lost to Georgia in double overtime. Enhanced recruiting that makes the future seem bright.
It’s been a weird year for Stoops.
“It’s strange,” he said. “It’s different. It’s great. It’s not great.”
Talk about weird. Hearing Stoops be the least bit introspective is weird. The ultrafocused, ultra-consistent coach who was unassailable through all those Sooner seasons lets his guard down a little these days.
He’s sitting in the mostly-empty dining room of Belmar Golf Club on a Friday morning and is willing to let us peek behind the curtain of a year-old decision that rocked not just a state, but a sport.
Stoops admits that while driving from northwest Norman to northeast Norman, he thought about what he would say about this year removed from running the Sooner football machine. And he even has an answer. A very good answer.
“A lot of it, I wanted my own time,” Stoops said. “More than anything, I just wanted to own my own time. Does that make sense?”
Oh, to some it will, to some it won’t. At age 56 and in good health, Stoops walked away from a $6 million salary and a quarterback for the ages and a team good enough to win it all. He walked away from a job
he loved.
The intensity. The practices. The gameplanning. The filmwatching. The emotion. The excitement.
“The adrenaline of it is probably the biggest part that was really hard to get used to last fall,” Stoops said.
Stoops, the son and brother of coaches, a football lifer if ever there was one, left that rush because of time. Because that $6 million salary included duties that went beyond practice and gameplans and film-watching and beating Texas on electric October afternoons.
Those duties included solving three or four problems a day if he was lucky, 10 or 12 if he wasn’t. Discipline problems and equipment issues and personnel questions and recruiting dilemmas and compliance questions and a hundred other things that can arise in big-time college football. Those duties include seven-day work weeks from mid-July into February, always on call, plus recruiting weekends that pile up one after another and only are getting more demanding with a new calendar.
“You’re dealing with something all the time,” Stoops said. “And that was great. I loved it. But it was just enough for me. If I choose to go somewhere and do something, I want to be able to do it. I got to a point, at what age do you do it? Are you then capable of going where you want, when you want? You never know what’s promised to you. I don’t have anything wrong, it’s just that I don’t want to wait until I do.”
So Stoops surveyed the landscape, saw that he had a turnkey successor available in Riley who would keep the organization together and a ready-to-win roster that would keep the success rate humming, and stepped aside.
“I’ve got a lot of time now,” Stoops said. “Sometimes, I have too much time. So there’s those struggles that way. But it doesn’t mean it was wrong. I anticipated the ups and downs of it. The good and the bad. And I’m good with it.”
Stoops stepped aside. He didn’t step away. He attended 12 of OU’s 14 games, missing Texas because he knew of no safe place from which to watch in the Cotton Bowl and missing Iowa State because he took son Drake on a recruiting visit to Ohio University. He frequently saw the players and coaches, his players and coaches, and felt a part of the special season.
By design, he didn’t fill up all that new time, not wanting to commit to too much. He’s traveled more, worked out longer, played extra golf.
“I was still, even in the fall, too attached to the team and coaches, players, to just leave and not pay attention and be invested in it,” Stoops said. “I still felt too much of it to do that. I still do. As time goes, well, now that my sons are going there, it may take awhile, but you know what I mean.
“The coaching part of it is hard to just eliminate when you have such a concern for everybody involved. I guess as time goes, people move on or players leave, it’ll be less. So that really tied me up in the fall being that I still felt I wanted to see the games.”
Watching those games, especially early, was difficult. Sitting in a small suite high above Owen Field’s west side, sometimes with only Carol and sometimes with friends who knew how invested he was in each game, Stoops found himself saying the same things he said on the sideline. On 3rd-and-4, when the defense substituted and the Sooners didn’t, Stoops found himself yelling. Snap the ball, snap the ball. Get five yards.
“Then it was like, ‘what am I doing?’” Stoops said to himself. “No one’s listening to me.”
It got easier as the games passed. He was letting go a little more, getting wrapped up in the myriad nuances that consume a coach a little less. By year’s end, he actually was enjoying the games to some degree.
Stoops even tried the American tradition of tailgating. Twice he attended the pregame tailgate of Delta Delta Delta, his daughter Mackenzie’s sorority.
“I said, ‘wow,’” Stoops said. “I never knew all that goes on outside these games.”
But don’t paint Stoops as all-consumed with football. He never was that way. Think back to those early days, 1999, 2000, 2001, when the Stoops’ staff was young and the Sooners were back in the saddle. Stoops was noted for his perspective, encouraging families to hang around the football office and not working his coaches deep into the night.
“I guess, too, it’s fair to say, this isn’t all I got,” Stoops said. “Football isn’t my whole life. Maybe it seemed like that to people, but that’s never been the case for me.”
He’s traveled to Florida and Chicago, two of his favorite places, and is headed to Europe in a few days. Back in the winter, in mid-week, he flew to Phoenix and mischievously thought of his coaches, beating the recruiting bushes, while he had a golf club in his hand and the warm sun on his face.
And Stoops has met people. Really met them. Over 18 years, you could tell that Stoops was not without his charm, but only people on the inner circle got to see that charm bloom. He was careful. Guarded. Circumspect.
That’s changed, to some degree. A few people come through the sleepy Belmar dining room. Stoops chats comfortably with those he knows and doesn’t know.
“One thing I’ve noticed, I’m a lot more open to people and have learned and gotten to know tons more people in the last year than I did,” Stoops said. “Two reasons. I haven’t been around ‘em enough, and I always felt a sense of being guarded. So I’ve been able to be myself a lot more. I’m a lot more open and more accessible.”
In the OU gala that saluted Stoops in April on the state fairgrounds, Stoops said he believes there’s something else out there for him professionally, he’s just not sure what it is. And he says he’s probably not ready for it now.
Television or radio, for instance. All kinds of opportunities would await Stoops if he made himself available, but he’s thought it through.
“I’m a little leery,” he said. “I feel like I’m still close enough to it, I gotta be careful what I say or it becomes news and takes away from the team and OU and Lincoln. So I can’t just go out, start popping off and not have it reflect back. At some point, as I move on, it’ll become my own voice and not OU. But I just feel right now, if I’m talking about
… the SEC, I still get attached back to OU, and now they (the Sooners) gotta deal with it. And they shouldn’t have to.”
And of course, major media work would require travel.
“I want to own my own time, and all of a sudden if I’m on TV, I’m traveling two days a week,” he said. “So I don’t know.”
So for now, he’ll stick to travel and golf and meeting people and living and dying with the Sooners. And if Stoops truly gets bored, there’s always that two-seat bass boat for his backyard pond.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at (405) 760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at newsok.com/ berrytramel.