First Patton, now Shipp: Stoops never believed things were 'pretty good'
Published: 2/12/2013 6:33 PM
Last Modified: 2/12/2013 6:33 PM
By now, it’s clear that Bob Stoops wasn’t entirely serious last month when he sat on a stool in front of a handful of local print reporters and patted his program on the back for finishing the 2012 season with a 10-3 record and sharing the Big 12 Conference title with Kansas State.
In a conversation that spanned more than an hour, someone asked Stoops, what’s the state of the program?
“Well, let’s see here,” he said. “Last three years, we’ve won two of the last three Big 12 championships. We just were 15th in the country. We’ve won more games overall than any other Big 12 team in the last three years. We’ve won more Big 12 games than any other team in the last three years. I think in the last three years, there’s only five teams in the country that have won 10 or more games; we’re one of them. In the last five years, there’s only two teams that have won more games than us. So pretty good.”
Not long after the small gathering had dispersed, Stoops’ publicity department cranked out a press release stating these facts.
It read like a prepared statement because it was.
It always felt like Stoops was speaking with hollow conviction. Events of the last two days bear that feeling out.
OU has fallen far behind college football’s best programs in quality of play on both the offensive and defensive line, the Alabamas of the world, the LSUs, the Floridas, even the rise of Notre Dame last season was irrefutable evidence.
Remember Barry Switzer’s words after the loss to Kansas State, when he said the Sooners no longer have elite players in the trenches?
Stoops knows this. Knew it all along.
It’s just that when two consecutive promising seasons concluded with three losses, combined with Switzer-like sentiments from around the nation — heck, it was obvious to anybody who’s ever followed football — it was then that Stoops realized the painful truth: this situation would not fix itself.
It required executive action.
Stoops, always so loyal to the core, cut loose James Patton as offensive line coach on Monday. (Patton landed with old mentor Kevin Wilson at Indiana, suggesting he took another job. But that’s semantics. Patton was fired. Whether or not he should have been is another discussion entirely.)
Now, Tuesday afternoon, there are multiple reports, confirmed by the Tulsa World, that assistant Jackie Shipp — an original member of Stoops’ first staff, a valued teacher of technique, an accomplished recruiter — also will not return to coach defensive tackles.
If the Shipp report is accurate, Stoops has gone from never firing one assistant in 13 years to firing three in two years.
Tired of all the accusations that he has grown soft, that he has become content, that his staff was stricken with the cancer of entitlement, Stoops has acted with impunity.
Shipp’s future has been the subject of speculation for the last few years. After signing prep All-Americans like Tommie Harris and Gerald McCoy (and turning them into first-round-draft picks) and developing middling prospects like Dusty Dvoracek and Adrian Taylor into All-Big 12 talent, Shipp and his players may have hit a wall.
He landed two top high school players in 2008 in Jamarkus McFarland and Stacy McGee — McFarland was the No. 1 d-tackle in the country, McGee was the No. 1 player in Oklahoma — and neither came close to that kind of potential in Norman. Neither did 2005 signee Demarcus Granger.
The last two recruiting classes before 2013, Shipp managed to sign only two defensive tackles and was suddenly a notorious figure to many Sooner fans for an inability to land top talent. Dallas prospect Justin Manning, Granger’s younger brother, was targeted for four years by Shipp, but famously committed to and signed with Texas A&M.
But some of that bad run can be traced back to the evolution of the Big 12 Conference to a passing league. No Big 12 team signs major league defensive tackle prospects any more. They all go to the Southeastern Conference, it seems.
As Sooner defensive coordinators Brent Venables and Mike Stoops switched to junk defenses — no defensive tackles, or no linebackers, for example — the best big men rightly decided to go where their opportunities were better, where defensive tackle play was a premium, not a goal-line decision.
That’s not Shipp’s fault. Just like all the injuries on the offensive line the last two seasons aren’t Patton’s fault. Patton did his best work the last two seasons with unremarkable players.
But clearly, Stoops had to do something.
Losing three games, sharing conference trophies, falling way short of another national title run and ending up 15th in the nation — in the postseason polls and in the national recruiting rankings — are the kind of expectations that are fine for other programs, but not Oklahoma.
Pretty good, as Stoops called it, isn’t good enough.
Written by
John E. Hoover
Sports Columnist
