Why SEC football will miss Bob Stoops
SEC football programs have a lot of enemies outside the conference borders, but no coach was better at pushing their buttons than Bob Stoops.
There’s some mourning going on in SEC country today. No, there wasn’t a death in the family, nor did Nick Saban get lost at sea following the SEC spring meetings. But the conference everyone loves to hate has lost perhaps its greatest antagonist, Bob Stoops.
When it was announced on June 8, 2017 that Oklahoma head football coach Bob Stoops was retiring effective immediately, there was an impromptu and joyous rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus staged by members of the Big 12 Conference.
Stoops was a road block to many a Big 12 school’s title hopes over his 18 years at Oklahoma, and while things may not slip at all for the Sooners under new head coach Lincoln Riley, just the seeing the architect of so many shattered championship dreams depart was reason enough to rejoice for some.
But down south, where football once reigned supreme over the nation, there was a different feeling.
When the news on Stoops blasted the Twitteverse and made its way to the deep south, the conversation opened up in a hurry. You could almost see tea-sipping neighbors leaning on fence posts in the southeastern sunshine of Tuscaloosa, Oxford, College Station and other cities, talking about what a jerk Stoops could be, but then telling each other “We’re gonna miss that feller.”
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Frenemies? Perhaps. But sometimes it’s more the lack of someone trying to sting you into submission that you really miss.
SEC fans and coaches will miss Bob Stoops the way Road Runner would miss Wile E. Coyote; the way Batman would miss the Joker, or the way Nick Saban would miss sportswriters.
Stoops could be viewed as the greatest foil of the SEC in modern times. A vocal detractor without a filter who seemed to take a sort of twisted joy in getting under the skin of anyone who ever let the chant “S-E-C” cross their lips – and it always made for good theatre on the gridiron.
It wasn’t that Stoops owned the SEC on the field, although his record was a tidy 7-4 (including four straight wins to close things out), but it was more how he went about goading on SEC supporters before and after the matchups.
In 2013, Stoops took to the microphone to give his personal eulogy on the SEC being the best conference in the nation.
“So they’ve had the best team in college football, they haven’t had the whole conference,” Stoops said in a spring 2013 press conference. “Because, again, half of ‘em haven’t done much at all. I’m just asking you. You tell me. So you’re listening to a lot of propaganda that gets fed out to you. Again, you can look at the top two, three, four, five, siex teams, and you can look at the bottom six, seven, eight, whatever they are. How well are they doing?”
But he was just getting started.
The Big 12 loves their “every game matters” mantra, and Stoops loved to rub that in the face of the SEC.
“Think about it: mathematically we play everybody, they [the SEC] don’t play everybody,” Stoops continued. “For instance Texas A&M. They play eight conference games. They have Lamar, Rice, SMU and Louisiana Monroe. Boy, those are all a bunch of toughies, right? We have nine conference games. So if [Texas A&M] was fortunate enough to be in the SEC championship game, they would play nine conference games at the end of the day and they have all those four ‘toughies’ to go with it.”
ALSO READ: Bob Stoops Leaving Oklahoma in Good Hands
Stoops didn’t mind being blunt, because it seemed every time he opened up about his disdain for the lifting up of the SEC, his teams did something on the field to back him up. They would silence the fans who wanted to rub his nose in those quotes like he was a puppy being housebroken.
And it’s not just fans or members of other programs who traded barbs with Bob Stoops. ESPN talk show host and ultimate SEC homer Paul Finebaum even got into the act.
Prior to the 2015 second act of the Sooners’ home-and-home series against Tennessee in Knoxville, SEC mouthpiece Paul Finebaum predicted a Volunteers win, calling Stoops “irrelevant”.
When the Sooners left Neyland Stadium with a 31-24 double overtime win over Big Orange, Stoops countered Paaaawwwl’s jab in the postgame presser.
“I don’t care. He doesn’t deserve that attention from me,” Stoops said, per Josh Bean of AL.com. “Bottom line is, ask Tennessee and their 105,000 people if we’re relevant or not, and a few other teams in the last couple years, so it doesn’t matter. And he’s getting paid to promote a league, I mean, that’s what he does. And that’s OK, everybody has to earn their money one way or another, so.”
On and on this went over the past two decades. 11 meetings between Oklahoma and the SEC. Seven Bob Stoops wins, and lots of bulletin board material on both sides.
And Alabama? Mighty Alabama?…
A combined 0-for-3 against Stoops.
(Shhhhhhh…they don’t talk about that in T-Town)
While Stoops did soften his stance on SEC greatness a little at the end of the 2016 season (and by soften, I mean not pick on Auburn after beating them for his fourth straight win over an SEC team), his legacy with the that conference is one of antagonism and verbal sparring.
Next: Five Best Players of Bob Stoops Era at OU
Bob Stoops was a big part of the glue which has helped to bond the SEC together over the years. His dismissal of their perceived dominance gave some programs and their supporters reason to arch their backs and say, “Them’s fightin’ words!”
If you don’t think SEC folks will miss that, think again.