Of all the hand-wringing and conjecture that followed Bob Stoops’ sudden retirement from Oklahoma football in June of 2017, none seemed to encapsulate Stoops’ new frame of mind better than a column last year by longtime Sooners observer Berry Tramel.
Berry visited Stoops on the one-year anniversary of his stunning departure from the OU sideline.
Stoops, named the head coach and GM of the Dallas XFL team last week, told Tramel the story of being greeted by his wife Carol as he pulled into the driveway with a new purchase in tow – a 10-foot bass boat.
“Never been to Bass Pro before,” Stoops revealed. “I didn’t even know how to fish.”
You can only play so much golf, I suppose. Or catch only so many fish.
Retirement must not be easy once you’ve heard the cheers on your biggest stage.
Years after he had been removed in 1989 from his founding Cowboys role by Jerry Jones, the late Tex Schramm told me about his own invigorating new fishing pastime – marlin fishing. But not the Hemingway kind.
Anyone with a stout boat and a Santiago can go searching the deep blue seas for marlin, Tex explained. So Schramm had devised an alternative, a way to fish for marlin from a Bahamas beach.
Tex discovered that when the winds were blowing from the southeast, he could launch a kite that was able to slip beyond the coral reef and drop his baited hook.
Marlin can grow to 16 feet in length and weigh over 1,800 pounds. But Schramm wasn’t interested in catching and mounting the big fish – just tagging and releasing them. It was the challenge of it that appealed to Tex.
“I’m the only nut doing this,” explained Schramm, ever the innovator.
He laughed, but there was a sadness in Tex’s eyes, as I later wrote. He missed the arena. He missed football.
Standing at a microphone last week, Stoops tried to explain why his golf and fishing days are about to be over, at least for now.
“When I stepped away a couple years ago, one of my major reasons was — and I made it very clear — I wanted my own time,” he said.
“But as that old saying goes, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ After a couple of years, I got to thinking that some days I’ve got too much time on my hands.
“So you start to look at what are your options.”
I’ve never espoused the theory that Stoops was forced to step aside as head coach because of something untoward that happened at OU.
The Joe Mixon thing? A bad call on Stoops’ part to allow the redshirt freshman to remain on scholarship, since a police video showed that Mixon’s assault on a female student was much more flagrant than the Ray Rice incident. Yet, Oklahoma administrators publicly did nothing to the head coach.
The tarnishing of his “Big Game Bob” moniker? After winning it all in 2000, Stoops reached the national championship game three times and lost. But he won 10 Big 12 titles and went 17-1 in the conference in his last two seasons. If there were drumbeats of discontent in Norman, they didn’t seem to be about Bob Stoops.
A reporter asked Stoops after last week’s announcement for his response to the scandal theorists.
“You were waiting for other shoe to drop, weren’t you?” Stoops answered. “And there isn’t one.
“And you found out that it actually was a really good time [to resign], wasn’t it?
“How’s OU done since? Did they lose any recruits when I stepped out?”
The reporter persisted and asked Stoops whether he had been forced out.
“I don’t even need to answer that,” Stoops answered.
When the succeeding football season arrived, Stoops continued to prominently walk the crimson carpet. The TV cameras regularly showed him cheering for the Sooners from his stadium suite. In April of last year, the university unveiled a statue of Stoops.
As the months passed between football seasons, though, little was heard publicly from Stoops. He surfaced once to call reports that he had interviewed for the not-vacant Auburn job “ridiculous.” Other head coaching gigs opened and closed – including Stoops-relevant ones, like Florida, Ohio State and the Cleveland Browns.
But for all we could tell, Stoops was on the golf course or the bass boat, or finally taking care of the things on wife Carol’s honey-do list.
I asked Stoops if any NFL teams had talked to him about a job over the last two years.
“Ahhh, no,” he answered, with the slightest of hesitations.
“That doesn’t mean that my agent every now and then doesn’t get a call.”
And why should we doubt him? I asked Stoops how long ago did he begin to think he wanted to coach again.
“There’s no timetable on that,” he said. “It just little by little happens.”
The XFL announcement had been a surprise to most. Oklahoma TV stations scurried down I-35 to cover the news conference.
How widely known was it, Stoops was asked, that he wanted to return to football?
“It wasn’t,” he said, “because I never expressed that. This just started to happen. I started to think this whole situation just might fit well. Little by little, it worked on me, and that’s where it came to.”
The randomness of his XFL decision, nevertheless, was not lost on the 200 or so who gathered at Globe Life Park for the announcement.
If Stoops, back in early December, had made public his desire to get back into coaching, the opportunities would have come sweepin’ down the plain.
Instead . . . the XFL?
Trust me on this – people don’t go to Craigslist looking for jobs in startup football leagues. The XFL, scheduled to begin play 12 months from now, is owned and centrally operated by wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon.
But coaches such as Stoops with a winning resume and a national brand don’t leave home without some measure of tailored compensation. I’m just guessing, but maybe Stoops is going to be part-owner of the team that will play in Arlington. Or maybe part of his compensation package is WWE stock.
Some in the media have suggested that Stoops’ return to the sidelines is his way of showing the football world that he will soon be re-available. Maybe so, but he could have accomplished the same thing with a simple announcement. He even could have tweeted it.
No, there’s a random factor to Stoops picking the XFL for his return. With the competing Alliance of American Football launching its first season last weekend, the timing of the Stoops return may just be McMahon’s league trying to rebound off the turnbuckles and make an attention-stealing splash.
Indulge me for a second:
I love these brassy, new football leagues. I worked in one myself (the old WFL) a long time ago. Ours folded because a couple of teams were soon not going to be able to pay the light bill. But today’s new leagues have something we didn’t have – a plethora of TV networks to show their games, and the TV cash that comes with it.
Nobody makes much money in a startup football league. If reports are correct, the XFL is wise in allocating its highest salaries to the head coach/GM and the starting quarterback. Those are the two roles most capable of influencing a team’s success.
The AAF, judging from the little I saw of it last weekend, is not going to be accused of overpaying for its quarterbacks. It’s going to regret that.
A few rough weekends in the XFL, however, are not going to tarnish Stoops’ campus statue. No matter whether his quarterback is named Manziel or Kaepernick, he’ll be able to jump to a more marquee job in 2021, should he desire.
Stoops, in any case, is in for a wild ride. There’s an arc to the lives of startup football leagues, an arc not totally unlike Fort Worth treasure Dan Jenkins’ “10 Stages of Drunkenness” from his best-seller Baja Oklahoma.
Call it, in order, the “10 Stages of Newly Formed Football Leagues”:
Stage 1, Trumpets and Hooters girls
2, Announce tricked-up rules
3, Sign somebody outrageous, like 75-year-old Jimmy Johnson. Or Tony Romo.
4, Disclose network TV deal, but no actual numbers
5, Unveil uniforms, some of which scorch viewers’ eyes
6, Inflate attendance figures
7, Explain low attendance is because of “opening of deer season”
8, He Hate Me
9, Nuclear winter
10, Antitrust suit against NFL
In other words, there are going to be weekends when Stoops wishes he was back in his bass boat.
At least now everyone will know where to find him.