What's Sooner magic without the tricks? Has Stoops become too conservative?
By Berry Tramel
Published: March 14, 2007
An influential OU booster chatted with me a few days after the Fiesta Bowl. He was not upset. He talked about what a grand game was Boise State's overtime victory and how even in defeat the Sooners could take pride in being part of such a spectacle.
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The booster had only one lament.
"Man, I remember when we used to play like that.”
All-in. Anything goes. No stone left unturned. Boise State beat the Sooners with three trick plays in the final frantic minutes. You recall them well: the hook-and-lateral, the halfback pass, the statue of liberty.
Time was, not so very long ago, Bob Stoops was college football's reigning daredevil. The coach most willing to buck convention.
Not so now. Now Boise State's Chris Petersen holds that status and might for a while, thanks to the Fiesta Bowl stage.
Has Stoops gone button-down? Has he embraced convention? Has he become a stay-between-the-lines kind of coach?
Not necessarily. The fourth-down call at Texas A&M last November was not the move of a coach who plays it by the book.
But still, Stoops' tricks — fake punt, fake field goal, all kinds of ruses — have become fewer and fewer. That's only natural. A coach starts winning big, and he turns conservative. Hard to think of a football coach who's not that way.
Success changes a coach. Changes a coach and his program. Naturally he turns more standard. Less risky. Less innovative
It's danged hard for a coach at a big-time school to have big-time success and not go corporate, and it's hard for a corporate coach to go all sandlot, like Petersen did.
Maybe it's some sort of honor code. A respect-the-game mentality. Maybe it's what happens to all successful people, to clothe themselves in the security of their surroundings.
But Boise State should make every coach in America stop and wonder if trickery has been mined enough. If it can work against Oklahoma in crunch time, why can't it work against whoever whenever?
"It was an amazing game,” Stoops said. "We made some key mistakes early that really put us in a hole that we tried to fight out of but couldn't.
"In the end ... the catch and lateral, we're in as good of coverage as we can be. Just timed up right. Sometimes it's just meant to happen.
"The guy that catches the ball, we jam, knock the heck out of. If we don't jam him, he's going to catch it a couple of seconds earlier. If the lateral takes places earlier, then it all unfolds differently. Sometimes things just line up better for somebody, and they did.”
No argument. But Stoops still could take a page out of Petersen's playbook. It has not so much to do with trick plays as with attitude.
Petersen held nothing back and even resorted to unlikely heroes at times. The halfback pass to tight end Derek Schouman actually was thrown by flanker Vinny Peretta, who lined up as a tailback. That's an old Stoops ploy, using players out of the spotlight to pull off tricks, but one we haven't seen much of in recent years.
Stoops said the Fiesta Bowl did not change his attitude about trick plays one way or the other.
"Not really,” he said. "I don't know that those are all going to work, If you run those six times and they work, it's great. If they don't (work), then they're not the best. Doesn't change my mind on any of that. Sometimes they're gonna work, sometimes they're not.
"In the end, we needed to play better, obviously. We needed to take better care of the football and give ourselves a better opportunity to win.”
No arguing that. Ball protection means everything on the gridiron. It's also one of the commandments of corporate football.
And corporate football is not what got OU to the pinnacle. Going against the grain is what ignited the Sooner Renaissance, whether it was Mike Leach's funky offense or gambling defense or Stoops' trick plays.
Listen to what Petersen said about trick plays the week after the game.
"Around here, sometimes we use too many. But we were willing to go for broke. We know it's not always going to work. Full speed, a smile on our face. When it all comes out in the wash, that's our style. That's how we want to play.”
That's how the Sooners once played. Maybe that's how they need to play again.
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