Core curriculum for Sooners

Stoops's system, values get OU back in title game

Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops is hands-on, and he hasn't lost the fire that was one of the main reasons he originally was hired. (Jeffrey M. Boan/Associated Press)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - He was known as "Big Game Bob." A coach who revived a program that had slipped out of the fast lane of college football. "Play Oklahoma at your own risk" was what one heard about the Sooners and coach Bob Stoops, who came from Steve Spurrier's Florida staff 10 years ago with the "boy wonder" tag. A rising superstar with a can't-miss label coming to one of the most storied programs in the game.

At the start, it all seemed to work. The national championship came in 2000, his second year in Norman, when the Sooners put together a 13-0 season.

What followed was a decade of success. More than 100 wins in 10 years, six Big 12 championships, BCS bids in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008. A BCS title game appearance after the 2004 season. But with the success came a harsher spotlight, especially when "Big Game Bob's" teams didn't live up to the pregame hype.

A 21-14 loss to LSU in that title game was followed by a 55-19 loss to Southern Cal in the 2005 Orange Bowl, which was followed two years later by the dramatic and frustrating 43-42 loss to Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl, which was followed by a 48-28 loss to West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl.

Oh, the regular-season wins were still there, but the closing flourish was missing.

Big Game Bob?

Now we are back in South Florida where it all started eight years ago with a win over Florida State for the 2000 national championship. OU will be squaring off against Florida in the BCS title game tomorrow night in Dolphin Stadium, on the verge of climbing all the way back to the top.

Stoops has been the anchor, the cornerstone through it all, through times that have been mostly good (109 wins in 10 seasons are impressive by anyone's criteria). But the bar has been raised. A loss to Florida will bring back the whispers: Just how good is Oklahoma? What's with Big Game Bob? What happened to that guy?

Stoops said such chatter does not concern him.

"You know that doesn't bother me," he said. "I'm not worried about seeking the approval of whoever. We've won our share. You know what we've been able to accomplish through the years, so it is what it is. Have we won every one of them? No. But not many people have."

Make no mistake, Stoops has not lost the competitive fire that was one of the reasons OU athletic director Joe Castiglione hired him when he was a talented but unproven assistant at Florida 10 years ago.

"I'm very comfortable in what we represent as a program and what we've been able to do, and we want more," said Stoops. "We're going to keep pursuing it regardless of what anyone else wants to say."

Castiglione was only a few months into his job as AD when he hired Stoops to revive a program that had six national championships and had been a dynastic force in college football in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s under Bud Wilkinson and Barry Switzer.

"I was on campus roughly for four months," said Castiglione. "We didn't know how our rebuilding process would go. But in the end, you want someone who has skills not to just build a program but to build a program around."

Before Stoops arrived, OU football had fallen into a dormant stage under Gary Gibbs, Howard Schnellenberger, and John Blake. Blake's three-year record prior to Stoops's arrival was 12-22.

Stoops changed that with an attitude that turned OU back into a national power.

"He has always been in a leadership role," said Castiglione. "As a player, he was captain of his teams. He's been a person people gravitated towards. He is someone who has always been wise beyond his years.

"But he has never changed his core values. He has never changed his principles. And I believe that is why there is such a remarkable consistency of success."

Stoops's strength is in that consistency, in his work ethic.

"He's just a guy's guy," said OU defensive coordinator Brent Venables. "He's not a coat-and-tie, stiff dictator where he's standing on the sidelines watching. He's a guy who likes to roll his sleeves up, get down on his hands and knees, and let's go with it. Coaches respect that. Players respect that."

Stoops said working at Oklahoma has given him an appreciation of the tradition there.

"When we arrived at Oklahoma, we just didn't have a strong self-image, to be honest with you, and I felt as a program we were shying away from those expectations," he said. "And I remember telling the players in maybe one of our first meetings - and I kept showing them all of the championship teams - and said, 'This is what we're supposed to be.'

"I look at Bud Wilkinson, Barry Switzer, and I said, 'I have to walk by those guys on the way to my office every day, life-sized paintings of them. This is what we're supposed to be and this is how we're supposed to play. It's my job and I'm not shying away from the expectations of Oklahoma. This is what we're going to do and we're going to work to do it.'

"Fortunately, the players embraced it and agreed. I look back at that 2000 group where we did win the national championship. I don't know, to be honest, if we had any business winning, but we thought we did."

Ten years later, OU and Bob Stoops feel the same way.

Mark Blaudschun can be reached at blaudschun@globe.com