It was too good to be true in 2020.
Oklahoma had been down more than a dozen coaches and players due to the COVID-19 pandemic that shut things down. The Sooners were looking at potentially coaching without defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and other defensive coaches.
So Lincoln Riley looked no further than an old friend.
Bob Stoops came out of retirement for a week to help out. The former Oklahoma head coach coached from 1999-2016 before retiring in the summer right before the 2017 season.
“It was great,” Riley said on Tuesday. “It’s nice. It’s kind of been in our hip pocket this whole time. If we had any staff member who fell off, we have a Hall of Famer sitting on the bench. It’s a pretty good bench when you can call that guy up. More than that, just how much he cares about this program. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do. It was great to have him out there today. It was awesome. Our kids were excited to see him. All of us were excited to see him. I think he had some fun as well.”
However, it turned out Oklahoma received good news on the COVID-19 front with some coaches this week. The Sooners announced late Friday that Stoops would not be coaching on the sidelines.
“Our staff and players are extremely appreciative of Coach Stoops for his time and for the input he provided the last several days as we’ve prepared for tomorrow’s game,” Riley said in a press release. “He means so much to our program and we’re very thankful for his willingness to assist during a period of need.”
No nostalgia for Oklahoma fans.
Here is what athletic director Joe Castiglione said on Thursday in regards to Stoops helping out coach.
“As you know, we’ve kept coach Stoops involved in our program since the first day,” he said. “We’ve never let him really get too far away. He certainly has freedom to do a number of things that he wants. We went through a period of time when as you all know that another football league developed and they contacted him and wanted him to be one of the first if not the first head coach they hired in the XFL. We were able to work through how we could keep him involved in other times around that season.
“He’s been great. He’s been involved in a lot of fundraising activities for us. We’ve really put a premium during these times to build relational capital with our donors and ticket holders and these times when even some of them who want to be at the games can’t, and so we’ve had programs that connect them back to the university some way shape or form using this technology of Zoom. So we didn’t neccessarily plan it out exactly like this. But as you all know, when I said he’d be the special assistant to the AD, I said he’d be doing very special things. So here’s one of them.”
[vertical-gallery id=21231]