A few things about a few things …
Suddenly, the sports calendar has slowed.
In fact, but for baseball’s All-Star break, it doesn’t get much slower.
Soon, the Olympics arrive, NFL and NBA offseason comings and goings, Wimbledon, the Open Championship, even the college football season, which doesn’t really begin until August becomes September, yet appears to begin in July, when conferences bring coaches and players together to talk things over, the SEC typically going first, this time beginning July 15.
During this calm before the storm, a few thoughts:
• I’d prefer NiJaree Canady, the nation’s best pitcher on her way out of Stanford, not become a Sooner because I’d prefer watching Patty Gasso build something up again rather be Steinbrenner’s Yankees gobbling up the nation’s best talent after missing out the first time around.
The program likes talking about all the adversity it overcomes year after year after year and yes, it’s lonely at the top, but wouldn’t it be nice to watch it climb again, facing the very common adversity of not being the nation’s default best team, yet trying to win the whole thing anyway?
• Remember, way back on Wednesday, when I opined the old college football facilities race has been replaced by one of staffing?
Kind of, sort of, the NCAA has jumped on board with the idea, now allowing an unlimited number of coaches to instruct players on the field, both in practices and games.
Undoubtedly, we’ll soon see programs busting through the old 11-coach limit. Yet, as soon as the coming season, we’re going to see analysts, once limited to meeting and film rooms, down on the field.
For the Sooners, it’s just another thing Brent Venables, a head coach with micro-management tendencies, must navigate.
The Sooners count loads of analysts. Put them all on the field and you’re approaching 20 assistants, which sounds like too many.
On the other hand, any team without a full-time special teams coordinator is practicing coaching malpractice.
Suddenly, Venables faces a host of new decisions.
• Can we just agree Porter Moser’s been gifted a fourth season at the Sooner men’s hoops helm because he clearly hasn’t earned it.
If not for the university’s attention on trying to sell Norman on an entertainment district the city doesn’t need complete with an arena it’s convinced it needs, along with Oklahoma’s day-away official joining of the SEC, there’s no way a Sooner basketball coach would have been allowed to turn in the three seasons Moser’s turned in and remain standing.
Yet, playing a brand of hoops nobody wants to watch and rebuilding his roster on an annual basis, Moser’s been given that courtesy long enough for his job to become easier in a new conference.
So please, going forward, can he finally be judged critically, the way all Sooner coaches have tended to be judged since Joe Castiglione came aboard, because there ought to be a standard.
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