Nowhere near SEC ready
The next 18 months figures to be supremely challenging for Joe Castiglione's Sooner athletics department
Here’s the question.
Are we to choose Door No. 1 and presume Oklahoma was in fact ready at a systemic level to enter the Southeastern Conference this academic year?
That is, though clear the choice to abandon history, tradition and geography will prove lucrative, Sooner athletic director Joe Castiglione and those in his employ also gave the programs they oversee every chance to be successful once anticipation became reality?
Because how was anybody to know Brent Venables’ football Sooners to be in such need on the offensive line and that its portal pickups to ameliorate the condition would prove so incapable?
Or that it’s men’s basketball coach, Porter Moser, would suffer a fourth straight roster exodus before entering his fourth season, one in which his team’s been preseason picked by conference media to finish 15th, only in front of Vanderbilt?
Or that it’s more anonymous fall sports, volleyball and soccer, would struggle in their new league, the indoor of the two sporting a 9-8 (3-6 SEC) record to date and the outdoor of the two riding a 10-7-1 (3-6-1 SEC) mark?
Yet, to be entirely fair, though well below .500 in their in the conference standings, both are top 50 on their respective NCAA RPI list, so just maybe they’ll return to their respective fields of 64 for the first time in many seasons.
We’ll see.
Or, are we to choose door No. 2 and presume, say it isn’t so, but the choice to abandon history, tradition and geography and join the SEC so blinded, or just so consumed Castiglione and his athletic department, with logistics, et al, that the marathon-that-became-a-sprint to enter the new conference, to literally be “SEC Ready,” simultaneously conspired to help make individual programs joining the new conference less than ready?
It’s an interesting choice.
Certainly Joe C.’s still the person most equipped to best manage what must be managed.
Certainly, though college athletics has changed abruptly and entirely, and becomes more unpredictable every day, given his success in the old world Joe C. remains the best person for the job in the new one, too.
Then again, how could a second-year football coach, after suffering a losing rookie season, ever demand and get a near $45 million buyout after a lone 10-win campaign that neither included a conference championship game appearance nor a major bowl game.
Then again, could any Sooner men’s basketball skipper go 20-34 over three conference seasons, failing to reach the NCAA tourney each of those seasons, becoming the program’s first coach to endure such a fate since the 1970s, while playing a style of hoops nobody enjoys watching in the first place, still keep his job?
It doesn’t compute.
Thank goodness women’s hoops coach Jennie Baranczyk has proven a retention savant, first keeping the primary core of Sherri Coale’s final Sooner roster together while recruiting beyond campus, too, well enough to reach three straight NCAA tournaments, not to mention win a couple of regular season conference crowns.
Indeed, without Baranczyk’s women, ranked 10th in both the Associated Press’ and coaches’ preseason top 25s, the programs ready to flat excel in their new conference might only be women’s gymnastics, men’s golf and the one we all take for granted, softball.
It probably goes without saying, beyond any single coach, perhaps Patty Gasso aside, university president Joe Harroz, who wants so badly to give Norman a new sense of community as long as the entertainment district that provides it includes a nowhere near campus new Sooner basketball arena, still sees Castiglione as his most indispensable athletics employee.
Also, and here I’ll answer my own questions, though I believe the unnecessary move to the Sooners’ new conference must have preoccupied Castiglione’s athletic department to some level of detriment to individual programs, nor would I trust anybody more than I’d trust him to guide the department forward.
I remain a Joe C. fan.
Further, having taken the long look, I can’t wait to see how he responds to the department’s challenges over the next, say, 18 months, because while having a sense of what they may be — quite possibly replacing his two highest-paid (and highest buyout) coaches for starters — I still have no idea how it might go down, how he’ll handle it, how difficult the scene might become no matter how clearly it appears to be coming.
“He’s the best in the business,” Venables said Tuesday, also mentioning he and Castiglione speak on the regular, as they always have. “He’s been around both good and bad … he’s got a lot of wisdom that he can [use to] guide all of us coaches here.”
And maybe there’s still time for him to do that for the university’s two richest coaches, Venables and Moser, even as one wonders how that might work, because it’s Venables who’s already sent two coordinators packing, one of them, Ted Roof, already losing his next job as UCF’s defensive coordinator just this week, while Moser’s original offseason, the one he inherited upon his 2021 hire, just keeps repeating.
At least Castiglione still has Gasso on the diamond, Ryan Hybl on the golf course and K.J. Kindler and Mark Williams helming gymnastics.
The future remains unwritten, of course, but nobody expected a present like this.
Come to the SEC, they said, it will be great, they said.
They were wrong.
OU was not SEC ready.
Your final comment sums it up nicely. We were not ready for the SEC and are now a very small fish in a very large pond.
Nope.