Where they're going, hard knocks await Sooners in dang near every sport
Beyond softball, gymnastics and men's golf, Oklahoma's SEC success will be entirely predicated on pulling upsets
You can’t get through an hour of sports radio without Oklahoma’s impending move to the Southeastern Conference coming up.
Mostly, it’s football talk, but not all.
Will there be eight or nine SEC conference football games? If it’s eight, what will the non-conference schedule look like? If it’s nine, which conference opponents will teams play every season?
Never mind OU won’t enter its new conference until the fall of 2024, 15 months away, but what are you going to do?
The Thunder are almost fabulous again, but we're still a college sports market and what else is their to talk about beyond softball gunning for another national championship, baseball hoping against hope to reach an NCAA regional and maybe men’s golf, trying to get back to the match play, compete for another national championship and win it all again like it did six years ago.
So, if the time is right for Sooners-to-the-SEC takes, allow two more.
One, the move puts a particular outcome on the table that hasn’t been available since Bob Stoops replaced John Blake as football coach.
That would be OU as Cinderella.
In every sport but softball, men’s golf and women’s gymnastics, any Sooner squad in the foreseeable future to claim a crown in its new conference will have done it via upset and nothing’s more fun for a fan base than winning like that.
Oklahoma, the state and the university, made its name on the gridiron, yet the first conference championship it wins where it’s headed will undoubtedly be unexpected and it will be like that for almost every other sport, too.
Think about the national championships Stoops’ squads could have won in 2003, ’04 and ’08. Each would have been fantastic, yet none as exciting as the one OU won in 2000, when it knocked off No. 11 Texas, No. 2 Kansas State and No. 1 Nebraska back-to-back-to-back to reach the top of the polls and was still a stunning 13-point underdog against Florida State for the national championship and won that, too.
Going to the SEC will make those kinds of outcomes available in so many sports precisely because they’ll be so unlikely.
Two is the flip side.
Those outcomes, indescribably sweet should they occur, will be so unlikely.
That is, competitively, all these years later, moving to the SEC remains an unequivocally bad idea from which Sooner athletics may never recover.
In maybe two sports, it will be a terrific move: softball and women’s gymnastics. In just about all others, signs point toward bad to disastrous.
Softball and women’s gymnastics, OU’s already the class of the nation, but now its road will be tougher and that’s good for the sports and Sooner Nation, too.
Right now, the coach-voted USA Today top 25 softball poll includes eight SEC programs and only one other Big 12 team program.
Terrific.
Can’t wait to watch.
In the final women’s gymnastics rankings — OU at the top — four of the remaining top 10 were SEC programs.
If that sport’s is your thing, Sooner regular seasons and conference meets will soon be more exciting.
The rest?
Ugh.
On the grid, we’re still waiting to find out if Brent Venables has what it takes to be a head coach, and if he can’t game-manage, team-manage or coach-manage Saturday to Saturday each fall, it won’t matter how high his recruiting classes are ranked. And even if he can do those things, he’ll still have Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and LSU to get past, not to mention the Mississippis, Arkansas, Auburn and Texas A&M.
Men’s hoops?
A disaster in the Big 12 already, there’s no reason to expect it to fly high where it’s going. Probably OU brings a rookie coach into the conference. And if it doesn’t, it brings Porter Moser, whose proven nothing.
Women’s hoops?
Coach Jennie Baranczyk’s first two seasons have been great successes.
The Sooners have gone right back to the NCAA tournament and even shared a regular-season Big 12 crown. But in the SEC, which put four teams into the Sweet 16 and three more in the tourney — including No. 1 overall seed South Carolina and eventual national champion LSU — how will OU compete?
Can’t wait to watch, but finishing in the top five of that league could be a super long shot.
Baseball?
Forget it.
Entering Friday’s slate of games, D1Baseball.com projected seven SEC squads as regional hosts: Florida, Arkansas, LSU, Kentucky, Auburn, Vanderbilt, Alabama; four as ought-to-be super regional hosts: Gators, Razorbacks, Tigers, Commodores; and three others to reach the field of 64: South Carolina, Texas A&M and Tennessee.
The Big 12 may have no hosts.
Men’s tennis?
OU was bounced out of the NCAA’s round of 32 by Georgia, one of five SEC programs to reach the Sweet 16.
Women’s tennis?
The No. 13 overall seed Sooners reached the Sweet 16 before they, too were bounced by the Bulldogs, one of five SEC squads to reach the Sweet 16.
Volleyball?
OU’s gone nowhere lately, but only two SEC squads reached last fall’s Sweet 16 — Florida, Kentucky — so maybe there’s an opportunity.
But you get the picture.
Where it's going, OU’s bound to get richer.
Just don’t expect many additions to the trophy case.
It didn’t have to go this way.
In our part of the world, Sooner athletics has amassed all kinds of history, clout, championships and championship chances. At the price of being slightly less rich, all of that could have been kept.
But it won’t be.
Oh, well.