Why is Roger Denny insulting Sooner fans over and over again?
Joe Castiglione, man of the people.
Roger Denny, not yet.
The former, Sooner athletic director from April of ’98 to about a month ago, was ubiquitous, on hand at what seemed like every event, typically in uniform: a suit and red tie, often in the coolest cap, perpetually happy to be there and happy to see you, whoever you were.
The latter, on the job since the middle of last month — yes, a small sample size — is not.
Also, food for thought, a few months after arrival, on the same page as university president David Boren, Castiglione pushed out an historically bumbling football coach and, just like that, the Sooners were good again and, soon after, national champions.
Denny, on the other hand, has chosen to keep an historically underachieving basketball coach, convinced what Porter Moser managed over the last six weeks of his fifth season to be more telling than everything he managed over the previous four-plus seasons.
Sure, why not.
He could always be right, I guess. That’s the caveat. And still, even the folks happy to see Moser get another crack are unlikely to bet on him to make it another five years, so who’s kidding who?
The real case for keeping him is hating to see a guy they like so much suffer the unpleasantness of being canned.
But it’s old news, so why go down the path?
A throw-away.
Unimportant.
No, this is something new.
Because has it occurred to anybody whatever level of damage Denny did to his relationship with the fans by keeping Moser, he’s done more damage with his clumsy, know-nothing, interloper’s ear for what Sooner fans want to hear in his windup to explaining why he kept Moser?
“At Oklahoma, we’ve had a long history of embodying an underdog spirit,” he said, via Twitter, before going on to explain his reasons.
“But an underdog spirit will only take us so far,” he added later in the same tweet.
WTF?
Is he serious?
Spoken like a guy with no understanding of the fan base he serves.
An underdog spirit?
I’m legit trying to think of the last bands of Sooners to make athletic hay by embodying an “underdog spirit” and here’s what I’ve got:
• OU men’s tennis, 2014 (national runner-up)
• OU softball, 2000 (national champion)
• OU baseball, 1994 (national champions: “25 Guys Pulling on the Same Rope.”)
That’s it.
Three in 32 years.
Yes, Sooner football was a huge underdog in 2000, but all that team did was kick ass and take names, no underdog spirit required.
Yes, OU’s run to the 2022 College World Series championship series was unexpected, but sometimes teams just catch fire and it pays to have the nation’s best pitcher.
Yes, coach Gregg Grost’s 1989 Sooner golf team won the national championship, but it was ranked No. 1 by the coaches going in and prevailed by 19 strokes.
I could go on.
Historically, Sooners are frontrunners, not the little engine that could.
Not underdogs.
Nor do they see themselves as such.
For most of the last 40 years the OU basketball mascot has indeed been a dog.
Top Daug.
Not Underdog.
Perhaps Denny’s not supposed to know all that, but does he even know the origin of the word “Sooner.” Whatever those folks were — the jump-the-gunners — the last thing they embodied was an underdog spirit.
To say nothing of an athletic department that’s been good at dang near everything for a quarter century, volleyball and soccer the only real laggards and still they’ve had their moments.
To say nothing of a men’s basketball program that attended 29 of 39 NCAA tournaments prior to Moser’s arrival, three Final Fours included, four No. 1 seeds and seven other No. 2- and No. 3-seeds included.
Underdog spirit?
What?
A man’s got to know his audience.
And when he flubs it up, he can’t make the same mistake twice.
Only here was Denny speaking to Dari Nowkhah, KREF radio host, SEC Network host and an OU grad to boot, on Monday.
“I’ve heard some frustration out there with my use of the term underdog spirit and I think folks have a problem with that because they see an extraordinary history of success in our program,” he said, right so far. “What I would tell them is, is a lot of that success is because of the underdog spirit of this program.”
Oops, he did it again.
Come on, man, stop.
Let’s let him finish.
“As part of this analysis, we’ve looked at all of our sports. We have 21 sports here. Two of those 21 sports have budgets that are in the top quartile of the SEC,” Denny said. “So, whatever you want to call it, underdog spirit or punching above our weight … the simple fact of the matter is, our programs are routinely performing beyond the resources they have available to them. And I think that underdog spirit is absolutely critical for our success.”
OMG, he said it once, he said it twice, he said it thrice.
Must one respect a man willing to die on the hill of a metaphor?
Or must one not, because even as we get what he’s trying to say, every time he says it, he yet again exposes himself as one with no sense of Sooner history.
Presumably, his job is hard.
He keeps making it harder.
Spot on, as usual, Clay.