Updated: Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione Will Retire This Year

Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castigione will soon retire from his full-time role, and has even picked the eventual date.

That’s according to a report published Monday by ESPN college football insider Pete Thamel, later confirmed by the university.

Sources: Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione will retire from his full-time role during the upcoming school year, bringing an end to the longest-tenured run for a current AD in major college sports. Upon the hiring of his successor, he will stay on as athletic director emeritus. pic.twitter.com/ZHHgMEiITT
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) July 7, 2025

Castiglione, whose official title is Vice President and Director of Athletics, is the nation’s longest-tenured athletic director in major college athletics.

OU announced a formal press conference for Tuesday morning to allow Castiglione to make the announcement official.

In an email to the OU community, President Joseph Harroz confirmed Monday’s report and said Castiglione has targeted June 30, 2028, as his eventual retirement date. Harroz said Joe C will "continue to serve as the Athletic Director into the coming year" as he helps advise the school in the search for his replacement.

After that, Harroz said, Castiglione will become Emeritus Athletic Director and "will continue in a fundraising capacity" until 2028.

Harroz also said in the email that alumna Randall Stephenson, as expected, will lead the search to find OU’s next athletic director.

Here's the email OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. sent out to the OU community today.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of this: "A search for his replacement will be led by Randall Stephenson." #Sooners pic.twitter.com/K7bkmb5kST
— Colton Sulley (@colton_sulley) July 7, 2025

Stephenson, a longtime supporter of OU athletics, signed on last year to help the Sooners restructure the budget to prepare “for this new world of college sports.”

As such, OU could go in one of two directions for its next AD: a traditional athletic director type — perhaps even one who comes from Castiglione’s own tree with time already on a college campus— or more of a corporate, CEO type who has broader experience navigating the world of corporate partnerships, private equity firms, venture capitalists, brand consultants, etc.

Castiglione, 67, “initiated the conversation about his retirement with school officials nearly a month ago, per sources, and they landed on this plan together,” Thamel wrote.

After shepherding the school from the Big 12 Conference to the Southeastern Conference, OU began its second year as a member of the Southeastern Conference just last Tuesday. The Sooners had an up-and-down first season in the SEC, beginning with another 6-7 record from Brent Venables’ football team.

Getting football turned around immediately and long-term will be the first job for the new AD, although Castiglione will no doubt keep a hand in those efforts.

Castiglione and his deep connections in the world of college athletics could be seen as an asset to bring in the next AD. On the other hand, the school could go in the complete opposite direction and use this as an opportunity for a clean break and a fresh start.

Just last December, Castiglione emailed OU season ticket holders and athletic department boosters about Stephenson’s addition. The email explained that Stephenson “has refused compensation” and “will help guide us into restructuring our budget for this new world of college sports and into developing a football structure with elements similar to professional sports teams.

"This includes building out a more expansive General Manager function and developing a dynamic model that will allow OU Football to become a national gold standard around talent acquisition, portal management and player development,” the email said.

That came to pass a few months later when OU hired Jim Nagy as its football GM, and has allowed him to bring in what he has called a staff of eight or nine assistants in the new personnel department.

With its new AD, OU will try to remain at the forefront of the ongoing evolution of college athletics, which now includes a revenue-sharing model with student-athletes that will compensate football, men’s and women’s basketball and softball players at OU in the neighborhood of $20.5 million, starting last Tuesday. That figure, Castiglione said in last year's email, is a “baseline total” and will now be paid to the athletes directly from the school.

Under Castiglione’s guidance, OU has remained one of the few self-sustaining athletic departments in the nation, meaning Sooner athletics do not draw funds from tuition, student fees or taxpayer dollars and actually contribute millions of dollars each year back to the university’s general academic budget.

According to his official OU bio, Castiglione’s stewardship has allowed Oklahoma’s athletic department to finish in the black in 26 of his 27 years (2020-21 put OU and everyone else in the red). When he replaced Donnie Duncan in 1998 at the age of 43, OU’s athletic department was $1.76 million over budget, according to The Oklahoman.

Castiglione’s athletic department has brought the university 26 of its overall 45 national championships, starting with softball coach Patty Gasso’s first of eight national titles in 2000.

Then came Bob Stoops’ only national title at the end of the 2000 season.

The Sooners have been back to the football national title game three times in 2003, 2004 and 2008, and also made the College Football Playoff four straight years from 2016-2019 — but haven’t been close since then.

Joe C’s teams have also been to the Final Four twice in basketball and three times in women’s basketball, and in addition to Gasso’s exploits turning the OU softball program into the nation’s best, the men’s and women’s gymnastics teams developed into dynasties under Mark Williams and K.J. Kindler, respectively, that dominated the national title count.

A native of Fort Lauderdale, FL, and a 1979 graduate of the University of Maryland, Castiglione came to OU after five years at Missouri. He was hired on April 30, 1998, and presided over both the eventual dismissal of football coach John Blake that winter as well as the restructuring of an athletic department that was not only marginally successful at various sports, but was deep in the red financially.

His hire of Stoops — and Stoops’ immediate winning in 1999 and national championship in 2000 — rejuvenated the entire fan base, reconnecting the school with big-money donors who had become disillusioned with a decade of mediocrity on the football field.

It also brought the athletic department out of financial crisis. Stoops’ success quickly led to a construction and expansion boom in campus facilities that continues today, as Memorial Stadium has been renovated multiple times since 2003, including the $160 million bowling in of the south end zone in 2017. The results of all the building and renovations have touched every other sport on campus, beginning with state-of-the-art Headington Hall for freshman housing and resulting in new playing and/or practice facility upgrades campus-wide.

Stoops remains the crown jewel of Castiglione's hires. He became the first college football coach to compete in all four BCS bowls and the BCS national championship game, and retired in 2017 as the school’s all-time leader with 190 career victories — and did it all with just one major run-in with the NCAA, the 2006/07 Rhett Bomar/Big Red Sports and Imports fiasco that resulted in Bomar’s immediate and permanent removal from the program.

As part of the Bomar fallout, OU was the first major athletic program to separate its compliance department from the athletics umbrella in 2006-07. But Castiglione’s strict adherence to NCAA compliance has been criticized in recent years by a fan base that wants more elite players and more wins at any cost.

Castiglione, however, was also one of the driving forces (along with Stoops and former president David Boren) who ensured that 5-star running back Joe Mixon remained in Crimson and Cream after he was dismissed from the program in 2014 for one semester when video surfaced of Mixon punching a woman in a local establishment. Mixon starred over the next two years at OU, stayed out of serious trouble and has had a strong (and largely controversy-free) NFL career.

Castiglione's current contract runs through June 2028 and pays him a $450,000 base salary with total annual compensation of $1.93 million, according to Sportico. That figure ranks fifth in the nation behind Penn State ($3.15 million), Ohio State ($2.5 million), Texas ($2.42 million) and Texas Tech ($2.14 million), where one of Castiglione's former understudies in Norman, Kirby Hocutt, has built the Red Raiders into something of a powerhouse, and should be considered a strong candidate to replace his old boss.

Castiglione in 2004 received the Bobby Dodd Award as the nation’s top athletic director, and in 2009 he was named Athletic Director of the Year by Sports Business Journal, then won the award again in 2018 — the same year he was inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. In 2020, a survey by Stadium named him as the nation’s best AD. In 2000 and 2018, he was named Athletics Director of the Year by his colleagues at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

“There’s a reason Joe has been called the Best Athletics Director in the Country,” Harroz wrote Monday. “Because no one has done it better.”

Castiglione was the first person to serve on both the NCAA Tournament Men’s Basketball Selection Committee and the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.

In 22 of Castiglione's 27 years, the Sooners have ranked among the top 25 in the Learfield Director’s Cup, which recognizes overall program excellence. That includes a ninth-place finish this past academic year, the school’s second-highest finish ever.

Under Castiglione, OU athletes have continued to set new standards for grade point average and graduation rates. This spring, OU athletes posted a 3.31 cumulative GPA, the 27th consecutive term that OU student-athletes recorded an aggregate 3.0 or higher.