Oklahoma Athletic Director Roger Denny Calls Resource Gaps ‘Unacceptable’

Simply outperforming resources isn’t good enough for Roger Denny.

Denny, who was hired as the University of Oklahoma’s athletic director on Jan. 23, appeared on the Dari Nowkhah Show on KREF on Monday and outlined some of the financial challenges the Sooners are currently facing.

Denny revealed that six of Oklahoma’s 21 athletic programs are outside of the top 10 in the SEC in resourcing. While Denny acknowledged that OU isn’t in the conference’s bottom six in that many sports, he knows the Sooners must have more at their disposal to be a national title contender in every sport.

“I don’t care what metric it is, if you put it in front of me and I look and see we’re in the bottom of the SEC, I’d say that’s a real problem,” Denny said.

Denny hasn’t shied away from the challenges that come with being the athletic director at an SEC institution.

As new members to the SEC — both joined in July 2024 — Oklahoma and Texas received significantly lower revenue shares from the conference than the other 14 members.

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The Sooners took home $2.6 million during the 2025 fiscal year, while the Longhorns got $12.6 from revenue distribution. Those numbers will drastically increase for 2026, though, as they will both be full members and take home likely more than the $72 million distribution that the other 14 schools received in 2025.

In the Big 12, OU was consistently a top-dollar athletic department. But Denny is aware that having to compete with the resources at programs like Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Texas A&M is a much greater challenge.

“Coming out of the Big 12, maybe Oklahoma was ‘big bad Oklahoma’ that was running program budgets in the top one, two or three in the conference,” Denny said. “The SEC’s a different environment, and we have to be prepared for that.”

Challenges and all, Denny also hasn’t shied away from his lofty expectations.

At both his introductory press conference in February and Monday’s show with Nowkhah, Denny stated that chasing anything short of a championship is unacceptable.

Denny knows that it’s unrealistic for every sport to be the top-resourced program in the SEC. But the athletic director believes that all 21 sports can be in better positions than where they currently stand.

“I think to some degree at Oklahoma, we have to expect to outperform our resources,” Denny said. “But I’m not going to be satisfied with being in the middle of the SEC in any metric.”

As for football, Denny acknowledged that the Sooners are currently outside of the top quartile in resourcing. Considering OU was one of five SEC teams that reached the College Football Playoff in 2025, it means they outperformed their resources.

But, per Denny, simply reaching the CFP isn’t the end goal.

“That’s where I’d like for football to be — on a stage in Las Vegas next year,” Denny said. “That’s where I want us to be. We’re going to continue to do everything we can to push the needle. … I have not shied away from that. Now it’s up to me to continue working with Brent Venables and Jim Nagy to make sure that they’ve got what they need to go out and lead us to that point.”

Denny, of course, made the decision on Saturday to retain OU men’s basketball coach Porter Moser, who has led the Sooners to only one NCAA Tournament appearance in five years.

Men’s basketball is one of the six sports where Oklahoma falls outside of the top 10 in resourcing.

The Sooners are 19-15 and went 7-11 in SEC in the 2025-26 season, and they were the first team out of the field for the NCAA Tournament. They will compete at the College Basketball Crown — an eight-team postseason tournament with an NIL cash prize — in April.

Denny knows that he must be realistic when assessing the program’s future, but his goals are similarly lofty for getting Oklahoma back on the map in the men’s college basketball world.

“I think middle of the SEC (in resourcing) is what I’d call a reasonable expectation, but it’s absolutely not my aspiration,” Denny said. “Now, more than ever, the correlation between the resources you put into a program, which now includes the amount of NIL opportunity that your student-athletes have, is higher than ever with program success.”