Oklahoma 'Can't Stand the Noise' About Sooners' Move to the SEC
NORMAN — So, Oklahoma is joining the Southeastern Conference.
Someday. Maybe someday soon.
But right now, there’s a championship to win, and the 2021 season officially starts Friday when the Sooners open training camp.
OU to the SEC? Exciting news to be sure. Not everyone spoke effusively of the Sooners’ future in college football’s most powerful conference during Thursday's OU Media Day.
Still, senior defensive tackle Perrion Winfrey, who won’t be here when the change occurs, wanted to clarify how he felt when the news broke.
“When I seen that it happened, I was honestly excited,” Winfrey said. “Because I can’t stand the noise saying that we’re in the Big 12 and we can’t handle the SEC.
“I honestly got excited because I can’t wait to see my fellow alumni going against them and show how we can stack against them and actually prove to everybody else in the country that we can stand with them. So I was excited.”
The challenge will get here soon enough — maybe 2025, sure, but probably something closer to 2022 or 2023.
For head coach Lincoln Riley, defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and the rest of the OU coaching staff, it’s not about noise. It’s about selling recruits on opportunity — whenever it comes.
“I know what you know, in terms of the timeline and all that stuff,” Grinch said. “It’s been very minimal to this point. Specific to the recruiting side of things, it’s hard to gauge. You can’t go and sell something that's inaccurate, or pretend you know something that you don’t. But certainly at some point, you got to paint an accurate picture as to where this thing’s going.”
Sooner Nation had previously only heard from president Joe Harroz and athletic director Joe Castiglione about the move during last week’s special meeting of the OU Board of Regents.
So Friday’s comments were the first from the head coach who will be recruiting against and playing against programs in the SEC.
So Riley — while saying he’d known some behind-the-scenes stuff for a little while now — acknowledged he still has to tread carefully.
“We’re always pretty careful that we don't want to have two different messages with our team and with our recruits,” Riley said. “We get that it’s a part of it with those guys, and we got to have the conversations. But we're trying to keep the focus right here both for our recruits and our players as much as we can.”
Something else Winfrey wanted to clarify during his time at the mic: the “noise” he referenced was not necessarily the pregame Cotton Bowl comments made by Florida linebacker James Houston, who said last December that Oklahoma was “not on our level” and the Sooners “are not the SEC. They’re not the Florida Gators.” Nor did the noise necessarily come from pundits picking OU to finish well down in the future SEC standings, or from fans who just have an opinion.
“I wouldn’t even say the noise from the outside is the reason why we’re so motivated to go to the SEC,” Winfrey said. “I would say it’s from ourselves. We know who we are. So we’re just really ready to put it on display and show the rest of the world what we’re capable of.”
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