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OU-UTEP: One Big Thing

It's easily the Sooners' most eagerly anticipated season opener since Bob Stoops' debut in 1999, but Brent Venables and his team have handled the hype.
John E. Hoover|
OU-UTEP: One Big Thing
OU-UTEP: One Big Thing

For nine months, Oklahoma’s momentum has been building.

Now it’s time to play a football game.

The Sooners need to be able to navigate all the emotion of being jilted by Lincoln Riley last November and then being swept off their feet by Brent Venables a week later. It shouldn’t be too hard. High emotions are good for a season-opening football game, and collisions can be good for the soul.

Think about all that’s transpired since Riley scurried out west: the 2023 recruiting class imploded, and now ranks in the top five nationally — without even playing a game. Two 5-star quarterbacks soured on OU, but the Sooners got a nice Hawaiian punch in Dillon Gabriel. Venables stepped off the private jet at Westheimer Airport like he’d just finished a set with The Rolling Stones, and then he brought back rock star strength coach Jerry Schmidt. More than 200 former players and some 75,000 fans turned out for the spring game — both unheard of for Oklahoma — and he asked the program’s longest-tenured assistant coach to resign at the start of preseason training camp with, apparently, very little disruption to the team.

Now, the UTEP Miners are in town, a 31.5-point underdog, and kickoff for the 2022 season is hours away — easily the most anticipated season at Oklahoma since Bob Stoops arrived for the ’99 season.

Norman mayor Larry Heikkila needs to just go ahead and declare Saturday “Brent Venables Day in the City of Norman.”

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John E. Hoover
JOHN E. HOOVER

John is an award-winning journalist whose work spans five decades in Oklahoma, with multiple state, regional and national awards as a sportswriter at various newspapers. During his newspaper career, John covered the Dallas Cowboys, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Arkansas Razorbacks and much more. In 2016, John changed careers, migrating into radio and launching a YouTube channel, and has built a successful independent media company, DanCam Media. From there, John has written under the banners of Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, Fan Nation and a handful of local and national magazines while hosting daily sports talk radio shows in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and statewide. John has also spoken on Capitol Hill in Oklahoma City in a successful effort to put more certified athletic trainers in Oklahoma public high schools. Among the dozens of awards he has won, John most cherishes his national "Beat Writer of the Year" from the Associated Press Sports Editors, Oklahoma's "Best Sports Column" from the Society of Professional Journalists, and Two "Excellence in Sports Medicine Reporting" Awards from the National Athletic Trainers Association. John holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications from East Central University in Ada, OK. Born and raised in North Pole, Alaska, John played football and wrote for the school paper at Ada High School in Ada, OK. He enjoys books, movies and travel, and lives in Broken Arrow, OK, with his wife and two kids.

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