camel at sea

Probably about the best that Venables could do. There isn't a realistic can't-miss OC on the market and this move maximizes continuity from what was a really good offense. They'll succeed or fail next year based on whether Arnold lives up to his hype. It'll be easier to make that happen if he's not learning a new offense. I kind of expect Venables to replace Ted Roof (DC/LB) this offseason, too. We'll see.

Yeah, no chance of that and for a lot of reasons (NIL, the two rosters, proximity to home, etc.) Maybe OU has to keep an eye on one of their '24 QB recruits. I could see Zurbrugg or Hawkins flipping. I expect Lebby to bring Joe Jon Finley with him, though, and make him the OC. That might make the Mitchell kid (TE) in the '24 class a flip candidate. If you told me that Littrell ends up the OC / TE coach, and that OU moves J.P. Losman into an on-field coaching role as QB coach, I wouldn't be surprised. Littrell seems like the most obvious on-staff fit and Losman has been with Venables since they were both at Clemson.

Sounds like a guy who is on his way out the door, but won't confirm until OU is officially out of CCG contention.

He was really good at East Carolina with a talent disadvantage and he was good early on at OU against good defenses. He's gotten more reliant on QB play since becoming a HC. That doesn't hold up as well on its own against good defenses. I don't think he got dumber. He's just bad at managing a football team and his HC role is hurting his OC role. He's basically Mark Helfrich, but at better jobs and with more QB talent. He's the sort of guy that should do a tour of duty as an analyst for Saban or Kirby Smart. I don't get the impression that he's humble enough for that, but if he wanted to find out his own deficiencies, those guys could show him.

That's a good add for them. Who are the biggest brands (you know, relatively speaking) in that league now? Army, Navy, Memphis, Tulane? They really need a couple of their big enrollment members to take off.

I was dead wrong about Oklahoma State after the OOC slate. That was as bad as I've seen a Gundy team look and now here they are set to win 8 or 9 games. Incredible. There's a godo chance the Pokes are in the Top 25 if they get past Cincinnati at home this weekend. That should set up a fun Final (for now) Bedlam. My guess is that Bedlam gets scheduled annually at some point in the 2030s, but it ends up being played in September instead of late in the year.

I think Yormark is trying to position the Big 12 to be so strong in hoops that 1) he can separate the hoops media deal from the football deal, and 2) the B1G/SEC can't fully separate from them down the road. You couldn't really have a serious "Top Tier" basketball tourney without Kansas, Gonzaga, Houston, Arizona, etc. The geography is still a mess though, but I'm a proponent of the Big 12 and ACC eventually swapping Calford for WVU/Cincy/UCF. The Zags make a lot more sense if the Big 12 is on the west coast.

UH averaged close to a sellout in 2016. They then pissed that momentum away almost immediately. If their next coach is someone who gets the fanbase excited, maybe they start showing up again. Their history suggests they land on good coaches pretty frequently. They'll just have to hang onto that guy for longer this time around. Most of the programs that have seen big and sustained attendance growth got there because they landed a really good coach who hung around for a long time. UH hasn't done that yet. The Big 12 invite at least gives them a chance. Kelvin Sampson has had their arena full in basketball for a few years.

He needs to replace Wylie, Grinch, and then grow his recruiting staff to mirror what the other elite programs are doing. I can't see him doing any of that willingly.

I still think we're going to eventually see some membership shuffling between the ACC and Big 12 once the ACC's big brands get poached. The Zags would fit well in the Big 12 if it was more overtly a "Western" conference.

You skipped OU's '23 recruiting cycle. The one you labeled '23 is actually '24. OU's completed '23 class was ranked composite 5th nationally (higher than any Riley class) and landed two 5 star defenders along with a 5 star QB. OU's '24 class (the current one) has a 5 star DT commit (the first for OU since Venables was OU DC 15 years ago.) They also have a commit from a 5 star RB - a position Riley notoriously struggled to close. BV's staff is recruiting better. Obviously the sample size is smaller but it is what it is. Nobody is arguing that year 1 at OU was anything but bad for Venables but you've got to put it in context. Riley completely gutted the QB room on his way out, Grinch left Venables maybe one 300 lb interior defensive linemen, and Grinch's "Speed D" scheme was so simplistic that the learning curve for the personnel who stayed was higher than it should have been. I've read on Dirtburglars (from the board owner) that OU LBs had not read a play sheet or keys within a play since HS. Riley also decimated the S&C program by putting Bennie Wylie in charge of it for four years. OU got steadily worse on the LOS throughout Riley's tenure. I consider Lebby a question mark. He's always had the training wheels of an offensive minded HC who could curb his bad instincts as a play-caller. He doesn't have that anymore and it shows. He'll either get better or he'll move on. But the talent is being restocked, either way. On the whole, the offense has looked better this year than last year. Gabriel has been better. The WR room is much better. We'll see if the run game clicks at some point. It eventually did a year ago. As bad as things were a year ago, 5 of OU's 7 losses were one score games. The lack of roster depth crushed them late in games. The '21 OU team won something like 6 one score games. The margin was already thinning for Riley before he bounced. Caleb Williams made a difference. Venables didn't need to see a lot of improvement this year to get back on the other side of the win/loss column more often. From what I've seen so far, the current team has made big strides. If you told me that OU loses to Texas, Kansas, and maybe TCU, I wouldn't be shocked. But I think they at least split those last two, and probably win both. We'll see.

The Big 12 signed a six year, $2.3B deal. ESPN and FOX didn't overpay the Big 12 by many hundreds of millions of dollars to get UT and OU out one year early. That makes no financial sense at all. Whether you agree or not, the networks thought the Big 12's one or two best games each week would deliver pretty good TV audiences on ABC, FOX, and ESPN.

Yeah. The OU rebuild is going well. The head-scratching sideline communication issues from a year ago have not resurfaced. The defense is quite a bit better. Recruiting is better than it was under Riley. Lebby is a downgrade as an OC from Riley. He seems like a guy who knows how to build the car but not how to drive it. Riley also dug him a huge hole in the QB room to climb out of, so maybe some of that looks better with Arnold at QB. The one big question mark I have about OU going forward is at OL. They start slow up front every year and around the midway mark flip a switch and start playing well. It's a Bedenbaugh staple and has happened under Heupel, Riley, and now Lebby. You can get away with that in the Big 12 but it'll get you beat early next year. If OU can get the run blocking switch flipped in the next couple of weeks, they're an 11 win team given the light schedule after Texas. If not, then they're still probably a 9 or 10 win team with the rebuild still on track.

Most of the "low to mid twenties" projections were coming from PAC media sycophants who ended up being wrong about everything. The "365 sports" Baylor guys ended up being pretty accurate throughout, and the deal ended up about where they were predicting it would land. If you assume that the new Big 12 members were all actually worth ~$30M per, that means the payoff to let UT/OU walk away for nothing was $1.7M per x 16 schools x 6 years. $163.2M That fits pretty well with what the league thought it would be getting from UT and OU in buyout. But that also means that even without UT and OU, the media side thought the new Big 12 had good value on their own. The $1.7M per payoff is a relatively small part of the payout. Adding in NCAA and CFP money, they'll be distributing around $60M per by the end of their rights deal.

The new Big 12 deal was for six years and $2.3B. How much of that do you believe is a payoff?