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?

He hired a really good coaching staff and did a full overhaul of a horrible roster in one offseason. A lot of work and really good evals went into that. His players are pretty bought in and they play well together. That's really good coaching. This season might be the best that the PAC has ever been, top to bottom, so if he gets them to 7-5 / 8-4, he will be a national coach of the year candidate. Is it sustainable? We'll see. He'll have to start landing elite LOS talent if he wants to compete for national titles someday. He can make the CFP and win the new Big 12 without that, though. His players are producing and people want to watch on TV, so all of that will help him recruit.

I think ISU is winnable but it's on the road. Same with Houston. After that, it gets tough to find possible Ws. WVU in Morgantown will be very tough. They returned their entire OL and their defense appears to be improved. KSU and KU are both probably Ls, even if they are at home. @UCF looks like an L. BYU looks like an L. Oklahoma is an L. I'd pick Cincinnati to beat OSU on a neutral field (better on LOS, better QB), but maybe that's a W for Gundy at home.

2018: 7-6 2019: 8-5 2020: 8-3 2021: 12-2 2022: 7-6 2023 looks like it will be Gundy's first losing season since 2005. The offense has been in decline for years and that's Gundy's area of expertise. I think Jim Knowles's time in Stillwater is the reason Gundy isn't already on the hot seat. We'll see how the new DC eventually works out, but it's a major rebuild on that side and the landscape of roster building in college football has changed. Usually in Gundy's tenure, there have been things to point out to give you optimism about the future. I don't see any of that currently. The other thing that is lowkey hurting the Pokes is that OU can put together PWO NIL packages for in-state kids that outstrip OSU's scholarship offers. Oklahoma HS recruits are often undervalued nationally and Gundy has feasted on that. Now OU can talk high 3 star Okies into taking a PWO spot in Norman without disrupting out of state recruiting plans. OSU needs to get its NIL situation sorted well enough to deter that.

Yeah. That was the worst loss in the entire conference so far this year and by a fairly wide margin. One of the Pokes might know better than I do, but I can't think of a worse loss for Oklahoma State since the 90s, factoring in quality of the opponent and the margin of the defeat.

The Big 12 this year has a lot of squads capable of pushing pretty good teams and just as capable of losing to bad teams. Outside of Texas and OU, I'd guess a couple of them end up in the ten wins range by the end of the season. I just have no idea who it will be. It's a coaching / development league, and most of the league is between up cycles. That said, it is pretty shocking to see how bad Oklahoma State is this year. They looked untalented all over the field on Saturday. Gundy has been good there for a really long time, but he doesn't strike me as someone who should be trusted to navigate the recent changes with the portal and NIL.

I think Smith just outgrew the elite DE projections. Supposedly he's already pushing 270 lbs at Melissa. If so then I think he adds weight and slides inside in Norman and probably becomes a high ceiling DT.

I think UVA is massively overrated in realignment. They're an east cost Cal. I think they're overrated largely because of a combo of the idea that UNC would require them to come along to wherever they go and a cable-industry view of "value" that emphasizes market size, rather than actual eyeballs. There's an argument that VaTech is a better add than UVA because the Hokies have a larger football fanbase, larger gameday attendance, etc. On the other hand, I think university Presidents will need to be convinced of UVA's negatives because the school itself is elite and in a great location. I just think that's gonna happen. UNC breaking with them publicly, over the expansion issue, is an indicator of that. The TV networks successfully made a similar argument to the B1G re: Stanford and Cal. If we're comparing KU vs. UVA... KU hoops would (hypothetically) be additive to their entire SEC hoops schedule. UVA hoops is great, but doesn't move the interest needle. KU outdrew UVA in football attendance last year, at the very first sign of life, with multiple sellouts. KU's current football investment is better with a major facilities upgrade on the way. UVA is great at Olympics, but Stanford and Cal just proved that the networks don't care about that at all. If Leipold keeps the Jayhawks out of the ditch for another 3-4 years, I think the argument for KU's media rights value gets a lot stronger.

KU's AD is worth more and is better supported than UVA's AD, even if UVA is worth a lot more more than KU as a university. The TV side cares about AD value - which is why Stanford and Cal are where they are. It's arguable that VaTech athletics are more valuable than UVA athletics. I also think it's notable that UVA and Duke seem to be on opposite sides from UNC on the ACC expansion issue. To me, that indicates some internal division as to priorities. There are significant cracks in the Tobacco Road foundation. It reminds me of how the extinct mantras, "SC will never leave the other CA schools" and "Texas won't leave without several in-state partners," first began to crumble. I think the ACC is going to survive realignment. There are too many decent ADs on the east coast for that not to happen. If they can get away with only losing FSU, Clemson, and UNC, they're going to be in strong shape. They could - as you suggest - add UConn. They might also be able to lure away WVU, UCF, and/or Cincinnati at some point, too.

Yeah. There seems to be some smoke around the idea that the ACC contract provides that they won't lose per-team payout during the life of their current contract, provided they stay at 15 members. They now have 18 members. FSU, Clemson, and UNC are the three squeaky wheels. I'd guess they're SEC bound. ESPN can smooth the exit since they're the primary rights holder on both sides. There's no reason for ESPN to smooth an exit toward a FOX backed conference. That move also probably protects and stabilizes the ACC because I'm not sure how motivated the B1G would be to add schools like UVA, Duke, Miami, or Georgia Tech on their own. If it plays out that way, I think there's a pretty good chance that SEC #20 is Kansas. The Jayhawks would fill out the map in the west, give the SEC a 3rd crown jewel in men's basketball, and they'd give Mizzou back its primary rival.

Agreed, but I think they're still probably as talented as anyone outside of UT and OU. They'll put points up on people in Big 12 play if they can stay healthy.