Here you go:
OU had to fire Switzer, because that shithead, left to his own devices in building a program, recruited the biggest bunch of misanthropes outside San Quentin. Urban Meyer looked at that team and thought, “Barry, you have to take character into account when recruiting”.
Switzer was fired (it would be years before OU forgot their shame and named their football ops building after him) and was replaced by Gary Gibbs. Gibbs was a very good coach, but at OU, forced by the NCAA to not cheat for a while, a very good coach got you a steady diet of 8-4.
Gibbs was fired and replaced by Schnelly (a whole nuther story), and Schnelly was replaced by John Blake. Blake had no business riding higher than “assistant coach” (heh-heh-heh,…bag man), but Switzer needed him away from the Cowboys (in an attempt to fix Switzer’s growing unpopularity, Blake started telling people that Aikman was a gay racist. That didn’t go over well). Barry sent him to OU, telling both parties that Blake needed to install a pro set offense (a long time dream of Switzer’s) and parlay Blake’s ethnicity into elite recruiting.
It didn’t work. Blake had a glorious three years of losing, incompetent football. For his first two years, he had a passing QB- Justin Fuente. For his third year, realizing that running any offense that required players to do something other than what they mastered in high school was a fool’s errand, he installed the wishbone and made Eric Moore the QB.