OUInsider - Owen Field

We shouldn't throw stones inside this house. Oklahoma was accused of this back in the Switzer years (signing players just to keep them from signing elsewhere), and it's probably accurate to say we did. Of course, with the latest on Laith Harlow, I don't think OU can be accused of doing it under Stoops.

In all fairness, athletes don't necessarily commit for four years to the schools they choose either. So is it fair to a program competing at the highest level to keep sandbagging players on the roster?

I am just like most other OU fans as I don't like anything about TU football. I used to post on an A&M board during the period when all the crap came up a few years ago about the SEC and their tactics of booting players to make room for the 25 per year. So, I did a little research on the Big XII to compare some of the data from the SEC with Big XII teams. Texas was not close to the top in the Big XII when it came to the number of ships offered per year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was teams like Baylor and OSU that were at the top of the list in the Big XII.

As I recall, OU and A&M were in the bottom half and TU right below them with roughly the same numbers. I just went back to check and from the 2002 class to the 2012 class Texas took 25 kids only four times. I didn't do the numbers, but as I looked at each years numbers they seemed to be about on track for normal attrition. For the record, OU had 25 on four of those same years and the overall numbers for OU appear to be higher than those of TU.

I just don't see Texas as one of the bad guys when it comes to the issue of running off players. The reality is that some of these kids just bring on some of this by their own behavior. No matter how selective OU coaches are and no matter how much they do to offer kids of high character some are going to slip through. Bob Stoops is a great coach and he usually does things the right way. His actions at the end of last year were simply removing trouble makers and kids that seemingly didn't want to go about things the right way.

I think that Mack has not done near the good job of managing the trouble makers as has Coach Stoops. Where I would fault Mack is that I think he just doesn't take care of problems very well. My view is he let his staff issues of a couple of years ago just fester instead of solving the problem. Stoops is a much better manager than Mack.

Meat on the Hoof was required reading in many OU humanities classes in the 70s.

Nice post Roy!

I read "Meat on the Hoof" years ago. Agreat book.

It is not accurate to say that. Switzer became head coach just as the scholarship liimits were being cut back from 45 per year to 30. I believe the '73 class was the last one with the higher limits. He didn't have the luxury of just recruiting guys to keep from having to play against them and I have never heard of Switzer being acused of that. With the lower limits, he would have been a fool to do so. Whenever this has been said about Royal, it is talking about the 60s when UT could recruit 45 per year and have 150+ player squads and he primarily tried to load up on QB and RB talent to keep the players from going elsewhere.

billk,

Don't think so. In the era of one platoon football in the 50s and into the 60s, squads weren't so large. When two platoon football came back into vogue in the 60s, schools down south started loading up on players because, as I understand it, scholarship limits were set by individual conferences. The push to have the NCAA set national limits came from the Big 10 which had instituted the 30 limit in their conference and didn't like the UT's, Alabama's, and Oklahoma's of the world being able to offer 45-50 scholarships per year. So I don't think Woody and Bo had massive numbers of players. The Big 10 was essentially responsible for socialism.

Klein, you are just wrong on this. Bud, used to bring in every kid he could possible get that he thought had a shot at playing. Numbers wise Bud had some of the largest numbers of any time that I know about. I grew up on OU football during the Bud era and he took every Oklahoma kid he could find with the idea of leaving nothing for Okla A&M as it was back in those days. And early in Switzer's years he would do the same just to keep them out of Stillwater.

I am not wrong. Look at photographs of Bud's teams in the 50s and count em up. Then look at pictures of OU's teams in '70 or '71 and count em up. Squads got a lot bigger in the late 60s and early 70s. It wasn't unusual for Texas to have over 150 players at that time. And if you think that Switzer was just taking guys to keep them away from OSU then you are clueless. He didn't have that luxury. Scholarship limits instituted in the early 70s prevented that. I started at OU in '74 and that was the first year of the 30 limit.