What was once a tenuous offseason full of questions has now become full-blown uncertainty and soul searching.
This is the damage a busload of idiots can inflict.
If it wasn’t bad enough at Oklahoma; if losing by 34 in a bowl game to cap a five-loss season didn’t have the Sooners’ teetering on collapse, they're now careening into a critical crossroads moment because of the one thing any team, any organization, can’t possibly navigate without further fallout.
Racism.
The word itself is utterly repulsive, its strength fueled by bigotry, hate, ignorance, fear and finally, destruction.
Now here we have the Oklahoma football team, a bit player at ground zero of the racism controversy swirling in Norman, but a distinctively marked casualty of collateral damage from 30,000 feet. There are two ways this can end: what can’t be left unsaid — of left to simmer and ignore — can either break the OU football team or galvanize it.
“It’s sad the ignorance that can still be there with some people,” Sooners coach Bob Stoops told the Tulsa World. “It’s just appalling.”
We’re not even a week into the fallout of members of an OU fraternity’s racist chants caught on video and imploding on social media, and already a recruit for 2016 has reopened his recruitment and said he will not play at OU. The Sooners have postponed two practices this week, and the entire team — players, coaches, support staff — showed up for a campus protest.
Players have taken to social media to voice their displeasure, including this potentially revealing tweet from defensive end Charles Tapper: “It hurts and many other frats have been saying racial things… And we truly have set back and just had to take it.”
Those are damning words. Sad words. Surreal words.
While OU president David Boren has done everything possible to strongly react to the incident and put the university in proactive mode, this will linger. Racism is the cancer that can never be cured, only hidden and overlooked until the next idiot opens his or her mouth and, once again, removes all doubt.
So this is where we find the OU football team, which before we were all reminded yet again that racism is alive and thriving, was simply trying to find a way to win games in 2015. They’ll spend the next five months busting their tails to return OU to the nation’s elite, all with the knowledge that the very students they’re playing for on fall Saturdays might just be like those idiots on the bus.
Is it any different at any other university? Probably not.
But it’s different at OU because the idiots on the bus opened their mouths and removed all doubt — and left a gaping hole in our sense of hope that it is different.
“We all work with beautiful young men and women of all races,” Stoops said. “It’s just — very little gets me choked up. But that hurt.”
And it’s going to continue to hurt throughout the program, throughout the university, throughout a tough, grueling offseason and into a season where one key injury, one tough loss, one controversial loss, and the whole season could turn.
That’s where Stoops might just be the perfect guy to handle the fallout.
Say what you want about his brash (and blatantly honest) personality and bravado; criticize him for how the team has regressed of late or what he said two summers ago that players already are paid. But there aren’t many coaches who care more, invest more, in players than Stoops — sometimes, to the point of it being counterproductive.
This former walkon turned All-American at Iowa knows the value of a college education and what the sport and academics mean to a teenager. Two summers ago, he was ripped for saying if players get their degree and work hard, hell, they could be make $5 million a year just like him.
His point: the world is your oyster — but no one is going to hand it to you. That idea, though, got lost in the narrative of a million-dollar coach telling players they shouldn’t be paid.
Most recently, he gave troubled wideout Dorial Green-Beckham and freshman RB Joe Mixon second chances after most schools wouldn’t touch either player. On the surface, the narrative was Stoops doing anything to win.
Then DGB was ruled ineligible to play (and Stoops declared he wanted DGB to get back in school and focus on a degree, anyway), and Mixon was suspended for a year — and a freshman named Semaje Perine set the NCAA single-game rushing record to reinforce Stoops mantra to Mixon and every other player that, yep, no one is going to hand it to you.
On the field, in the classroom or in life.
That’s why the hardscrabble, tough-guy coach from Youngstown, Ohio, choked up. It’s more than an ugly word or a football game.
It’s real life. It’s young men believing they can achieve anything and be anything no matter the obstacle.
Until the next idiot opens his mouth.