It's funny how one man's decision is sometimes viewed as a referendum on an entire institution.
We've done it with Nick Saban's retirement. Was has decision to walk away the natural course of a 72-year-old man with nine figures in career earnings, or a repudiation of everything college football has become in the past few years?
Individual decisions become referendums when they're attached to preexisting narratives. Have the Portal and NIL made college football worse? If they pushed away the Greatest Of All-Time, then the answer is self-evidently yes. Or so the argument goes.
And so it was for Lincoln Riley's departure from Oklahoma.
The first coach in OU's modern history to voluntarily leave for another job, Riley either left because Oklahoma wasn't SEC ready or he wasn't SEC ready. Someone wasn't ready for the week-to-week grind of the ESS EEE CEE, and who it was depended on your view on the color crimson.
Two years later, Oklahoma is officially in the SEC, and AD Joe Castiglione broke character to take a shot at Lincoln Riley.
Joe C just went scorched earth on a former #Sooners coach about the SEC move. This via SEC Now on SEC Network. pic.twitter.com/rDfY91HEqC
— Dylan Buckingham (@DylanBuckingham) July 1, 2024
Riley won Year 1 of the divorce, shooting to an 11-3 season with a third Heisman Trophy winner in former Sooner quarterback Caleb Williams, while OU suffered through a 6-7 re-tooling campaign under Brent Venables.
But OU increased its win total by four in Year 2 under Venables while USC dropped its own victory count by three. And with Oklahoma now officially in the SEC, USC is less than a month from formally joining the Big Ten, in a move that was announced between Riley's hiring and his first game.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.