NCAA Football oklahoma Sooners

If there's a recession in college football, it has yet to reach the coaching ranks. Well, not the head-coaching ranks, anyway. In the past week, three head coaches, Bob Stoops, Pat Fitzgerald, and Brian Kelly, have signed contract extensions that will keep them at their present jobs for a while longer.

We start at Oklahoma, where Bob Stoops is now signed through the 2015 season. Despite several big-bowl bloopers, the people in and around the Oklahoma program are happy with their head coach, and who can blame them? In addition to the extension, Stoops also gets a $250,000 raise to $3.675 million a year, plus $700,000 each July if he remains at OU. If he doesn't stay, they are so defriending him.

Former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer says he's moved on. He doesn't dwell on his decision that stunned Sooner nation and crippled the football program 20 years ago Thursday when he suddenly resigned.

OU was in a heap of trouble back then, with five players being arrested on various felony charges and the program had been slapped with three years of NCAA probation for recruiting violations. Who could forget a tearful Switzer admitting on June 19, 1989, that too much had transpired for him to continue on as the Sooners coach?

OK, so maybe your cousin who's on the 12-year undergraduate plan isn't such a slacker after all. Former UCLA and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman finally graduated from UCLA on Saturday, more than two decades after he left for the NFL.

Aikman is already a member of the Pro and College Football Halls of Fame. Though he is a native Californian, Aikman attended high school in Oklahoma and started out playing for Barry Switzer's Oklahoma Sooners. Aikman proved to be ill-suited for Switzer's run-oriented offense, however, and Switzer helped Aikman transfer to UCLA after he lost his starting job to Jamelle Holieway. At UCLA, Aikman won the 1988 Davey O'Brien Award.

After a few hours on the depth-chart bench, Oklahoma middle linebacker Ryan Reynolds is again apparently a starter.

Monday, Sooners coach Bob Stoops' released the team's depth chart with several surprises.

The biggest was in the middle, as the coaching staff had Mike Balogun listed as the starter with incoming freshman Tom Wort backing him up and no mention of expected front-runners Reynolds, who starred for the team until suffering an injury against Texas, and Austin Box, who started four games at the position last year.

But as of Tuesday at 10AM, the two-deep listed Reynolds as the No.1 linebacker and Balogun backing him up. It's unclear what prompted the quick change, whether it was a coaching decision or simply a typographical error. Sooners football media contact Kenny Mossman did not return several calls on Tuesday for clarification.

An unidentified University of Oklahoma football player committed an NCAA violation last spring by accepting a trip from a former teammate to a NFL draft party, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported over the weekend.

According to the report, the player took a trip that racked up $1,300 to attend the celebration, which his former Sooners' teammate's agent paid the bill. The school learned of the violations in November 2008 and turned over the information to the NCAA. The player was ordered to pay $832 of the money to a charity using money from his scholarship, Federal Pell Grant and school-issued spending money from the BCS national title game trip this past winter.

Just maybe the Big 12 football coaches thought they had seen the South Division at its most competitive in 2008 when they voted this spring not to change the league's three-way tie-breaker guidelines.

They might want to re-think that one.

The ultra-competitive Big 12 South could again have as many as three teams in a logjam for first place if the best teams take turns beating up on each other as they did last season. Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech all swapped wins and finished tied for first in the South with 7-1 league records at the end of 2008. They Big 12 had to sift through four tie-breaker stipulations before coming up on the fifth that named the Sooners the South champs by virtue of their BCS poll standing.
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Christmas decorations begin in late August, and now the ClayNation Hypesman Watch (CHW) is here in the first week of May. It's part of a new term, I just coined: Heisman Creep. (And it has nothing to do with Maurice Clarett). We're going to try something radical here, every other week or so we'll drop in and give you a top 10 list for Heisman candidates. Even though most of them are finishing their spring finals right about now. The goal is to ridicule the Heisman obsession, keep us entertained, and write about the Heisman in a way no one else is.

And, plainly, it's never too early to start debating the most over-hyped award this side of a kindergarten valedictorian.

The cries near the end of the Big 12 football season were for change.

The system for deciding the divisional champion in the event of a multiple-team tie seemed unjust when Oklahoma received the South Division's spot in the Big 12 title game over Texas and Texas Tech, after all three finished with identical 7-1 league records last season. During the season, UT had beaten OU, but lost to Texas Tech. The Red Raiders claimed a dramatic win over the Longhorns, but got crushed by the Sooners.

Don't get U.S. Rep. Joe Barton wrong: He doesn't think Tim Tebow is a Communist. He just thinks the process by which Tebow and the Florida Gators became national champions is reminiscent of Communism.

College Football Spring Storylines 2009 looks at the key developments and big news from spring ball.

The Big 12 stood up and challenged the SEC for the title of One Conference to Rule Them All in 2008. They didn't exactly succeed, but the conference gave us a lot of great football last season.

However, that was then and this is now. The postseason was not entirely successful for the conference, with a 4-3 overall record in bowl games. How will that carry over into this fall? Who's on the rise? Who's hitting the skids? We'll talk about the big stories after the jump.