By Clay Horning, Sports Editor
So all of us headed over to the stadium at 3:15 Thursday afternoon. The you-know-what had hit the fan and Bob Stoops was going to talk about it and Joe Castiglione after him.
Most of the questions they wouldn’t answer, some they would.
Who knew there was a team meal Wednesday night, complete with Karaoke and Stoops couldn’t get the microphone away from his charges long enough to tell everybody to go home?
“We had a great day yesterday,” Stoops said.
So maybe the few holdouts who never lost sight of the fact Paul Thompson was never given a real chance last season aren’t the only ones excited about the fifth-year senior’s chance to finally play quarterback. Maybe the whole team feels that way. And maybe that will make all the difference.
A subject for a later day.
Thursday’s story, the day after Wednesday’s story, the biggest story to hit the Sooner Nation since Jason White proved you can come back from reconstructive knee surgery on both knees as the nation’s best quarterback, was Castiglione, on his way out of the stadium, speaking to a few straggling reporters.
This is what he said.
“People know the rules.”
This is how he said it.
“PEOPLE … KNOW … THE … RULES.”
His head was bobbing with each word, not too unlike the way the lead singer, lead guitarist and bassist from your basic hair metal band will their noggins around on stage.
At one point, Castiglione said a word like “frustration” was too tame to describe his feelings.
“I’m hardly keeping it together,” he said.
That went along with something Stoops had said about 45 minutes earlier.
The questioner asked him, given his relationship with the players and all the time they’ve put in and …
Until Stoops waved off the preamble and said, “I was shocked.”
So here’s what you need to know about what’s going on with the football program and the rest of the athletic department at the University of Oklahoma.
They’re fighting the good fight over there.
They may be pulling their hair out. They may believe they’ve failed in some way. But they’re not sure how.
In more ways than they might have known they could come up with, both Stoops and Castiglione made the same point over and over and over again.
You can come up with the most elaborate system, but if somebody wants to devise a process to bypass the system for personal gain, it can be done.
You bet they track the employment of their athletes.
But if the starting quarterback and one of his offensive lineman are committed to bucking the system, the system can be bucked.
“We’re doing everything that can reasonably be expected of an institution,” Castiglione said.
Know this about the partners in crime.
They had to work pretty hard at getting paid for not working at all. And they had to have some help.
Castiglione told a story.
He’s at a function somewhere and Joe Business Owner walks up and sort of whispers, “Am I all right?”
At which point Castiglione says, sure, why?
“I got a letter.”
Really, who from?
“From you.”
One of OU’s compliance letters.
“I know they’re getting the message,” Castiglione said.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll follow it, despite what somebody might have been saying in another newspaper Thursday morning.
That doesn’t mean the football coach does everything right. Same for the athletic director. They receive no special treatment on their hometown sports page. Those are the rules around here.
But we try to tell the truth.
And over there between Asp and Jenkins, they’re doing their best.
Clay Horning366-3526cfhorning@normantranscript.com
