With Micro-Rebuild Complete, Oklahoma Confidently Embraces SEC Era And Its Bevy Of New Challenges

Joe Castiglione hovered in the shadows Tuesday, content to blend into the crowd of 1,200 reporters as he watched Oklahoma take the stage for its grand debut at SEC Media Days.

The longtime Oklahoma athletics director marveled at the scene in the familiar stomping grounds of Big D, where the SEC transformed an entire floor of the Omni Hotel into an indoor carnival for the media to pose questions to college football's best coaches and the sport's brightest superstar athletes.

"It's an event," Castiglione told CBS Sports. "It's not just a press conference. I've seen fans of other schools."

The chaotic scene this week is a far cry from the wide-open, lightly-covered media gatherings in the Big 12, but it's nothing new for the SEC, which rolled out the red carpet for the Big 12 castaways, traveling west to Dallas -- just a 15-minute drive away from the Big 12's headquarters -- to celebrate Oklahoma and Texas' long-awaited arrival after three years of waiting in conference realignment's purgatory. 

"Oklahoma isn't intimidated as a football program," Sooners coach Brent Venables said. "We're running toward the SEC. I think that goes without saying. We've looked forward for the last several years for this partnership, to be a part of an amazing conference, the best conference in college football."

Said Castiglione: "It's been a natural fit."

Both OU and Texas have sampled the SEC plenty in the past, of course, and their trophy cases mirror the SEC's elite. OU won 14 Big 12 titles in 28 seasons and faced three different SEC teams in its four College Football Playoff appearances (and lost). The Sooners claim seven national titles and co-lead the country with seven Heisman Trophy winners. Before the modern era, Oklahoma won 47 straight games in the 1950s, a record that may prove impossible to break in the new era of expanded conferences. Oklahoma is sixth all-time in wins. 

"They have a clear expectation of excellence [that] I think complements our current members," SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said when Oklahoma officially joined the league July 1. 

The Sooners are particularly excited about joining the SEC because of their familiarity with the conference. The personal connections are as complex as they are deep in the Southeast. Two of Castiglione's former lieutenants are now athletic directors in the SEC (Zac Selmon at Mississippi State and Laird Veatch at Missouri). Three head coaches in the league cut their teeth in Norman, including Tennessee's Josh Heupel, who led the Sooners to the 2000 national championship as quarterback, though his relationship with the university soured when he was fired as offensive coordinator following the 2014 season.

"I thought I'd only get one Oklahoma question today," Heupel joked Tuesday after answering a fourth question about his alma mater. "I missed on the over-under."

South Carolina's Shane Beamer and Mississippi State's Jeff Lebby were both highly-regarded assistant coaches at Oklahoma within the last five years, too. Venables was an assistant for the Sooners when Heupel was a player, and Lebby served as the Sooners' offensive coordinator last season for Venables. Perhaps it's fate, or a clever creation by the SEC's schedule makers, that the Vols and Gamecocks are on the Sooners' schedule this fall.

"I'm a people person, and I don't like facing people that I know and I like," Venables said. "I really don't, because I know the byproduct of it, but it is what it is."

The byproduct is a win or loss, but the results carry hefty consequences in this league. SEC wins are celebrated, sure, but the losses can ruin seasons and prematurely end careers.

"Everything is hard," Venables said. "The windows that you throw through are hard, the gaps that you run through are small. There's length, there's physicality, there's depth, there's speed, there's precision, and then you go experience what a real game brings to you. Again, they're not looking at half-filled stadiums, you're looking at the best of the best."

Oklahoma's athletics department is ready to join the SEC, but is the football program? The Sooners rebounded from their first losing season in 24 years with 10 wins in 2023 after a rougher-than-expected rebuild of the program, which Venables said experienced 75 departures during his first 15 months on the job. The bounceback season was led by a resurgent offense, but Lebby is now the head coach at Mississippi State and seven starters, including the entire offensive line and quarterback Dillon Gabriel (Oregon), have departed.

The Sooners also replaced both coordinators from last season. The schedule could be extremely difficult with trips to Ole Miss, Missouri and LSU -- three teams fellow newcomer Texas managed to avoid -- and no clashes with any of the expected cellar-dwellers. 

It's easy to surmise Oklahoma should be concerned entering the SEC, where porous offensive lines tend to lead to losing seasons.

"The SEC has a different type of feel to it in the trenches," Oklahoma safety Billy Bowman Jr. said.

Venables isn't panicking. He added three linemen from the portal, including all-conference center Branson Hickman from SMU, and several backups with experience also return to a roster that mixed an abundance of youth with a splash of veteran experience in 2023. More than 4,300 snaps last season were taken by freshmen or sophomores, which led the country, Venables said.

The offensive line's situation, which replaces all five starters, is not as dire in reality as it may seem on paper. 

"We don't have guys that have never played ball before, we just brought in new guys that are new to the OU culture," said quarterback Jackson Arnold, the former 5-star prospect who takes over for Gabriel. "But I thought they adapted very well and I'm really confident about that group."

Venables enters his third season with a 16-10 record that includes seven losses by one possession. The Sooners started last season 7-0 and were in the playoff picture but lost three of their final six, including back-to-back, one-score losses to Kansas and Oklahoma State.

"The SEC is a deep, incredibly competitive league, unlike any other in college football, and everything, again, about this league is about parity," Venables said. "It's about competitive depth. And it's a one-possession league."

In a league whose mantra is "it just means more," the Sooners can certainly match the fanatical energy of their new rivals. The Big 12 was tough, but not necessarily as challenging and daunting as the week-to-week grind in the SEC, which Venables compared to playing eight Red River Rivalry games in a single season.

"If you think that one is emotionally taxing, you're going to go into a lot of venues that the pageantry is going to be real, the stadiums are going to be completely full and a lot of people are going to hate your guts for three hours," he said. 

Such talk hearkens to a vivid scene for Castiglione in 2002, when the then-43-year-old athletics director at Oklahoma noticed a group of Alabama fans tailgating on campus four days before a non-conference football game against the Sooners in September. By Thursday, the parking lot was packed.

Sooner fans descended on the Tide's tailgates and mingled in the middle of a work week. Finally, they had to think to themselves, another fan base that was as football-crazy as them.

"They were so blown away at how they were treated that when we went back the following year to play Alabama in Tuscaloosa, many of our fans literally stayed at the homes of the fans in Alabama," Castiglione said.

History might not repeat itself when the Sooners host the Tide in November and return the favor in Tuscaloosa in 2025; conference rivalries tend to change the mood.