generic Tramel's ScissorTales: Why OU-Texas is a bigger get for SEC than USC-UCLA for the Big Ten
Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey made an off-hand, but on-point, comment the other day that his league got the better deal of the blockbuster conference realignments of the last two summers.
OU and Texas pledged to the SEC in July 2021. Southern Cal and UCLA pledged to the Big Ten in June 2022.
Both will bring new riches to the most affluent conferences in collegiate athletics.
Both will bring high-performing athletic departments.
Both will bring high-profile football brands. But some are more high-profile than others. Which is what Sankey really meant.
Here’s the best way to look at it. USC and Texas are quite similar. Great tradition, iconic brands, stretches of dominant football. But currently in a protracted slump.
Since the 2010s arrived, Texas has one top-10 finish (No. 9 in 2018), four top-25 seasons and is on its fourth coach, offensive whiz Steve Sarkisian.
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In the same 12-year span, USC has two top-10 finishes (No. 3 in 2016 and No. 6 in in 2011), six top-25 seasons and, not counting interims, is on its fourth coach, offensive whiz Lincoln Riley.
The Longhorns and Trojans both were mostly great in the decade of 2000-09, mostly so-so in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, and mostly-great in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s.
Each sit in one of the nation’s most fertile recruiting grounds, with USC in a massive market and Texas in a big market with tons of alumni in nearby other mega markets.
Texas-USC seems a wash. So the SEC-Big Ten spitting contest comes down to OU and UCLA, which is no comparison.
The mediocre stretches of OU football history are about the same as the best stretches of UCLA football history.
But everyone knows that. Here’s the information that matters to the bean counters who are running college football.
In the last four seasons, 42 OU regular-season games have been available to either ESPN or Fox. Those corporations have put the Sooners on their over-air channel, ABC or Fox, 39 times.
Only three times have the Sooners been sent to cable – Kansas in 2021 and 2020, West Virginia in 2018.
By comparison, USC has been on cable 21 times and on the big networks 21 times. Some of that is the difference in success, but still. The Big 12 and Pac-12 have the same television partners, ESPN and Fox, so the decision-makers on the Sooners and Trojans are the same.
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In the last five years, OU has appeared on 17 prime-time, non-cable games, drawing an average of 4.13 million viewers. Those games range from Ohio State to Kansas. USC has appeared on 14 such games, with an average of 3.37 million viewers.
Texas has been on just seven non-cable, prime-time games during that span but averaged 4.23 million viewers. So the Longhorns remain a big draw. Ironically, two of those games were against USC, which drew an average of 3.95 million viewers. Two of those Texas games were against OSU, which drew an average of 3.57 million viewers.
On mid-day, non-cable games, OU has averaged 2.54 million viewers, USC 2.06.
Those differences aren’t terribly one-sided, considering the Sooners’ success and the Trojans’ lack of it.
But UCLA has drawn only a fraction of such number. However, USC and UCLA do offer the Big Ten a late-night television window. The Pac-12 kickoffs at 9:30 p.m. or 10 p.m. Central time draw decent viewing numbers, and if the Trojans or Bruins are playing Wisconsin or Michigan State instead of Oregon State or Arizona, those numbers will rise dramatically.
In the last five years, USC has averaged 1.33 million viewers for its 16 late-night games. UCLA has averaged just 0.74 million viewers for its 15 late-night games. Part of that is USC has had more games on ESPN; UCLA has played seven late-night games on Fox Sports1, which generally draws dramatically fewer viewers than ESPN or ESPN2. USC has played just four late-night games on FS1.
Still, the SEC is glad to have OU and Texas, even if they are Central Time Zone schools. The West Coast addresses of USC and UCLA create all kinds of Big Ten scheduling problems for other sports, which have been well-documented.
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It would not be surprising to see the Big Ten add more West Coast schools, even if they don’t add value to the television contracts, just to make scheduling a little more palpable.
Away from football, USC and UCLA clearly raise the Big Ten’s brand.
UCLA has won 119 NCAA championships, plus the 1954 football title. Forty of those championships have came in the 2000s, so it’s not like the Bruins are on some kind of slide.
USC has won 119 national titles, counting eight football championships in the poll era. Thirty-seven NCAA titles have come in the 2000s.
That kind of success trumps the Sooners and Longhorns.
Texas has 58 national titles, including 40 in the 2000s. OU has 41 national titles, including 22 in the 2000s.
So all are high-caliber athletic programs, with USC and UCLA excelling at a higher rate.
But OU and Texas football outrank USC and UCLA by a significant margin. Both on the field and in the television ratings, the scoreboard that matters most.
Greg Sankey was right.
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Biographer David Maraniss talks Jim Thorpe
Two weeks ago, on the same day that the International Olympic Committee announced that Jim Thorpe’s Olympic records had been restored in full, I received a package.
An advance copy of David Maraniss’ new Thorpe biography: Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe.
Maraniss is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author whose previous sports books included When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi and (Roberto) Clemente.
Path Lit By Lightning goes on sale next week. I’ve read the Lombardi and the Clemente books, and both are superb. I assume Maraniss’ Thorpe biography will be as well.
I’ve read at least three Thorpe biographies, counting Sally Jenkins' The Real All-Americans, the story of Carlisle football. But Thorpe, not just Oklahoma’s but America’s greatest athlete ever, is such a mythic figure, a writer/reporter like Maraniss can uncover all kinds of new Thorpe material.
Here’s a portion of a Maraniss Q&A from Simon & Schuster in which he talks about Thorpe.
Q: What inspired you to write about Jim Thorpe?
Maraniss: “I have to become obsessed with a subject to write a book about it, and over the past few years I became obsessed with Jim Thorpe. I look for two essential things for any potential biography: first a dramatic arc to the life, and second, a story that has a larger meaning, illuminating history, sociology and the human condition. Thorpe met both of those conditions. His amazing feats as an athlete and struggles later in life, his fight to maintain dignity and restore the Olympic records that were unfairly rescinded – all of that provided the dramatic arc. Then I saw that through his life I could illuminate the Native American experience, illuminating a difficult aspect of American history and sociology. As I state in the preface, the seed was first planted some two decades ago when Norbert Hill, a writer from the Oneida Nation, suggested that I write about Thorpe. It took a long time for that seed to grow into obsession, but eventually it did.”
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Q: You are known for your meticulous research. What was your research like for this biography?
Maraniss: “I tried to use the same methodology I apply to all my books, what I call The Four Legs of the Table. The first leg is Go There, to the places of the story. The second leg is Gather Documents, the third is Conduct Interviews and the fourth leg is Look for What’s Not There. In other words, don’t accept the accepted story and the myths that have been passed down. Because of COVID, the Go There leg was abbreviated in this case. I went to most of the places of the story, but not for as long as I wanted. For the Lombardi book, for instance, I moved to Green Bay. I would have liked to have moved to Oklahoma for a period of research for Thorpe, but that was untenable. I also never made it to Stockholm, the site of his Olympic triumph. And live interviews were less important for this book since Thorpe died in 1953 and almost everyone who knew him was dead. But oral histories were vital, as were letters and other documents I acquired from 22 archives ranging from the Avery Brundage Archive at the University of Illinois to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale to the National Museum of the American Indian archive in Suitland, Maryland, to four stashes of personal papers. Luckily, I was able to do a good share of the archival research before COVID slowed my travels.”
Q: In Path Lit By Lightning, you include so many unlikely cameos, encounters and exploits. Do you have a favorite anecdote that you uncovered or one that you think will be most interesting to readers?
Maraniss: “Thorpe’s life intersected with almost every well-known person in the first half of the 20th century. He was on the Olympic team with George S. Patton and Avery Brundage; played football against Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Halas and Knute Rockne; played baseball with Christy Mathewson; led a barnstorming team against Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige; sat in the Yankees dugout with Babe Ruth; acted in Hollywood with Bob Hope and was directed by John Ford. But I think if I could be a fly on the wall and witness Thorpe for one day, it would be on a November day in 1922 when he and Paul Robeson, the great actor, singer, and political activist, met on a football field in Milwaukee in an NFL game, Thorpe as the playing coach for the Oorang Indians, Robeson as a star end for the Milwaukee Badgers, two champions of their people, the Native American colossus against the African American colossus.”
Q: How did you approach one of the most important chapters of the book – the events that led to the confiscation of Thorpe’s Olympic medals?
Maraniss: “I began the research with an open mind. Was the decision to rescind Thorpe’s medals and take away his trophies in any way justifiable even if unpopular? The more I learned, the more I became convinced that what happened to Jim was not only wrong, it revealed a corrupt system led by unethical and hypocritical men. In Chapter 11 – ‘Lo, the Poor Indian!’ – I unpack in systematic detail the many ways that Thorpe was screwed by the powers that be and deconstruct their written rationalizations and lies.”
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Q: What was the Carlisle School and how did it shape Thorpe’s identity and life trajectory?
Maraniss: “The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the flagship government boarding school for American Indians. It was founded in 1879 and lasted until 1918. It was closed after a scandal that led to a damning congressional investigation and reverted to its former use as a military installation, the Carlisle Barracks. The motto of the school’s founder says it all – Kill the Indian, Save the Man. The purpose of the school was assimilation and acculturation of Indians into white society by any means necessary, ridding them of their Indianness in culture, language, religion, and appearance. The first group of students taken to the school from the Lakota Nation thought they were being sent East to show their bravery and die. Many of them, as it turned out, did die. The student cemetery at Carlisle is haunting, row after row of crosses of young people who were taken from their homelands and died far from home. Jim Thorpe was sent there by his father and stepmother at age 16. It was a mixed experience for him. No one would know him today if not for the fact that it was there that he became a brilliant football player, an all-American whose teams defeated the greatest teams in the nation of that era, including Army and Harvard and Penn, and there that he developed the track skills that led him to Olympic greatness.”
Q: While Thorpe is arguably best known for his Olympic accomplishments, he spent years of his life traversing the country playing professional football and baseball. What are some of the highlights of that career and his lasting impact on the sport?
Maraniss: “Thorpe was better at football than baseball and had a more lasting impact on that sport. When he joined the Canton Bulldogs in 1915, he helped lift a ragtag sport into the first stage of its later prominence. He was the dominant player in the league and his team won several championships. By 1920, he was so highly regarded that he was named the first president of what became the National Football League. In baseball, he struggled to find playing time on John McGraw’s Giants but improved year by year, especially when he played with the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Braves, and in 1919 led the National League in batting for most of the season. My conclusion was that he was rushed to the major leagues too soon for promotional purposes and misused by McGraw, the Little Napoleon, though baseball was not his best sport by any stretch. Nonetheless, he was a remarkable athlete, voted the best of the first half of the 20th century and one of the greatest of all time.”
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Southern Nazarene football seeks turnaround
Football victories have been in short supply at Southern Nazarene University. One win in 2021. Two wins in 2019, with the pandemic wiping out the season in between.
That’s three victories and 19 losses since 2018, and it’s not like the Crimson Storm was winning big before then, as it tries to navigate the Great American Conference.
But Southern Nazarene players don’t seem to have lost hope. Sixteen SNU players are in graduate school. Defections haven’t mounted.
Our series of state college previews continues today, with Southern Nazarene.
“We’ve got a lot of guys that have played a lot of games,” said Crimson Storm coach Dustin Hada. “We’ve got a great group of older guys who have grown into their leadership and understand how we want to do things culturally. So experience is probably our strength right now.”
Additionally, 46 newcomers have swelled the SNU roster to 142, which makes for a hectic August. Crimson Storm coaches will stage duel team portions of practice, allowing players to get enough practice time.
Hada is optimistic about his defense, led by veteran safeties Eli Calhoun (Grand Prairie, Texas) and Trent Smith (Garland, Texas) returning. “They’re vocal leaders, but they can play football, too,” Hada said. “They’re going to be the energy guys on defense.”
Linebackers Dylan Bauer (Rowlett, Texas) and Cole Cizek (Elgin) are graduate seniors who have command of the scheme.
SNU returns two quarterbacks. Graduate senior Gage Porter (Elk City) played extensively in 2018, started in 2019 and was the starter a year ago before an injury. Jarvis Davis (Freeport, Texas) took over and led the Storm in rushing, though his passing was spotty (1,216 yards, seven interceptions, six touchdowns, .503 completion percentage).
Grayson Winters (Prosper, Texas) and Braden Jones (Hobart) are veterans on the offensive line. “Those two anchors up front are going to help us out,” Hada said.
Hada spent four years on the SNU staff of previous head coach Andy Lambert. Hada was hired before the 2020 season that then was canceled by the pandemic. So Hada has been around quite awhile, with relatively few games to measure any progress.
“A lot of our problems last year were football problems,” Hada said. “I’d much rather fix football problems than culture problems.
“We just gotta play better football. That’s what our goal is. Build off the foundation we’ve set culturally. That’s a good place to be.”
2022 SNU football schedule
Sept. 1: Arkansas-Monticello, 6 p.m.
Sept. 10: at Ouachita Baptist, 6 p.m.
Sept. 17: East Central, 2 p.m.
Sept. 24: at Southeastern State, 6 p.m.
Oct. 1: at Arkansas Tech, 2 p.m.
Oct. 8: Harding, 2 p.m.
Oct. 15: at Southwestern Oklahoma State, 5:30 p.m.
Oct. 22: Northwestern Oklahoma State, 3 p.m.
Oct. 29: Henderson State, 2 p.m.
Nov. 5: at Southern Arkansas, 2 p.m.
Nov. 12: at Oklahoma Baptist, 6 p.m.
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The List: All-College MVPs
Reporting on the death of NBA great Bill Russell has brought up many All-College Tournament memories the last couple of days. Including how glorious the fields once were for OKC’s holiday basketball tournament.
Some of the greatest players in the history of the game played in OKC during the All-College's heyday, which ended in the early 1980s. Here are the 10 greatest most valuable players in All-College history:
1. Bill Russell, San Francisco, 1955: Two-time NCAA champion, averaged 20.7 points and 20.3 rebounds with the Dons, then led the Celtics to 11 NBA titles in 13 seasons.
2. Elgin Baylor, Seattle, 1956: In two seasons with Seattle U., Baylor averaged 31.2 points and 19.8 rebounds a game. Then he became one of the NBA’s greatest players, averaging 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds over 14 seasons.
3. Pete Maravich, Louisiana State, 1968: Maravich’s shooting exploits during the All-College at State Fair Arena are well-told. All these years later, his numbers remain the stuff of science fiction. Scoring averages of 43.8, 44.2 and 44.5 in three seasons at LSU, all without the 3-point line. And sometimes we overlook how prolific Maravich was as a pro – a 24.2 scoring average over 10 NBA seasons.
4. Nate Thurmond, Bowling Green, 1961: The 6-foot-11 center averaged 17.8 points and 16.6 rebounds over three seasons with the Falcons, then played 14 NBA seasons, averaging 15.0 points and 15.0 rebounds. Thurmond made the Hall of Fame.
5. Robert Parish, Centenary, 1975: Another example of how basketball has changed. Few had heard of Parish when he came to OKC as a senior. But in four seasons with the Gentlemen (yes, that was and is the Centenary nickname), the 7-foot center averaged 21.6 points and 16.9 rebounds. Then Parish was the eighth overall pick in the 1976 draft and spent 21 seasons in the NBA, mostly with Boston, becoming a Hall of Fame center.
6. Calvin Murphy, Niagara, 1969: Five-foot-9 guard was a college phenom, averaging 33.1 points over 77 college games. All without a shot clock or a 3-point line. Then Murphy averaged 17.9 points a game over 13 NBA seasons.
7. Bob Kurland, Oklahoma State, 1944-45: Landmark center helped change the game, along with DePaul big man George Mikan. Kurland led the Cowboys to back-to-back NCAA championships. Kurland played Industrial League basketball after Stillwater, since the NBA was just starting when Kurland graduated.
8. Wayman Tisdale, Oklahoma, 1983: Three-time consensus all-American in three Sooner seasons, then played 12 NBA seasons and averaged 15.3 points a game.
9. Dave Stallworth, Wichita State, 1963: Probably the greatest player in Wheatshocker history. Six-foot-7 forward averaged 24.3 points and shot 53.2 percent from the field over 79 Wichita State games.
10. Flynn Robinson, Wyoming, 1965: Point guard averaged 26.5 points a game over three Cowboy seasons, then averaged 14.5 points a game over seven NBA seasons.
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Mailbag: Figuring out collectives
The name, image and likeness revolution in college football is causing confusion with some fans.
Steve: I’m confused and wonder if other Sooner supporters are as well. In December of 2021, OU announced the OU NIL Exchange platform designed to connect athletes with businesses. Then in April 2022, Switzer’s 1Oklahoma NIL Collective was launched to provide the opportunity for OU football players, and athletes from a couple of other sports, to earn $40,000-50,000. Now, the players have announced the formation of the Norman NIL club. As a side, some players selling online T-shirts with their logo, like a WBBZ Saturday morning call in trade ‘em show. What the heck is going on here? Is this the way other major universities are dealing with the NIL? Seemingly totally haphazard and disorganized. And as a potential donor, I’m very reluctant and confused how to help. Do you think other supporters feel the same? Feels like a grab and go to me.”
Tramel: I don’t blame anyone for not knowing what the heck is going on. Yes, it's all crazy. There is nothing organized about any of it.
If I was giving money to OU or OSU, I would donate to the university scholarship fund for academics and sleep quite well at night.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: SEC's addition of OU & Texas is better than Big Ten gaining USC & UCLA
