The Pursuit of Excellence
Chapter 130
The goal of Oklahoma football is the pursuit of championships.
Those on the outside snicker at this. They roll their eyes. They don’t understand.
For them it seems obvious that everyone’s goal is championships . . . kinda, basically.
There is no kinda for the Sooners. It is what sets this program apart from all but a handful of elite brethren.
We are not satisfied with a good season. Win-some, lose-some is a placating mantra we cannot abide. We are in search of excellence.
But perfection is impossibly elusive as we all know. And not all long-term goals can be reached in every short-term timeframe. So what is the benchmark? What should we expect and what standards should we hold our program to in the season to come?
The prediction markets (betting markets) are telling us that we should be happy with 8-4 and perhaps ecstatic with 10-2. But that doesn’t seem right. I would suggest our instincts about it seeming misplaced are both right and wrong. The context of a season matters, and context has a long-term and a short-term version.
In the long-run scheme of Sooner football, 8-4 is unacceptable. In the scheme of the here and now, 8-4 might be appropriate given some conditions. Those conditions can be summed up easily by answering “yes” to the questions: Are you where you should be, and Are you headed in the right direction?
Truth be told, we won’t really know this until after all is said and done—meaning after this season is wrapped up and probably after future seasons have transpired. And we will never completely know this since counterfactuals are always hypothetical. But we will have more context eventually in which to render judgment.
I believe tremendous improvement has been made, that we have and are headed in the right direction, but that there is more work to be done. We are not yet to the desired position of keeping serve—where we dictate our destiny.
Time will tell if the wins and losses this year are, although painful, tolerable from a far-minded perspective. Still it is always hard to take solace in a “good loss” as that implies a foregone good win, and victory is the standard.
My goal this year is not too different than in any other year:
Win the games you should win
Be competitive in the games that should be challenging (winning your share)
The difference between years always hinges upon how many games fall into that latter category. Beyond that, a season of achieved excellence means finding a way to be the better team when it was in doubt.
It is only then that a team can realistically pursue championships. The standard at Oklahoma is to be the One team among teams who is positioned and poised to be in that pursuit year in and year out.
The 2024 season is a big opportunity to climb back to that plateau.