Back just before the calendar had flipped to 2000, Bob Stoops' 14 years as an assistant and coordinator paid off with his first head coaching opportunity at tradition-rich Oklahoma.
Looking back, the eldest Stoops put together a pretty impressive initial staff in Norman including four coaches that would go on to be head coaches themselves in Mike Leach, Mike Stoops, Mark Mangino and Brent Venables.
At the podium for his first spring ball as the new head coach of the Sooners, Brent Venables reflected back on their first staff meeting and shared a pretty funny story involving Leach and Mangino.
Leach was lured away from Hal Mumme's staff at Kentucky where they had brought the Air Raid to major college football and Stoops had appointed him the Sooners new offensive coordinator while Mangino brought with him a very different philosophy from his time working at Kansas State under Bill Snyder for eight seasons where he was the run game coordinator.
In that first staff meeting, Stoops is going around introducing the coaches to each other and the full offensive staff has their first opportunity to talk some ball.
Stoops introduces Mangino as the run game coordinator, and Mangino later starts talking about the beauty of the power play and how excited he was to install and practice it.
As Venables shares, Leach had other plans.
Of course, the two offensive minds got to face off later in Big 12 play as Leach went on to his first head coaching opportunity at Texas Tech and Mangino took the Kansas program to heights it had never seen before (and obviously hasn't seen since).
Listen to Venables lay out the full story in the clip.
Brent Venables tells the hilarious story of a Mark Mangino & Mike Leach interaction in the first staff meeting under Bob Stoops in 1999.
โ Jalen Ross (@CoachJalenRoss) March 21, 2022
He really enjoys this press conference thing. pic.twitter.com/b8TWRXa5NR