Sooner, p.17
Sooner, page 17
“There’s going to be some games where we have to run it a lot,” he said. “And there’s going to be some games where people load up on us, that we’re going to have to throw the ball well … This is an unselfish offense. Everyone will get involved. Not always, every ballgame. But throughout the year? A lot of people will get involved. If they stay unselfish and play hard, the mentality will be right.”
His hard times at East Carolina—the way he had to learn to evolve and adapt with the personnel at his disposal—had prepared him well for taking over the Oklahoma offense. He’d learned how to be more creative, and now he had top-tier talent to work with. He saw the whole world in front of him. And he trusted that soon, if his players trusted him, they would see a whole new world, too. He told them that if they bought in, he would make them the best offense in the nation.
And besides, at least one player was excited about this new direction: the walk-on quarterback who had left Texas Tech two years earlier, whom Lincoln had tried to recruit to East Carolina, whom he had called crazy: Baker Mayfield. Baker already knew the Air Raid, having run a version of it at Texas Tech under Kliff Kingsbury, so he bought in right away. “Obviously it was a lot of fun for me,” he says. “I got to throw a lot. I had been in an offense like that before.”
In some ways, Baker was eerily reminiscent of Lincoln when Lincoln had been younger. Walk-on. Thought differently than most people around him. Worked harder than most people around him. Seemed driven by impulses that even he didn’t seem to fully understand sometimes. Chip on the shoulder. Could come off as arrogant, which belied a sensitivity that, with proper management, could be leveraged for greatness. And willing to do anything to go after his dreams.
True to his word, Baker had just shown up on Oklahoma’s campus a year earlier, having enrolled at the school without speaking with anyone in the football department. He didn’t meet Bob Stoops until he showed up at a team meal sometime in January 2014. It was their first team meeting of the year. Later, Stoops called Baker’s arrival “maybe the strangest thing that’s ever happened in my coaching career.”
Baker was aware of this strangeness. “People probably thought I was crazy just showing up without talking to the coaches,” he said later.
Baker would make the team as a walk-on—Stoops knew the kid could play—but the Big 12 Conference’s rules dictated that a player who transfers also had to give up a season of eligibility, so he couldn’t actually play in games that fall. This did not suit Baker, who seemed to require competition the way most people require water. “I struggled having to watch from the sidelines,” he said. “I struggled with the fact that I could not do anything to help my teammates out. I struggled with the fact that no matter how hard I worked, I would not be able to test my ability on Saturdays. Although I was at the school I love, I was miserable. I was miserable watching the game I always played but was not allowed to play because I chose to walk on to another school.”
When he wasn’t practicing, working out, or going to classes, Baker got his fix by playing Halo 3 for hours on end, a video game he loved so much that at one point when he was younger he seriously considered quitting football to become a professional gamer. He also got into intramural sports with some guys he met in his dorm. They played softball, at which Baker excelled, having been a baseball player in high school. He was the team shortstop and displayed “unreal range,” according to one of his new friends, Nick Pine, and he hit a lot of home runs. He also played basketball, though another one of his new friends, Brandon Boggs, politely said, “Baker is not nearly as good at basketball.” And yes, he played flag football, but he was banned after the second game of the season.
Now that he was eligible for the 2015 season, Baker fully intended to be the Sooners’ starting quarterback. “After I served my year of sitting out,” he said, “I pushed myself harder than I ever could have imagined.”
Problem was, Baker was a good quarterback, but he was only pretty good for Oklahoma. Trevor Knight, the incumbent starter, may not have become the superstar that everyone thought he was destined to be—“solid, not spectacular,” to borrow one local newspaper headline—but he’d thrown for twenty-three hundred yards and fourteen touchdowns in 2014, with twelve interceptions. Then there was Cody Thomas, a redshirt sophomore who had performed respectably in a few starts the season before—and who, at six foot five with a strong arm, was built like a prototypical quarterback.
Baker was maybe six feet tall on a good day. He had a good but not great arm, he was athletic but not especially so, and he was smart but had gunslinger tendencies that resulted in some fantastic plays but also some silly interceptions.
Oklahoma had a quarterback competition on its hands. Bob Stoops liked to quote the legendary college basketball coach John Wooden, who said, “Competition is a coach’s best friend.” And Stoops was going to let Lincoln decide the winner. “Clean slate,” he said. “I didn’t care about the past. I told Lincoln that whomever he thought was the best quarterback after spring and fall workouts was to be our guy.”
Lincoln liked Baker from what he knew about him heading into the spring—he liked the way he played, and he really liked the chip he carried on his shoulder. But he also recognized where Baker fell short. “He had to change in a lot of ways who he was as a player,” Lincoln told a local reporter.
Lincoln wasn’t the type of coach to head-butt a kid into playing better, but he wasn’t going to sugarcoat things, either. From his own experience, he knew all too well how painful it can be to hear that you’re not good enough to do the things you want to do more than anything else. But he also knew what was possible once you accepted what you could and could not do. “There are certainly times you gotta have tough conversations and be absolutely real with them, too,” he says.
So Lincoln made it clear to Baker that nothing was guaranteed—and Baker responded well. He wanted to be great, and having flaws meant there was room to improve. He appreciated Lincoln’s honesty. “I’ve got a pretty good judge of character,” Baker says. “And from the start, I always felt like I could trust him.”
To ensure that the three quarterback competitors would have a fair chance, Lincoln decided not to watch any film of any of them. How they performed through the spring and summer would determine who was under center in the fall.
That parking lot where James Mayfield once parked his truck to tailgate before Oklahoma games, where young Baker Mayfield grew up giddy that he was about to go watch gods play football? That parking lot, where Baker’s dream began, was now the Everest Training Center, Oklahoma football’s indoor training facility, where he was spending all his time chasing that dream. He’d made the team as a walk-on, and he had a chance to go after the starting spot, right there.
Lincoln did make Baker one guarantee. “He was like, I’m gonna push you,” Baker says. “The best guy’s gonna play. So just take your coaching, and take it one day at a time.”
13
Mentality
IN APRIL 2015, ABOUT a month after spring practice began, Lincoln walked into the Oklahoma weight room and saw Baker Mayfield looking far more subdued than usual. “We’re around these guys so much,” he told a local reporter, “even at that time, I could tell something wasn’t right.”
The night before, Baker’s father, James, had called to say that his mom, Gina, had been in a car accident, but wouldn’t go into more detail. All Baker knew was that it had happened in South Carolina, on the highway to Hilton Head Island, where Gina was going on vacation with some friends. James seemed to want Baker not to worry, but later that night Baker impulsively checked the Internet to see what he could find. He learned that the driver of a sedan had crossed the highway median, hopped a barrier cable, collided with one car, and then hit the small SUV that Gina’s friend was driving, head-on. As the sedan hit yet another vehicle before finally stopping, Gina’s SUV was violently rolling off the highway. The driver and passenger in the sedan died at the scene. The rest were at a hospital.
Lincoln arranged for Baker to fly to South Carolina as soon as possible, where Baker would spend the better part of a week, taking turns with his dad and his older brother in the hospital by Gina’s side. She had a lot of recovering to do—busted collarbone, damaged abdominals, intestinal trauma—but she would be okay.
That was an extreme situation, but Lincoln gave that kind of care, on a smaller, daily basis, to as many of his players as he could.
“He just loves these guys,” Bob Stoops says. “And that came through immediately.”
A lot of coaches say they love their players, say they care about them as human beings first and football players second, say all kinds of things that sound good, but “you can’t fool the players,” Ty Darlington wrote in a blog post. “They know. They know whether you really care about them as people, or if first and foremost you want to win, no matter the cost. There is no doubt in my mind that Coach Riley cares.”
They can feel how much he feels for them.
They can feel how much he once felt what they feel now.
Lincoln busted up his shoulder in high school, was going to play at Texas Tech, it didn’t work out. Yeah, he was now a wunderkind coach, but the disappointment still hurt. And he still felt that pain. He knew intimately how precious was the time playing the game. How fragile it could be. He’d been there. He’d tried to do what they were doing and he caught a bad break. He knew what they felt on that field. And he knew something else: the feeling of when it ends. As he had learned at East Carolina, he knew all too well just how important it was to love his players until that day. How important it was to walk them home.
Lincoln showed an acute understanding of just how short football careers usually are. Players are well aware that their careers have expiration dates that nobody actually knows. “He knows football is his job and his career,” Baker says, “but for us, one day, it will end.”
Lincoln knew this as well as any of them. All his players knew his story. “And that’s why,” Baker says, “seeing how honest he is, and how much he cares about us, and not just football—you can see that part of it, and that means a lot.”
He knew what he was putting them through when he pushed them. He knew what it felt like to be told how much work you have left to do. That mattered to the players. “It does,” Baker says. “It does for a lot of guys on the team, actually. I’d probably say almost everybody. If you hadn’t been there, then it’s kind of a question of, some guys might think, Well, how do you know what this is like?… He can relate. And that’s very, very important.”
* * *
As spring practice got under way, like all college coaches, Lincoln felt the strain of spending so much time away from his family. Children don’t remember how big the house was they grew up in and they don’t really care what their daddy does for work, but they remember everything about how Daddy made them feel. Many men, especially ambitious young men, make the mistake of forsaking their family for their work. Lincoln didn’t. “You do have to separate it at times,” he says. “Like when you go out of town, or one night you turn your phone off and spend time with your family. I certainly try to do that as much as I can.”
One of the underrated aspects of being a coach at Oklahoma was that Bob Stoops was a family man at heart, too. As much as a college football coach can be, anyway. “There wasn’t a guard-your-desk mentality,” Lincoln says. There was no honor in working unnecessarily long hours. “That’s one thing I learned from Bob,” Lincoln says. “You gotta get away from it, too. I think that’s a big reason for his consistency and longevity. He was able to get away, and recharge, and spend time with his family.”
And Lincoln, same as he had done at East Carolina, sought to blend football with family, so he and Caitlin opened their home to his players in Norman. “We always felt—as soon as we were married and he had a full-time position—we really wanted the players to be around us outside of football,” Caitlin says. “We really enjoy having them at our home, even if they are just laying on the couch watching football. But we think it’s important to get to see him as a father, as a husband—as somebody who’s not just an Xs and Os football coach. We want them to see him as more than just a coach—as a human being—and we want them to know he sees them as human beings, too.”
Putting it simply, she says, “Relationships are what make life important, not accolades.”
Lincoln welcomed Caitlin and Sloan to the practice fields or the office at least a few times each week. “Everything he does, you could take notes on,” Baker says. “The way he carries himself. Every day. As a father, too.”
And on those fields, as spring practice unfolded and the players did what Lincoln asked, they began to trust him, and they began to see just what might be possible.
Even the brilliant and skeptical Ty Darlington was coming around on Lincoln’s offense, in all its brutal simplicity. He would come to describe what Lincoln was doing as not just simply installing a new offense, but also instilling a new approach to the game, which Ty later termed simply “the Mentality.” “I’ve bought into the system,” Ty wrote in a blog post. “I’m seeing the results … Sure, there are a variety of tweaks and tricks, but the base system is not difficult to understand whatsoever.” He was coming to see what Lincoln had learned long ago from Mike Leach. “A complex offensive system oftentimes leads to doubt, hesitancy, and then underperformance,” Ty said.
In Lincoln’s offense, Ty saw, “Simplicity breeds confidence.”
And that confidence was the key to the whole thing. “Confidence is the foundation of the Mentality,” Ty said. “When a player is confident, he can play aggressively and he can play fast. The system itself, with its simple concepts and aggressive, big-play schemes, is designed to develop the same mentality on the field that he works so hard to cultivate off the field.”
In other words, Lincoln didn’t convince his players that every play would work because the plays were perfect. He convinced them that the plays would work because they would make them work. “The guys on that offense truly believe that they are unstoppable,” Ty wrote, “and that is why they are.” He called this the most valuable thing he learned playing under Lincoln: “Mentality is more important than scheme.”
It didn’t matter what play was called—what mattered was that the players believed they would find success with those plays. Ty wrote, “This is the attitude Coach Riley instituted from Day One: Aggressive, fearless, confident.”
What helped instill this confidence was the way that Lincoln made certain his players understood not only how the plays were meant to be run, but also why. He showed them the forces at work, the push of the receivers running one way in order to pull the defenders with them, in order to clear the space for another guy coming behind them. He convinced them that they were unstoppable for reasons that had nothing to do with him. That was Lincoln’s genius as much as anything he put in the playbook. He wasn’t all about himself. He didn’t want to convince them to believe in him; he wanted to convince them to believe in themselves, by showing them who they really were.
“His ability to adapt to our personality and get the best out of our players has been huge,” Baker says.
His hard times at East Carolina had given him more than just an affinity for creativity on the field—they had also reminded him to remain in touch with those soft parts of his heart that still hurt sometimes. To tap into his pain, let it soften his heart into its most natural state, that of giving more than instruction and coaching—that of giving love. That was what his players needed. They needed to feel heard, seen, felt.
The players believed in his belief in them, because they believed that he really knew them. And so much of this came back, in a way, to Lincoln’s shoulder.
To his pain.
The thing about putting yourself aside to get to know somebody else is that it means inevitably revealing yourself along the way. Connecting with people requires authentic reciprocity. Lincoln’s players got to know him, and as they did, they got to know just how much he had once wanted what they all had, and they saw how this gave him greater empathy for how much they wanted it, too. “He cares so much because he wanted it so bad,” Baker says. “And he still does.”
And as the offense mastered Lincoln’s playbook, they wore their defense out. “Our offense jumped all over our defense,” Baker says, “which was supposed to be strong … We had so many talented guys.”
“We averaged I don’t know how many yards per play that spring,” he goes on. “Like, holy crap. This is why they brought him in. He knows what he’s talking about.”
That would become an emotional refrain for the next two seasons as Lincoln steadily grew his players’ trust in the system: Like, holy crap.
“For me and for everybody, it was like, this is the real deal,” Baker says. “It was like the words he had told us the whole time since we got there in January and then up until we start spring practice, what, the second week-ish in March—we realized that all the stuff he was saying and preaching for that long, when we got out there for the first day of practice, it was the real deal. If there were doubts in the back of your head—nah, they were gone, because this was real.”
As spring rolled into summer, the quarterback competition raged on. “It was just like a prizefight,” Lincoln said at the time. “A fifteen-rounder, where there wasn’t one big knockout.”
* * *
As summer took hold, Donnie Duncan’s health continued to decline. Lincoln and everyone else began to get the clear sense that he would not be with them much longer. Ruffin McNeill was so upset that when he learned that Donnie was planning to sell his boat, he offered to buy it, even though he had no idea how to pilot a boat himself. He had it transported to Washington, North Carolina, a small town on the Pamlico River half an hour east of Greenville, and he renamed it Timeout because Donnie told him that he should think of taking the boat on the river in North Carolina as just that, a timeout.
