Bob Stoops just showed the football world that he can still lead a team to a championship. On Saturday, he coached the Arlington Renegades to the 2023 XFL Championship. His Renegades defeated the D.C. Defenders 35-26. The former Oklahoma Sooners head coach got his second championship in his head coaching career. He captured his first title in 2000 while he was head coach of the Sooners.
Road To XFL Title
The Renegades barely sneaked into the XFL playoffs with a 4-6 regular season record. They only won one of their last five games after a 3-2 start and finished second in the South Conference. The Houston Roughnecks were the only team in the South Conference that finished with a winning record.
The Renegades and Roughnecks matched up in the first round of the playoffs. The Renegades lost 25-9 to them in the last week of the regular season but avenged that loss in the first round of the playoffs with a 26-11 win.
The Defenders had the best record (9-1) throughout the regular season, with their only loss coming in a 37-36 shootout against the Orlando Guardians in the regular season. They defeated their division rivals the Seattle Dragons in the semifinals to reach the championship before eventually falling to the Renegades.
Stoops talked about his team’s underdog story after the game.
“The assistant coaches and the players really deserve the credit. They’ve stuck together, they’ve hung together and here towards the end of the year we’ve really hit our stride at the right time,” Stoops said in a postgame interview.
Call Back Home
Stoops spent 18 seasons with the Sooners and never had a losing season. He also only had four seasons in which he didn’t win double digit games. He won 190 games and had a win percentage of 79.8, which was the highest before the Lincoln Riley era. His 190 total wins and 121 conference wins are the most in school history.
Stoops is 1-1 in championship games and coached two Heisman winners, Jason White (2003) and Sam Bradford (2008). He stepped down at the end of the 2016 season but was brought back in 2021 to coach the Sooners in a bowl game after Riley left for USC. In 2019, Stoops unretired to coach in the XFL, but the league shut down for the second time in their history during the 2020 season. The XFL returned in 2022 with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as one of the owners and face of the league in its third act.
The Sooners went 6-7 last year to finish with their first losing season since 1998 under new head coach Brent Venables. The former Clemson defensive coordinator helped lead the Tigers to two national championships and also was part of the Sooners staff for the 2000 national title run.
For years, Sooners fans complained about their team’s poor defense, and Venables was brought back to Oklahoma to fix that problem. But 2022 was more of the same as the Sooners’ defense gave up 30 points per game and 461 yards per game last season. Both ranked in the bottom half of all FBS teams, and that unit was the eighth-ranked defense in the Big 12 Conference among 10 total teams.
Venables’ rough start might end his head coaching career earlier than expected, and the Sooners could turn to a familiar face to get their football program back on track like they did in 2021.
