Brandon Sneed - Sooner

HE EXITS MEMORIAL STADIUM through Gate 12, the brick walls of the arena towering behind him, and makes his way toward the Everest Training Center across the street. Hip-hop music throbs from speakers, its bass so strong you feel it in your chest. I Milly Rock on any block / I Milly Rock on any block. Along the white walls, stretches of crimson contain white lettering that remind all who enter of national titles won and other honors achieved. The walls and white ceiling and striking green turf envelop him as he joins a crowd of players and coaches and staff, among whom he looks at home. Theres a faint but distinct smell of sweat, of young men at work.

Lincoln Riley moves lightly on his feet, bouncing to the music, as the Oklahoma offense gets loose for some light drills. Theres a pair of slide sandals inexplicably strewn on the turf in the middle of everything. Lincoln searches for their owner: Baker Mayfield, the teams star Heisman finalist from the season before. The kids making some quick warm-up throws wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and nothing on his feet but socks.

Hey, Lincoln says, his Texas accent thick. Nice shoes. Try not to get stepped on.

Then Lincoln moves along, leaving the star quarterback, the Heisman contender, the future of this teams season, to continue playing football in socks.

Lincoln moves like an athlete in his crimson Dri-FIT team shirt, black shorts, and gray running shoes, and he works up a light sweat as he makes his way around the field. From quarterbacks to running backs to receivers, he fist-bumps here, shoulder-checks there, bobs his head and shoulders, bobs in rhythm with the beatmore or lessall with a grin on his face. Its a Monday night in August 2017, and the season starts soon.

Hes thirty-three years old, and hes the head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners, one of the best college football programs in the country. Growing up, he never thought he would end up here. He grew up six hours west, in a tiny town called Muleshoe in West Texas, close to New Mexico, about as far west as West Texas goes. He was as close to the aliens in Roswell as he was to any football powers.

Practice begins.

Baker tosses footballs to running backs working on routes. Hes accurate and their hands are good. He doesnt get stepped on. Lincoln lets it slide for now. Hell have plenty more serious problems with Baker soon enough.

Lincoln organizes receivers for release drills, lining them up against each other to practice the violent art of breaking free. They snatch their defender by the forearm, the elbow, the whatever, fling them out of the way, and sprint past.

Lincoln lines up across from the biggest receiver there. (Ive never been one to just stand on the sidelines, he says. I like being in the mix.)

All right, ready now, he says. He takes the defensive position.

The receiver stands some six and a half feet tall and his biceps are thick. This is a big young man, more built than most receivers so tall.

Ready, Lincoln says. He lowers his head and looks up at the receiver, his chin jutting out as he speaks, and a charge of competition fills the air. And. Go.

The receiver launches forward, snatches Lincolns right wrist and yanks, pulling Lincoln aside. The receiver flies free. Lincoln, going with the momentum from the pull, turns in a half-circle. He claps and roars at the kid for a job well done. Then he lines up again, against another receiver, and tells the others to do the same. And they all go again. Soon a dozen football players are whooping and hollering, their noise echoing around the building, feeding off their coach and the energy he gives them, their grunts and roars blending with the music.

Lincoln shakes his arm and rolls his shoulder. Dang, he says. You really start to get that tinglin feeling after a while. Hes downplaying it, but when the receivers yank his arm and pull free, for an instant before turning to clap and cheer, Lincoln winces. His shoulder hurts.

A couple hours later, Lincoln settles into a soft and beautiful brown leather couch in his office across the street, where he tells the story of what happened to that shoulder, and what it means to hurt yourself and then heal.

Before he was a coach, he was a player with big dreams that he failed to achieve, and despite fantastic success as a coach, he still feels pain from that failure. He feels it, physically, in his body, to this day. That may sound like a curse, but it has also been a gift as he has allowed it to teach him, to make him the coach the young men in his charge need. His story is as much about becoming a man as it is about becoming a coach.

Many who know Lincoln say he was born with a gift, with a different sort of brain, with a unique ability bordering on genius. But then, watching a hometown star achieve great things has a way of distorting the past: some in town who knew him well claim that he was also his high school class valedictorian or salutatorian, which he wasnt. Lincoln, for his part, pushes aside any such talk. He says hes just lucky. Hes lucky he got to work with good coaches, hes lucky he got to coach good players, hes lucky in a lot of other ways. He doesnt care for when people try talking him up as a genius. He appreciates the sentimenthe knows they mean wellbut he cant help but disagree. I came up in good environments to learn, he says.

When Lincoln downplays his accomplishments like this, it can come off as almost disingenuous, because when you trace the course of his life, this obvious pattern emerges: where he goes, teams dont just get better, they are transformed. And yet, when he talks about not being a genius, about being lucky, you believe that he believes it, too. He really seems to think that hes only gotten here because of other people. And, of course, its true. None of us are who we are on our own.

Lincoln, however, seems hyperaware of how other people have affected himor at least he would much rather talk about other people than himself. He worries about people thinking that he thinks hes got everything all figured out. He made the mistake of acting that way when he was younger. He also made the mistake of believing that he did have to have everything all figured out, and he saw how that hurt him. Now, part of the joy he gets from what he does is feeling that theres always something else to learn.

Right now, hes trying to figure out how to balance the new demands on his time while also maintaining healthy relationships with his players. Hell text players, call them, stop them in the halls or on sidewalks around campus and just catch up. And its the nature of the relationship, the things they talk about and how they talk about them. Theres a lot to it, he says. You feel like youre half football coach, half academic counselor, half Dr. Phil. Yeah, theres a lot of that. But it helps them. Its necessary to play at a high level to get them all mentally into place. And balancing all that to find what they do well. Its almost like having a new puzzle each year and you just gotta make all the pieces fit.