My own personal belief is that it really is small things that make a big difference. You could argue that Bob Stoops best year was his 2nd year (2000 MNC) by that logic.
BV may be a great coach, but he has never done it at the D1 level, and certainly not within a high octane program like OU. John Blake, for all his failures, was considered a very good coordinator and recruiter. Certainly Bob won his first (and only MNC) with Blake's players mostly.
Hardly anybody had anything bad to say about LR until after he left. Even right up until the oSu loss nobody said anything too bad about LR, until reports started surfacing that he was leaving. Why he's leaving still remains a mystery, but I'm firmly in the camp that maybe daddy Bob stayed a little close to the program, and maybe was pulling strings behind the scene that LR didn't take kindly too.
I sometimes think that Bob chose LR just because he thought maybe LR was somebody he could manipulate because he was pretty young then. And maybe LR didn't react to that meddling the way it was intended.
Wasn't it strange that Bob stepped in to coach the bowl game when there were a number of assistants who could have done that when they were with the team every day? Certainly was very strange to me. How many times has a coach from outside the program came in just to coach one game? It indicates that maybe Bob really was either still very close to the OU program or wasn't quite done. I kind of expected him to be named the permanent HC and was surprised when he wasn't. Barry Alvaraz is about the only one I can think of, and I think he was the AD at Wisconsin so it's not like he was an outsider.
It will certainly be interesting. I look forward to OU and UT joining the SEC even if it's not what I wanted at this time. What I really wanted was for A&M to grow a little bit more in our new conference before this change. But I think we're on much better footing as a program in 2022 than we were in 1999, which was about the start of our Big 12 downfall. What I mean by that is that this university understands what kind of commitment it takes to win in this world, and is willing to play that game.
Besides, if we end up trading OU and UT for Alabama and Auburn it's not all bad.
BV is a great coach. He was the highest-paid DC in CFB last year, I believe. What he has never been is a head coach. We'll have to see if he can handle the additional responsibilities. Early returns on the administrative, program-management, culture-building part of that job are positive. We'll just have to see how the on-field part plays out.
John Blake had never been a coordinator at any level before OU hired him to be HFC after Howard Schnellenberger's dismal 1995 season. He had been a position coach at Tulsa, OU, and the Dallas Cowboys. And he was never a coordinator since getting fired at OU. He was known to be an effective recruiter. I will add to that my personal opinion that he was a dirty recruiter--not in the breaking-NCAA-rules sense, but in the telling-lies-about-other-programs sense. And he was a jaw-droppingly ignorant fool. And he was insecure, so he had to try to micromanage everything, about which he knew nothing, rather than letting his assistant coaches coach. He was probably the worst coaching hire in OU football history.
About the strangeness of Bob stepping in to coach the bowl game, I don't see it. The DC--Alex Grinch--left with Lincoln. Lincoln had been the OC. Shane Beamer had left a year earlier to take the HFC job at USC-E. So Bob--over a position coach--was an obvious choice. It's not without precedent. As you mentioned, Barry Alvarez did the same thing at Wisconsin. Bob obviously was not the A.D., but he has a permanent place in the Athletics Department as some sort of special assistant to the A.D. So he's not an "outsider." But nobody that I know of expected that he would come back as the full-time coach.
What I thought would have been cool was to see Brent Venables coach the team in the Alamo Bowl and have Bob as his D.C.
It's possible that you are correct that Bob meddled with Lincoln's program. I've heard nothing of the sort, but it's possible. I do think that Lincoln may have felt that he wasn't free to fire Mike Stoops, who definitely needed to go. He ended up firing him a half-season later than he should, and there was never a peep out of Bob that Lincoln had erred.
I'll be happy to see OU play A&M again. I've never taken many road trips, but I will always remember seeing the OU @ A&M game in 2006. It was a white-knuckle game, as you probably remember. I enjoyed the interaction with the folks in CS the night before the game and with the Aggie fans at yell practice and at the game. I sat next to a very nice Aggie mom and told her how great I thought the fans were. She laughed and said that I'd think differently if I were wearing burnt orange.