SEC Day: A Daring Move A Decade in The Making, How OU Administration Manifested July 1 Dream Wedding

College athletics' most ambitious move of the century provides the University of Oklahoma the opportunity to cash in on an unprecedented purse — and its football program an unprecedented challenge.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, center, talks with OU President Joseph Harroz Jr., left, and OU athletic director Joe Castiglione after a press conference before a celebration for OU joining the Southeastern Conference in Norman, Okla., Monday, July 1, 2024. / BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY

NORMAN — University of Oklahoma President Joseph Harroz Jr. broke the tension Monday.

“This all seems very serious,” Harroz said, drawing a faint laugh from the 50-plus media members and associates present during Monday’s press conference in OU’s interview room on the southwest side of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.

He flashed a smile. If he lacked confidence about what was unfolding, it wasn’t obvious.

Sitting to Harroz’s left was OU Vice President and Director of Athletics Joe Castiglione, with whom Harroz had been co-conspiring the Sooners’ move to the SEC from the Big 12 as early as 2010. Between them sat Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey, who was in Norman on Monday to officiate the SEC and OU’s July 1st wedding.

“This has been, as you might know, some years in the making,” Harroz said. “I was hoping to one day have this press conference where we actually announced that the University of Oklahoma was joining the Southeastern Conference, and that day is today.”

Monday’s carnival-esque “SEC Day,” which included several events on and off-campus and finished with a drone show above Memorial Stadium, marked the most ambitious day in Oklahoma athletics history — and the most intimidating. Along with the Sooners’ nemesis of over a century, the University of Texas, OU joins a 16-team league that has produced four of the last five College Football Playoff winners. Such a move will irrevocably change OU’s athletic success, culture, enrollment and finances.

“This whole thought process started probably 10 years ago,” Castiglione said. “Maybe even before that.”

IJMM pic.twitter.com/tHLablutGN

— Bryce McKinnis (@McKinnisBryce) July 1, 2024

Conversations involving Harroz, Castiglione, and the University of Texas's adjacent faculty started at the onset of Harroz’s tenure in 2020.

“So as I came into this role, the very first meeting you go to, I wind up talking with Chris Del Conte, the athletic director of Texas, and Joe Castiglione. And in that conversation, we talk about what's going to happen with college athletics, the general topic that takes place there, and what's our role? And can we continue to be Oklahoma, and flourish, and achieve our objectives? So the conversation started early. I think all schools have broad, general conversations,” Harroz said. “It wasn't going to work until you had the right alignment. And for Texas, that was their President, Jay Hartsell. He and I have become very good friends. And he understood the need. We each did our individual analysis.”

Harroz referenced National Collegiate Athletic Association vs. Alston, a 2021 Supreme Court decision that allowed college athletes to benefit from their name, image and likeness. It provided a shove for the OU-Texas-SEC movement.

“We saw in June of 2021, a 9-0 Supreme Court decision in the Austin U.S. Supreme Court case, which changed college athletics and made a very clear statement about what was taking place. Within 30 days of that, the story of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas endeavoring to go to the SEC came to the light. Is that a product of serendipity? Or is that a product of strategy? I can tell you it’s the latter,” Harroz said. “We did a studied, deep dive into, What does the future look like for college athletics? And for all of the thinking that went into that, there were two conclusions that we reached that governed all of it.

Chris Splitt and his wife Rhonda take a photo with an SEC sign outside Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman, Okla., during a celebration for OU joining the Southeastern Conference in Norman, Okla., Monday, July 1, 2024. / BRYAN TERRY/THE OKLAHOMAN / USA TODAY

“The first conclusion was the University of Oklahoma must be a place where we’re able to compete for championships on a regular basis in all of the sports — not make it into a final series, not make it into a playoff, but be in a position to win championships,” Harroz said.

This year, the Sooners will play eight conference opponents: Tennessee, Auburn, Texas, South Carolina, Ole Miss, Mizzou, Alabama and LSU. The College Football Playoff will transition from a four-team bracket to a 12-team bracket this year. It’s a new ball game.

“In terms of personnel, it’s the grind. I mean, it is the grind,” Dari Nowkah, an OU alum, said Monday afternoon during a Q&A alongside fellow ESPN/SEC Network pundit Dusty Dvoracek. “Programs in the Big 12 don’t have the grind programs in the SEC have. You get through one week, you don’t really get to exhale because the next team on your schedule is just as talented as the team you just played or close, and every bit as talented as you or close. . . You look at the last three games on their schedule: at Missouri, home against Alabama, at LSU, you know, you’ve got to play five conference games before that. You hope that you’re in a position to have those games really be impactful, meaningful when it comes to getting into the 12-team playoff. "

Since the CFP’s inception in 2014, OU has made the four-team bracket four times, fourth most behind Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State. The Sooners were one-loss conference champions in each of those seasons. SEC teams with a blemished record will have a very good shot at making the playoff moving forward.

“I think this: 9-3 is OK,” Nowkah said. “And that’s going to be hard because anything short of 10 wins for an Oklahoma fan is a bad year. That is a bad year. And sometimes, even 10-2 is a bad year. And, like, this year, this schedule, they go 9-3 this year, to me I’d be feeling really good if I’m an Oklahoma fan.”

I think that Oklahoma and Texas are being treated as our past 14 members, and you’ll see both the warm — and cold — embrace that can be present, and that is in many ways who we are

- Greg Sankey

The second of those conclusions Harroz, Castiglione and the university reached was that OU “wanted to remain among the handful of athletic departments in the country with universities that weren’t subsidized.” The economic impact of joining the SEC, both potential and realized, cannot be understated. Harroz and the university devised strategies four years ago they hoped would increase OU’s freshman classes by 2% each year.

“We didn’t grow by just 2%. We grew by 11% last year, and we’re going to have double-digit growth again this year,” Harroz said. 

“If anyone’s been paying attention,” Castiglione said, “you know that the expenses in college athletics or around college athletics are going up much faster than the rate of new revenue, and we’re challenged every day—and have been, back to my first days here at Oklahoma. . . Where were we going to be when people realized we’re gonna have to share some revenue with athletes? Where were we gonna be then, and where were we going to be with more and more investment across a lot of other sports? Be it facilities, be it investment in a program, handling rising costs."

“The same thing on research. We have aspirations of being an AAU university. Over the last four years, we’ve had 16% annualized growth in research. . . We launched a fundraising campaign, the biggest of its kind, certainly, in our state’s history, to raise $2 billion, $500 million of which, the biggest piece, would go to need-based aid. All of those are coming true, and the move to the SEC amplifies the outcomes for all of those.”

Harroz’s analysis posed an additional question on the outcome of alignment: Whether the move to the SEC was good for Norman, Oklahoma, or whether the move to the SEC was “good for the state of Oklahoma.” Harroz’ analysis determined the answer to that question to be an unequivocal yes.

“When you look at it, the analysis is crystal clear. Those 14 schools bring over $100 billion in impact to their states, and they travel, and they get engaged, and it gives us a bigger stage,” said Harroz, an Oklahoma City native. “I grew up here. I’m from Oklahoma. And you don’t make a move like this without thinking about not just your school, but what does it mean for the state? You look state leaders in the eyes, if and when this broke, and tell them this is a good thing for our state and not just the University of Oklahoma. Because if you can’t deliver that, then you’re not in a good position.”

Both universities were confident realignment was the move. Then begs the question, what did Sankey and the SEC see in the Oklahoma-Texas bundle? And when did he see it? Harroz phrased it best, “Don’t play poker with Greg Sankey.” It’s been nothing short of a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ’Em years in the making.

“October 2015, I presented an analysis to our presidents and chancellors about what might happen,” Sankey said. “Understand that between October 2015 and spring 2021 when this conversation became real, I’d had any number points of outreach from different institutions, yet we’ve added Oklahoma and Texas and that was focused on the spring of 2021. . . We had a lot change in our presidential roles. I think it was June 2, 2021, we had a meeting In Birmingham and shared that we had outreach and believed it was serious and united between the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas. I very candidly said to our presidents we can stop, if that’s your wish. We can go forward and talk in three years about the movement around us. The conversations, obviously, continued through June.”

Then came the Supreme Court decision, then the CFP expansion, expediting the process of realignment. Sankey told both universities, “We can't do anything until you decide your future in the Big 12.” Nor could he guarantee that the SEC’s member presidents would vote in favor of expansion. For both universities, leaving the Big 12 was a risk.

“Greg is a terrifying person to try and [read]. I tried everything I could to get him to commit the SEC to take us. And he wouldn’t do it,” Harroz said. “ He wasn’t going to get in the way of something, and we had to be the ones that made the overture.”

“When they informed [OU and Texas] the Big 12 of their direction, the next day they applied and from that Tuesday until the next Thursday, eight or nine days, an incredibly intense time as you can imagine, resulting in a unanimous vote, which I give all 14 members credit for achieving.”

Both universities accepted their invitations that Friday. Three years later, both have held true on a daring move.

By Tuesday’s dawn, the SEC Network stage sitting on the northwest side of Owen Field had been collapsed. The broadcast was over. Not one fan, donor, student and athlete that had lined every corner of the field to celebrate the historic move remained. SEC Day marked the conclusion of a successful decade-long game of tug-of-war but marked the beginning of a new challenge as frightening as it is hopeful.

“We’re very, very excited about what that will mean for our program moving forward and understanding some way, shape or form those things we saw 8-10 years ago are happening before our eyes. They’re complex. We still have to find the right way forward and we will, but now we’ve created a model for stability by partnering with the SEC and being a member for what we can do to help make the SEC itself stronger," Castiglione said.

“We talk about the University of Oklahoma with our purpose being ‘We change lives.’ Intercollegiate athletics is a huge part of that. It connects us. It binds us,” Harroz said. “[The SEC] puts us with the best. It advances our ability to change the lives of the students that go here, and it improves society in both big and small ways.”