Patty Gasso: NIL 'Could Be' to Blame for Oklahoma Still Missing the 'Little Things'

The legendary coach of Oklahoma's undefeated, No. 1-ranked softball team said there's not enough information yet, but she's taking steps like "blue-collar days" to address it.

Patty Gasso sees her team’s performance and potential through a different lens than the rest of the world.

A perfect record — 20-0 at the moment — doesn’t translate to a perfect team.

In fact, the Oklahoma softball coach currently rates her squad as a 6 out of 10.

Is it the unrealistic expectations of following a 56-4, national championship season with almost the whole roster back? Or is it something else?

Is it being a student-athlete in 2022? Is it Name, Image and Likeness?

“Yeah, I don't know,” Gasso said Wednesday. “I would say definitely could be. But because we don't know a lot of what is going on in their lives, with the business side of things, it could be. It could be taking their attention away a little bit.”

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Jocelyn Alo

Ty Russell, OU Athletics

John E. Hoover / SI Sooners

John E. Hoover / SI Sooners

Patty Gasso

Gasso said she’s seen things this year that she’s never had to deal with — at least before last July 1, when NIL legislation (or in the NCAA’s case, lack of legislation) was enacted.

“You've got 18- 19-year-olds having new responsibilities in order to make money,” Gasso said. “And that is, ‘I got to get on my phone, and I got to put out posts and I've got to do this or that.’ I don't know.”

By rule, Gasso isn’t allowed to “monitor” her athletes’ NIL endeavors. She’s supposed to remover herself from their NIL equation. Coaches can have team policies, but athletes can loosely skirt those if it’s an NIL opportunity.

Anything else and Gasso can be seen as restricting their ability to earn.

That’s the tough part for coaches who have made it literally their business and their careers to know every aspect of their players’ lives — athletic, academic, family, personal, financial, everything. Gasso said on a radio interview Tuesday, “this is my livelihood too.”

The way Gasso described it Wednesday, it sounds a lot like entitlement. Details — “little things,” she describes it — are sometimes slipping through the cracks now.

“For the most part,” she said, “I think when we're playing, they're focused. When I'm talking the little things, it’s, ‘Oh, I forgot. I forgot this,’ or — yesterday we had an example of a ball going over someone's head, hit the wall and it kind of trickled out and there just wasn't enough hustle at all for me. So I'm working with the infield and I stop what I'm doing to address it. And as long as I have to keep addressing lack of hustle or lack of focus or lack of priority, we're always going to remain a 6, and I have told them that plenty of times.”

Accountability, Gasso said, must naturally come from the upperclassmen. Especially the seniors. NIL or not, that part hasn’t really changed. She reiterates that it’s almost impossible quantify because it’s all so new — to everyone.

“Jocelyn Alo has some deals, I do know that, and she is working and she's playing hard and she is focused,” Gasso said. “So I can't say that (NIL is hurting her performance). Every player on our team is in that position. But I do think some are very young to be handling some of the things that are coming their way. I don't know that all of them have agents, or maybe, ‘My parents are making these decisions,’ so forth. It's hard to know. But I just think we just need a little more accountability and maturity.”

To bore down and extract those qualities, Gasso has implemented — reimplemented, actually — a new practice that she's done with teams in the past. When they've needed it, that is.

“What we have started to do now is create like, a blue-collar day, where after practice, they're all given job responsibilities. Last night, we’re raking leaves, were blowing out the dugouts, we’re down on our hands and knees picking up little pieces (of) trash from the indoor. They're picking up trash behind the grandstands. I mean, they are sweeping off the turf.

“So everybody's got jobs. Like, you get to learn how to take care of your house. So this is our house. You want to know what it means to keep your house in order. This stadium is going to be in order as long as we're here. So we've changed a few things and put them to work.”

It’s probably not the most popular thing she’s ever done, but for this team, there are new opportunities for team bonding, for building a sense of pride, taking care of the “little things.”

“I’m just trying to get them to understand about work,” Gasso said. “And stop leaving it to everyone else. I guess that's what I'm trying to teach with this. Like, 'I forgot my socks; I'm going to go into the equipment room and ask for a pair of socks.’ Everybody keeps bailing you out. And we're not going to do that anymore. So, we wait for our people here to clean our dugout — we're going to do it ourselves now.”

“The NIL, it's a helpless feeling as a coach. I'm not saying that the NIL is creating these things, because I don't know. I don't know what they're doing. And that's where every coach would tell you, your hands are tied. Because like, again, these are 18- and 19-year-olds making decisions that I don't even know about until someone might tell me by happenstance.

“Just trying to continue to create like, this blue-collar effort. And just — girls to women. We still have too much ‘girl’ mentality we need to change.”