Shake Tiller
New Member
NORMAN, Okla. — College football fans tend to prefer that university presidents be seen, not heard. The University of Oklahoma’s president, David L. Boren, has been a flagrant violator of that precept.
He urged a 2006 loss to Oregon be expunged after the Sooners bore the brunt of poor officiating. He pledged in 2011, at the height of conference realignment, that Oklahoma would not be a “wallflower,” leaving open the possibility that it might depart the Big 12 Conference. And in 2015, he gave the league a public diagnosis of “psychologically disadvantaged” after none of its teams qualified for the first College Football Playoff.
These are the kinds of quotations that attract the wrong kind of attention in the college football fishbowl; one journalist compared Boren to the former Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table.
But Boren, who announced in September that he would retire next year after nearly a quarter-century as Oklahoma’s president, was not a typical university chief executive: neither a tweedy academic (though he was a Rhodes scholar) nor a professional administrator (though on his watch Oklahoma has climbed the annual U.S. News and World Report national rankings).
That first championship game will be played Saturday at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex., between No. 10 Texas Christian (10-2) and No. 2 Oklahoma (11-1), for whom a win will cement a spot in this season’s playoff but a loss will most likely end any hope of qualifying. However, since the game is a rematch of the conference’s two best teams — unlike most other leagues’ title games, which feature the winners of two divisions — it could backfire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/...on=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below
He urged a 2006 loss to Oregon be expunged after the Sooners bore the brunt of poor officiating. He pledged in 2011, at the height of conference realignment, that Oklahoma would not be a “wallflower,” leaving open the possibility that it might depart the Big 12 Conference. And in 2015, he gave the league a public diagnosis of “psychologically disadvantaged” after none of its teams qualified for the first College Football Playoff.
These are the kinds of quotations that attract the wrong kind of attention in the college football fishbowl; one journalist compared Boren to the former Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table.
But Boren, who announced in September that he would retire next year after nearly a quarter-century as Oklahoma’s president, was not a typical university chief executive: neither a tweedy academic (though he was a Rhodes scholar) nor a professional administrator (though on his watch Oklahoma has climbed the annual U.S. News and World Report national rankings).
That first championship game will be played Saturday at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex., between No. 10 Texas Christian (10-2) and No. 2 Oklahoma (11-1), for whom a win will cement a spot in this season’s playoff but a loss will most likely end any hope of qualifying. However, since the game is a rematch of the conference’s two best teams — unlike most other leagues’ title games, which feature the winners of two divisions — it could backfire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/...on=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below