Former Ada High School All-Stater and University of Oklahoma national champion Dan Cody got the chance to speak to current OU football players last week prior to their first official fall practice of the 2024 season.
Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables invited Cody and two other former OU greats, Dusty Dvorcek and Teddy Lehman, to speak with his team as part of his efforts to keep Sooner alumni involved in the program.
Cody said he was honored to have the opportunity to come back to campus and talk to current OU football players. It was an amazing day. The kids were so receptive. They were so nice and seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say, he said. The way the alumni connect with these kids is really special. And I’m telling you right now, it did a lot more for me than it did for them.
Vibe and depth
It had been two years since Cody had had the chance to visit the Sooners as a team and he noticed something had changed.
That was the first time I had been there in a long time. When I compare the atmosphere then to last week, it was a big difference, he said. I can't put my finger on it, but when you walk into the room, you see a group of guests who are much more comfortable with each other. There was an air of confidence among the guests.
Before the speeches began, Cody had a chance to speak with Venables, and the depth came up.
He said that in the old days, you had about 90 guys on your team that could play. Now, if you have 90 guys on your team that can play, all the guys that can't play go somewhere else, he said. That's why it's so hard to have a lot of depth.
Cody played at OU for five years, from 2000 to 2004, where he was part of the Sooners' national championship team.
When I was at OU, that was something we always had in depth. My senior year, as a group, the defensive ends had almost 30 sacks between four guys, he recalled.
According to Cody, the current team as a whole looks a lot more athletic than the last time he was there.
I was also looking at a much higher caliber athlete than I saw two years ago. There's no doubt about that, he said.
Topics of conversation
Cody had three main talking points during his speech Instruction, Inspiration and Accountability. He emphasized that it is not about how you start, but how you end the season, not about every game.
You win a game by finishing it better than you started it. The game tape tells the story, not the score, he told the group.
Cody also told the Sooners, who are heading to the SEC for the first time this year, that third-down plays are by far the most important plays of the game.
The game is about third down. It's always been that way. On defense, you want to force third downs and get off the field. On offense, it's about converting them and holding the ball. That's how you play a game, he said.
Cody said that there are a lot of things during a game these days that can cause players to lose focus.
There are all these distractions. Between quarters, everybody lights up like it's a Jimmy Buffet concert. When you shoot a field goal, the lights flash on and off three times. They hold up pictures of trombones and elephants and license plates on the sidelines, he said.
Fire and brimstone
When he started talking about accountability, he shared a personal story about his last season with the team.
The Sooners were 8-0 and still harboring national championship aspirations, locked in a battle with Texas A&M in College Station. OU entered the game ranked No. 2 and the Aggies were ranked No. 22.
OU trailed 21-7 early in the game, trailed 28-14 at halftime, and the game was tied 35-35 with just over 10 minutes left. The Sooners won 42-35.
It was my best college game ever. We were tied at the end of the fourth quarter with a national title on the line, and we ended up winning. Reggie McNeal was the quarterback (for A&M) and I took him out with a rib shot in the second quarter. They had to play the rest of the game with their backup quarterback, Cody said. It was a game where I passed out between quarters and egged the guys on.
That weekend a newspaper article reported that Cody had been pretending to kill snakes.
That was the coolest sentence I ever heard in my life. I'll never forget it, he said.
Cody said after the game that coach Bob Stoops told all the seniors who practiced at 6 a.m. that they could come in at 1 p.m. that week.
That's exactly what Cody did. Jerry Schmidt, the longtime OU Director of Sports Enhancement, was not impressed.
So the next week I came in that afternoon, hadn’t done anything all day, and Schmidty was standing there waiting for me. I was all confused, but I could see that there was going to be a problem, Cody said. He pulled me aside and said, let me ask you something. You’ve been here five years. You just played the game of your life. And now you’re going to change what you’re doing? He was right. It took a while for that to really sink in. On the surface, of course, I knew what he meant. But it took years for me to realize how lucky I was that this man pulled me aside and told me that.
That story led Cody to criticize the current Sooners.
I was breathing fire now. I said, What you're doing right now is not enough. We've got LSU, Georgia and Bama coming up. Up until that point it was instructional. Now I'm just going to go. Now I'm pumped up, he said. We're always going to need more. It's never going to be enough if you want to get better.
Parting words
At the end of Cody's speech, he told the players to cherish the bonds they will build in Norman, Oklahoma.
These coaches are not going to work you to the top. They're not going to coach you to the top. They're going to love you to the top. We all love OU more than we hate any of these bozos on our schedule, he said. You guys have something in this room that no one else in this room has and that's each other. And then I just dropped the mic.
