Former Oklahoma Sooners head coach Bob Stoops and former OU assistant Cale Gundy told a great story this week about Tennessee Vols head coach Josh Heupel's incredible competitiveness.
Stoops and Heupel, of course, have a long and complicated history together.
Heupel was the quarterback of Oklahoma's 2000 national championship team -- Stoops' only championship as a head coach -- before serving as an assistant at OU under Stoops from 2006 to 2014.
Stoops fired Heupel after the 2014 season and the two supposedly haven't had a relationship since.
The former Oklahoma head coach, however, still speaks fondly of Heupel, as he did this week while telling a story about Heupel that was also told earlier this year by former Sooners tight end Josh Norman.
The story is about the time Heupel, ahead of the 2000 season, stood in front of the entire Oklahoma team and went down the schedule, team by team, and pointed out why the Sooners could go undefeated (which they would eventually do).
Stoops and Gundy, who was the running backs coach on the 2000 Sooners team, told the story this week on "Conversations with Coach".
"He told everybody 'we're going to win the national championship'," said Gundy.
"I can remember him going game by game," added Stoops. "He knew the schedule. 'Why can't we beat them?' and then 'why can't we beat them?'. And then at the end he kept saying why not us?"
"As a staff, we always did a good job of intentionally putting in front of our players and our staff the championship teams, the great hall of fame players," continued Stoops. "And [we] kept saying 'this is what we are to be, this is who Oklahoma is and we're going to do everything we can to be this.' And sure enough, Josh, at the end, after going through every game, said 'why not us?'. And those guys took an attitude of 'it's going to be us'."
"It was the perfect recipe," added Gundy. "It was the right chemistry. And it was across the board with the players, our coaches, the administration. Everybody in our office. Everybody had one goal. But I just keep going back to Josh Heupel and those meetings and him saying 'why not us?'. I think it just really hit everybody in the face, like, why not us? We can do this."
It obviously takes an entire team and coaching staff to win a championship. But I think it's fair to say that if you remove Josh Heupel from the 2000 Oklahoma roster, the Sooners don't end the season as national champions.
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