How Randall Stephenson Suddenly Became Oklahoma's Big Man on Campus

It hasn’t taken much for Sooner Nation to discover just how influential Randall Stephenson is going to be on the football program and the athletic department at the University of Oklahoma in general.

Just a complete overhaul of Sooner football’s personnel, scouting and talent evaluation and the retirement of their venerated athletic director.

Stephenson, 65, is a retired former CEO at AT&T. An Oklahoma City native with a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and a master’s from OU. Stephenson is listed as a current member of the Board of Directors for Walmart, and previously served on the policy board for the PGA Tour. From 2016-18 he was National President of the Boy Scouts of America.

He’s a private citizen who isn’t technically on the OU payroll — his title of “chair of football and special adviser to the president and the director of athletics” at Oklahoma is strictly a non-paying, volunteer position.

But make no mistake, Stephenson obviously wields enormous authority on the OU campus.

As OU’s athletic department undergoes a fundamental shift with this week’s blockbuster news that Hall of Fame AD Joe Castiglione will be retiring soon, Stephenson’s role — largely in the background since his addition last December — now takes center stage in Norman.

“Joe and I reached out and brought in Randall back in October,” OU president Joe Harroz said Tuesday, “because we recognized how much change there was (in collegiate athletics), and we knew we needed somebody that loved the university, that had truly world class talent at recognizing disruptive change and adapting to it. In his 13 years as CEO of AT&T, that's what he lived in, was disruptive change.”

Stephenson will “lead the search” to find Castiglione’s replacement — “Joe C 2.0,” Harroz joked — with the help of a “tight” committee and Castiglione himself.

Stephenson’s business acumen and corporate sense might mean OU’s next AD comes from outside the world of college athletics.

Or maybe not.

Among the virtues Harroz and Castiglione extolled on Tuesday, they both kept coming back to vision — not necessarily to see the future of college sports, but to anticipate it, and to be ready to adapt when the inevitable sea change does arrive. 

“When we look back at at Sooner athletics history, one of the most important moves strategically that we will see was when Joe Castiglione came to me, when I came into this job six years ago, and said, ‘We have got to make a move, either to the SEC or the Big Ten,’ then laid out the case for the move to the SEC,” Harroz said. “And with that counsel and direction, we and Texas became first movers, and that is the reason, the most recent example of the kind of foresight and vision you need as an athletic director to navigate a rapid disruption. 

“And so the athletic director we're looking for next is someone that can identify the landscape and act. I think a lot of people could have identified it and had identified it before Oklahoma and Texas made their move. But Joe identified it and said, ‘We got to move,’ and then, that took place. So we look at the attributes that we need for the next athletic director. It's someone that has both the vision, an understanding of the landscape and the ability to act, to move, and this, the changes, are going to continue to come.”

“First,” Castiglione added, “recognizing the moment that change is going to occur and doing your best to be prepared for it. One of the most challenging parts of the period that we're in is there's never been a moment like it — not only in college athletics; I think you could look across various industries. They all go through some moment of disruption and change, and the ones that see the future, that adapt, pivot, be flexible, those are the ones that navigate it and not only survive, but become stronger when they get on the other side.”

Football coach Brent Venables promoted former OU All-American Curtis Lofton as the program’s first general manager just last year. But with recruits now coming on their official visits with professional agents as well as their moms and dads, Stephenson saw the GM role at OU as something much bigger. 

“Developing a dynamic model,” Castiglione said in an email last year, “that will allow OU football to become a national gold standard around talent acquisition, portal management and player development."

Stephenson’s vision for OU’s new football personnel department was that of an NFL franchise, where the whole operation is run by a GM but also isolates different elements like scouting and an NIL/revenue sharing structure (a salary cap) and contract negotiations.

“Just looking at short term and long term, there's a capology that goes into this that's a very complicated space,” Venables said in March when he introduced Nagy. “You've had to kind of figure it out year by year since it really started. … We don't know what the rules are, what the limitations are and how things are going to change. And so you've done the best that you could under the circumstances these last few years. 

“So we're all looking forward to that structure and the boundaries and the guardrails that will be in place through that structure to help you be successful, and I just appreciate the administration for carefully and thoughtfully putting together this model through a lot of hard work and research led by both Randall and Joe both.”

“We're going to have more of a pro model,” Nagy said. “ … I want to bring in proven guys that have seen NFL-quality players. That’s what we’re looking to add. So bringing those guys down from the NFL will be important, especially in the portal, because that’s where they’ve been really focused. And so then we have to beef up the department with more guys that have been on the college side.”

It’s that kind of forward thinking — proactive instead of reactive — that OU’s next athletic director must have so the Sooners can keep up with college football’s vanguard and compete for championships in the SEC.

In that vein, Stephenson suddenly is the man of the hour on the Oklahoma campus. His decisions in the coming weeks and months could ultimately shape OU athletics for a generation or beyond.

“He's been involved with the PGA of America. He's done massive media deals. He understands the media landscape,” Harroz said. “And so we brought him in to give us a hand. I think you saw a product of that, of he and Joe working together with bringing in and restructuring, putting in the GM operation, putting Jim Nagy in there, the talent he attracted — and that putting us in first, as I understand it, in the country, a position of a true pro GM front office. 

“I’ve got every confidence in Randall and the team around him. Again, it's a search committee, and Randall’s expertise, as I said before, coupled with advice from Joe and others on that committee. 

“And we’ll be announcing that committee hopefully relatively soon, what that committee looks like — I think you'll see from the composition of it, once it's put together, that we've got a committee that can provide both insights into where the landscape is going, also an understanding of our history and tradition, and in coupling those together to get the right person to be here. 

“So it's going to take a little time, but I think we'll have that right team being led by Randall, that moves us forward.”