Blatant Homerism: Reflections on Joe Castiglione's retirement at OU
If familiarity breeds contempt, that would account for what I expect to be a wide divergence in reactions to the news that Joe Castliglione is retiring after a 28-year run as athletic director at the University of Oklahoma.
To members of the media and audiences at large with an interest in minutiae of college sports, Castiglione is a bonafide legend. He has presided over one of the country’s most successful athletic departments for nearly three decades. As he watched OU’s trophy cases fill up, Castiglione built up vast influence and respect across the sports industrial complex for his acumen and leadership – there’s a reason why the Sooners athletic department became an incubator for executives at other schools during his tenure.
Check out the OU-affiliated message boards and social media accounts, on the other hand, and you’d get the impression there is much rejoicing in Soonerland. Some of the more vocal OU fanatics see Castiglione as the AD who has been in charge during a 25-year drought of national championships in football and the brains behind the program’s deterioration in the last three seasons.
Personally, I look at Castiglione’s time at OU as nothing short of miraculous. Considering the current state of the athletic department, you can understand why the disaster Castiglione inherited in 1998 has all but faded from collective memory. He took over a dysfunctional organization that was drowning in red ink as the result of mismanagement and the lingering fallout from ugly scandals. His reorganization and leadership made the department self-sustaining, growing into the 10th largest in the country by revenue in 2024.
When the subject of Castiglione moving on has come up lately, my thought has been that it would be hard to find a candidate who could have achieved as much as he did in the last 30 years. But the job of athletic director has evolved dramatically with the introduction of athlete compensation and the relaxation of controls over player movement. OU now has a year to figure out who should oversee the athletic department through what is proving to be a tumultuous period across the landscape of college sports.
For the Sooners, of course, the most immediate goal amid that tumult remains getting the football program in order. That process started in earnest earlier this year with the organizational restructuring to install Jim Nagy as general manager. Nagy is joining OU’s front office with former AT&T executive Randall Stephenson, who has a position akin to team president. Notably, OU president Joseph Harroz has tabbed Stephenson to head up the search for Castiglione’s replacement.
Given that OU has added Nagy and Stephenson to the mix, what kind of part will the next athletic director play in football? After all, you could interpret the reorganization of the program as an effort to create a special silo for football in the athletic department. That would change the parameters of the job significantly.
To be fair, Stephenson’s involvement in identifying OU’s successor to Castiglione suggests to me the next AD will still have a managerial role over the football program.
Even with Castiglione officially in his final year as AD, time marches on. The Sooners can’t just put the football reclamation project on hold. What does this mean in the here and now for OU head coach Brent Venables?
My advice would be to bet on Venables returning as head coach in 2026 for two reasons. First and foremost, OU could have a strong enough year to ease a lot of the concerns about his coaching prowess. Given the difficulty of the Sooners’ schedule, for instance, a record of 9-3 or better this year would qualify as major progress over his first three seasons as head coach. In that case, Venables would make a winning case for his survival.
Second, even if this year’s squad doesn’t beat expectations, Castiglione’s status would make hiring a quality candidate extremely difficult – people don’t generally want to take new jobs without knowing who is evaluating them. OU would probably look for every reason to keep Venables on board, in other words. It might take something like missing a bowl game to force a change.
Castiglione supplied Venables with ample support to prove himself going into his fourth season. In light of what we know about Castiglione’s future, spending big this offseason on new assistants and transfer players now seems like a deliberate call on the AD’s part. If Venables and the OU football team take off this year, it will make for a fitting close to Castiglione’s time with the Sooners.