When he said the SEC isn't all that.
Some things of reference:
The Oklahoma coach took another shot at the SEC on Wednesday night, questioning the league's reputation for quality defenses just months after calling its mystique "propaganda."
SEC teams have had difficulty slowing down the stellar quarterbacks in their league this season, including Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel, Georgia's Aaron Murray and LSU's Zach Mettenberger.
Some of his comments
"Just a few years ago, we had all the quarterbacks," Stoops said in a small session with beat reporters, according to The Oklahoman. "And now, all of a sudden, we can play a little better defense and some other people can't play defense.
"Funny how people can't play defense when they have pro-style quarterbacks over there, which we've had. They're all playing in the NFL right now."
Meanwhile, former Big 12 stars such Robert Griffin III, Sam Bradford, Landry Jones, Brandon Weeden and Ryan Tannehill currently are playing in the NFL after terrorizing the conference's defenses with their arms in years past.
Stoops has consistently pointed to Texas A&M, which left the Big 12 for the SEC prior to the 2012 season, then put up stellar offensive numbers in the SEC, as an example of the type of offense his Sooners had to face regularly in Big 12 play.
I still don't know how (Texas) A&M was third in the country in total offense and scoring offense playing all those SEC defenses. I have no idea how that happened," Stoops said. "Oh, they got a quarterback. That's right."
Now, here are his previous challenges to the perceived sec supremacy that got some of the sec blowhards in a tussy:
It depends on who you want to listen to, Stoops said. Listen, theyve had the best team in college football, meaning theyve won the national championship. That doesnt mean everything else is always the best.
So youre listening to a lot of propaganda that gets fed out to you, he said. Youre more than smart enough to figure it out. Again, you can look at the top two, three, four, five, six teams, and you can look at the bottom six, seven, eight, whatever they are. How well are they all doing?
Whatd we (the Big 12) have, eight of 10 teams in bowl games this year? Again, you figure it all out.
To Stoops credit, he has a point. The Big 12 has been especially deep the last couple of years. Conversely, parity wasnt exactly present in the SEC last season. No SEC team who finished in the bottom seven of the final conference standings beat a team who finished in the top seven of the league.
John Hoover explains in his aforementioned column from the Tulsa World, its much the same way: 46 of the 63 came from the top half of the league. The other seven schools produced just 17 draft picks.
So, there's merit to that. Nobody denies the upper teams of the sec are dominant, but there's a perception that this extends to all the teams, including the bottom feeders ala arkansas and kentucky. As if the mystique of the sec logo had some sort of magical powers of making any wearers better. That's probably more the espn marriage to the league regurgitating their sec hype to the rest of the country because they signed a massive contract with them and it benefits them, and not any fault of any programs. But that's how some people see it.
