The evolution of our OU fan website
A while back we made use of this thing called the internet to report back to family and friends about our trip to an Oklahoma football bowl game. Posting our fun on the internet was easier than sending a bunch of emails.
That evolved into an annual thing, and then, during football season, a weekly thing. And as things are want to do, they become things that get out of hand. And before long we put a name to it and called it Soonerguys.com.
As the Sooners begin their new adventure into the SEC, this year also marks the 26th year of our website. (And yes, in the beginning it was on AOL. And no, I do not still have a flip phone.)
Today we also have a Facebook page, soonerguys.com, and we are on Twitter, @soonerguys (where the rants can really flow during OU football broadcasts — which reminds me I need to delete some of the improvident posts).
My dear late law partner (and devout Sooner) Gary Chubbuck would introduce me to his friends and other lawyers not as his business associate but rather the guy who runs Soonerguys. After all, anyone can try a lawsuit, but it takes something extra to share your fanaticism on the internet to be archived for posterity on some NSA server.
(Gary once wrote a column for the site providing an analysis of play calling from an engineering perspective. I’m not sure I understood it, but it got a lot of clicks).
One year grandson Hunter’s observations on Soonerguys was featured in a News9 story about an upcoming Red River Rivalry game. (A few years later Hunter got a sound blurb on a Bob Stoops Show video, but I think that time the female reporter just thought he was cute).
Most of the time the site has been used to document selfies of me and my kids in the stands. During some years it was the forum to lament losses in post season games with the intention never to write about OU football again — a promise never kept, since each year about this time it starts anew (my fee to renew the URL comes due each September).
Hope springs eternal.
The website isn’t the best one to get news on the Sooners. There are a whole lot better ones for that from people who know what they are talking about.
Family and friends make this happen
But enjoying college football for my family has been less about football and more about family since I went to my first OU football game when I was in diapers (or so, my mom tells me).
Since the website began, we’ve added participants. Friends contribute columns, including my good buddy David Cricklin, whose weekly writings say what most of us are thinking but are afraid to be public about it (he’s not, which is why Dave is a god).
Our friend Michael Carrier brings a Hunter S. Thompson vibe to the website like only he can do. Oftentimes we have to put him back in a home when he’s done so that we may recover.
Ol’ pal Tommy Cummings brings his career journalism expertise to the site on occasion. Tommy was born in a crimson crib and appropriately indoctrinated as a Sooner by his dad (as we all were) and know writes about OU things from his north Texas perspective. (Note, this is not across enemy lines — the Sooners have occupied the DFW market since Daryl Royal was OU’s quarterback in the 1950s.)
Each week a select group of “pickers” prognosticate about key upcoming college football games. That group has varied from a highs school freshman to a NASA rocket scientist in Houston. Really.
Over the years the pictures showing up on the site have been tailgate friends. And most importantly, family. That may become more colorful with participants from the South.
Our website motto has always been: “We have turned our passion for Oklahoma football into a family affair, since 1999.”
And we have added some family members recently, including the grinning face of young Arlo.
Some day when he is old and gray he will be able to Google himself flashing that infectious grin. And see just how nutty his grandpa was in his obsession with Oklahoma football.
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