The Football Brainiacs

The Boys are Back!

Rob and Brads latest!

The season is over, but the real drama is just getting started. In Norman, the transfer window has turned into a two week sprint where every entry and every commitment feels like it tilts the future of Oklahoma football. The portal is not a subplot anymore. It is the main stage, a live fire exercise where depth charts can evaporate overnight and a single late decision from a tackle or an edge rusher can change how the entire SEC run looks a year from now. The urgency is not abstract. When you wake up and it feels like a quarter of the roster just left, chaos is not a talking point. It is the air everyone around this program is breathing.

Portal Chaos is exactly what the title promises. Brad and Rob spend an hour living inside Oklahoma’s transfer window, trying to separate panic from reality while building a path to a 2026 roster that still looks like Oklahoma football.​

The show opens with a familiar mix of bravado and nerves. “The season is over, but the Portal Season Madness has begun,” Brad says, calling it “free agency period” and admitting this two week window “is going to determine so much about our season next year.” He jokes that this is when fan anxiety “hits all time high” because it feels like “a quarter of our roster just left overnight.”​

From there they dive into the numbers. Twenty one Sooners have hit the portal. Fourteen are on offense and seven on defense, a ratio that does not surprise them as much as the positions involved. Six offensive linemen are gone, which Brad says has everybody “shaking their head a little bit,” not because backups left but because several of those linemen played real snaps in 2024.​

The tone shifts when they get to right tackle Logan Howland. “Tackles do not grow on trees,” Brad says, clearly stunned that a long, athletic tackle with a wide open path to start in the SEC chose to jump. He thought Howland would be the favorite for the starting right tackle job, or at worst a swing tackle, and calls this one “a sting” that is hard to explain.​

Depth, not just star power, becomes the theme. Rotational defensive lineman Markus Strong is the archetype of the portal era in their eyes: a good player who can “go plug and play” at a place like Oklahoma State or North Texas and finally start. Retaining players like that, they argue, is the difference between a good roster and a great one once injuries hit in November.​

That sets up their favorite comparison of the night. Rob points to Indiana as the case study for modern roster building. The Hoosiers went 11 and 2, kept almost everyone, sent only a fifth rounder and a seventh rounder to the draft, and then “hand picked guys” from the portal to layer on top. “They are the most experienced football team in the country,” he says, and their veteran, mistake free style is exactly what he wants Oklahoma to become.​

The word that keeps coming up is retain. “Retain, retain, retain is the theme of every single offseason,” Brad says. Rob connects that to NIL and culture, arguing that if a player is already making five or six hundred thousand dollars, an extra one hundred thousand from a poaching school is where culture should win. In a Brandon Hall or Todd Bates room, the pitch is simple: sacrifice a little short term money now for a shot at “a four year contract making three million a year” in the league.​

They also admit that retention has not been good enough everywhere. The wide receiver room gets the harshest critique. Brad is “not too happy with the wide receiver recruiting” and especially the usage, frustrated that young receivers never got on the field even though everyone knew several top targets were gone after the season. He points to Zion Kearney, the “crown jewel” from the Sooner’s Texas High School recruiting who finished with “like two catches,” and Elijah Thomas, a 3A Oklahoma product who lived on the offseason hype train but rarely saw meaningful snaps.​

To underline the point, they compare it to Brandon Hall’s safety room. Hall had two studs in Robert Spears Jennings and Peyton Bowen and still found snaps for Jaydan Hardy and Michael Boganowski, effectively building his next generation in real time. On defense there are fewer snaps to go around, yet Hall still managed to build an “heir apparent” pipeline. At receiver, where snaps are plentiful, that never really happened.​

The defensive backfield losses are quieter but just as worrying. Jordan, Gentry and Dolby were all part of a four corner rotation and even saw time at Cheetah. Losing all three, plus Strong inside, produces what Brad calls a “pretty bare looking depth chart” once you mark off graduates in blue and portal departures in purple. At one point Rob notes they are down to nine players on the offensive two deep and eight on the defensive two deep.​

So what comes next. Brad lays it out in blunt terms. “We need ten to twelve instant impact guys,” he says. His back of the envelope math calls for four offensive linemen, two receivers, a defensive tackle, a defensive end, a linebacker, a Cheetah and a couple of secondary pieces. It is not just about replacing twenty departures but upgrading the roster, because by their count “seven, eight guys” who left actually moved the needle.​

In the middle of all that, the live show gets a bit of good news. They learn that tight end Hayden Hanson has committed from Florida, and the energy changes immediately. The room has been “nonexistent from a pure tight end perspective,” Brad says, so landing one of the better tight ends in the portal without even having a tight ends coach is, in his words, proof that “they threw some money” at the position.​

For both hosts, Hansen is an automatic starter. “You are Hayden Hansen, tight end one, done,” Brad jokes. Rob notes that new offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle loves using tight ends and expects Hansen to post career numbers as a big, quarterback friendly target in a spread system standing six foot eight. They also mention six foot four, 250 pound Trynae Washington as another intriguing piece and make it clear they prefer veteran power five transfers to smaller school flyers when the goal is championships.​

Quarterback depth sparks a philosophical aside. After losing Mike Hawkins, Rob does not want a veteran portal backup. If the starter goes down, he says, “your season is over” anyway, so better to let freshman Bowe Bentley “get every snap that Matier does not” for the future. Brad agrees that four scholarship quarterbacks on campus is enough and that Witt Newbauer can grow into real competition with time in Arbuckle’s system.​

Along the offensive line, there is far less patience. Brad describes the current group as “uber thin” and insist Oklahoma needs an experienced center and at least one tackle or guard who has already survived the Big Ten or SEC. Rob wants EPL at guard paired with a violent center, “Nwaiwu” type, then either plays Fodje at right tackle or right guard depending on who they land. This is not the place, he says, to roll the dice on another “FCS flyer” style experiment.​

On defense, the two biggest portal needs are clear. “Alpha pass rusher, alpha receiver,” Rob says when asked for his top concerns. He questions whether Isaiah Sategna can truly be a number one when “five to six of his plays last year accounted for forty percent of his production,” and he sees no proven alpha wideout behind him. On the other side of the ball, he thinks the defense cannot sustain its level over a full SEC season without a true game changing edge, someone who can do what Our Mason Thomas did when he “single handedly would destroy an offense in the fourth quarter.”​

Cheetah is the other hinge point. Kendal Daniels is the template, a player who “did everything” and sometimes played four different roles in a single drive, from big half field safety to slot coverage to off-ball linebacker. They want the next Cheetah to be a two year guy, a versatile piece who can be a tackling machine in year one and a full Swiss Army knife in year two once he masters Brent Venables’ menu.​

Linebacker urgency depends on Kip Lewis. If Kip returns alongside Peyton Bowen, they can live with one big portal addition. If he heads to the league, Rob thinks Oklahoma has to “go find three guys,” ideally a Danny Stutsman type tackling machine like Colorado State’s Owen Long plus a younger player who can bridge the room into 2027.​

They close by acknowledging how compressed this portal cycle has become. There is no spring window to patch mistakes. Brad calls it “a short free agency” in which Oklahoma has “two weeks to basically define your roster,” and every choice, from how much NIL goes to a splash receiver to whether they settle for another Marvin Jones type at edge, will be judged eight months from now. As he puts it, “you cannot sit on your hands anymore,” not if the standard is still the palace on the prairie and not just a nice bowl trip

When the window finally slams shut, there will not be much time to catch a breath. Whatever roster Oklahoma has built out of this chaos is the one it will ride into a new season and a new league reality, for better or worse. The portal is ruthless that way. There is no spring safety net anymore, no quiet second chance to fix what you missed in January. The staff either leans into the urgency and turns this noise into a tougher, deeper team, or it spends next fall living with the holes it could not or would not fill. In an era where one bad week in the portal can undo an entire recruiting class, surviving the chaos is no longer enough. The job now is to master it.​

Thank you for reading!

Boomer!