The Football Brainiacs

The Portal Reload

Oklahoma’s first transfer window felt like a month-long sprint squeezed into a little over two weeks, with 28 Sooners exiting and 15 new additions coming in as of mid-January, leaving the roster at roughly a net minus 13 scholarships and some targeted spots still to fill. The staff has clearly prioritized the front seven, tight end and veterans, with needs still circled at linebacker, defensive end or tackle, and safety as they hunt a few more pieces to round out the 2025 roster.​

The tight end room, once a glaring weakness, has become the most obvious example of that intentional overhaul. Tight end was the Sooners’ most depleted position heading into this portal cycle after they lost their top four scholarship tight ends, and the staff responded by landing veteran transfers Hayden Hansen from Florida and Rocky Beers from Colorado State, both multi-year producers at the FBS level. Hansen, a 6-foot-8, 260-plus pounder from Weatherford, Texas, started 30-plus games for the Gators and logged more than 50 career catches and multiple touchdowns, giving OU a proven in-line blocker and red zone target. Beers, who posted steady receiving production at Colorado State and whose sister Raegan is already a star for Oklahoma women’s basketball, arrives as another experienced, physical option who fits the “high floor, veteran” mold the staff clearly sought.​​

Tight Ends and Jason Witten

The hire of Jason Witten as tight ends coach is the kind of move that makes both football sense and recruiting sense in a way that should resonate for years, not just this cycle. Since retiring from the NFL after the 2020 season, Witten has been the head coach at Liberty Christian in Argyle, Texas, where he went 46–15 and won back-to-back TAPPS state championships in 2023 and 2024, plus a return trip to the title game in 2025.​​

That résumé matters when you talk about turning the tight end room into “program guys.” Witten played 17 NFL seasons, made multiple Pro Bowls and All-Pro teams, and owns the league’s tight end record for games played, which means there is zero learning curve when it comes to professionalism and technique at that position. He’s also deeply plugged into the DFW high school network after years at Liberty Christian, and Texas coaches are going to light up his phone with under-the-radar tight ends and other prospects—exactly how under-recruited quarterback John Mateer was first surfaced through Eric Morris’ DFW connections before landing at Washington State.​​

The expectation is clear:

“We did exactly what we should have done. Veteran high floor players… You know exactly what you’re getting.”​ – Rob

The vision is to build the tight end room like Bill Bedenbaugh’s offensive line room—grown men, high-effort “program dudes” who block their tails off, stay multiple years, and make life miserable for SEC safeties who don’t want any part of 250-plus pound bodies in space. Watching CFB playoffs only reinforces the point: tight ends are chain-movers, quarterback best friends, and matchup problems, and the Sooners’ staff clearly wants that to be true in Norman again.​

Run Game, O-Line, and the Mateer Equation

Here’s the thing: fixing tight end is only one piece of a much bigger run-game problem. Oklahoma finished 118th nationally in rushing yards per play last season, out of 130 FBS teams, a staggering number for a program that has historically lived on offensive balance. 

Brad hammers the point that this wasn’t just about tight ends—there were issues with musical-chairs offensive line combinations, run-game structure, and John Mateer’s RPO decisions that all contributed to a ground attack that was essentially non-threatening in key spots.​

The expectation now is incremental but meaningful progress. Getting back to a top-35 or top-40 rushing offense—roughly where 2025 playoff teams Texas A&M (around 30s nationally) and Texas Tech (around 40s) lived—would be a huge step forward and enough to force defenses to respect the run in the fourth quarter. The staff’s portal approach backs that up: they targeted run-game “productivity types” at tight end, on the offensive line, and at running back, betting that if the blocking surfaces are better and receivers stress safeties vertically, lanes will open and the backs will look a whole lot more explosive.​​​

There is also a subtle staff-structure layer here. Rob  float the idea of adding “run game coordinator” back to Bill Bedenbaugh’s title when the Board of Regents handles salary bumps, giving him more formal say over run-game design and, ideally,  though may not be possible, more influence over running back usage that has at times felt like a pure rotation under DeMarco Murray. With a new tight ends coach who will spend most of practice attached to Bedenbaugh, an expanded run-game title would fit the way the room will function day-to-day and could tighten the cohesion between OL, TEs, and the backfield.​

Retention, NIL, and the “Program Guy” Era

For all the portal churn nationally, Oklahoma has quietly built a strong retention track record, and the returns this offseason—Kip Lewis, star wideout Isiah Sategna, John Mateer, and young safety Peyton Bowen all coming back—reinforced that perception. Lewis already has a full career’s worth of high-level tape and could have plausibly jumped to the NFL, and Bowen flashed “Sunday player” traits that would have made at least a mid-round bet understandable, yet both chose to trust their position coaches and chase an even higher ceiling in Norman.​

That trust is where NIL and development intersect. The podcast’s argument is blunt: NIL absolutely matters, but if players feel themselves get better every year and see a realistic path from “good college starter” to “first-round contract with a fifth-year option,” walking away from another season of growth is a much harder decision. The staff’s “retention program” is clearly working better than at many peers, even if no one outside knows the exact formula of culture, locker room, and financial support that’s making it happen.​

Zooming out to the national picture, the hosts describe the NIL market as both “insanely” inflated at the top and still structurally underpaying players relative to their real value, because schools and collectives are desperate to avoid opening their books and negotiating in a truly open market. They point to reports of multi-million-dollar figures for top transfers like Quarterback Darian Mensah flipping from a return to Duke to a likely Miami landing spot as evidence of a system that is, functionally, pay-for-play already.​​

Their proposed fix is a hybrid of NFL and NBA models:

• Unionization and a collective bargaining agreement with players, even under a non-employee framework, to set real rules and end the “Wild West.”​
• Some form of soft cap plus luxury tax, where rosters that spend far beyond a baseline cap face stiff financial penalties or redistributions, pushing more money toward the broad middle of the roster instead of just the top 1%.​

Until players have a formal seat at the table and a negotiated share of TV revenue in writing, no third-party oversight group is going to meaningfully stop pay-for-play deals; the supply (players’ name, image, and likeness) belongs to the athletes, and only they can agree to cap it.​

A Wild CFP: Indiana vs. Miami

All of this portal and NIL chaos has produced a national title matchup hardly anyone would have predicted: Indiana vs. Miami in the College Football Playoff Championship, with the Hoosiers undefeated and built around a grown-man offensive line, and the Hurricanes riding a brutally physical front and an efficient, ball-control offense.​​

Indiana’s rise has been fueled by elite evaluation and retention, especially along the offensive line, where their starting five is loaded with fifth-, sixth-, and even seventh-year players who are technically sound and rarely make mistakes. On the other side, Miami leans on quarterback Carson Beck, who transferred in after four seasons at Georgia and has completed over 73 percent of his passes for more than 3,500 yards with a positive TD-INT ratio, plus a punishing rushing attack headlined by 1,000-yard back Mark Fletcher and explosive freshman receiver Malachi Toney, who already has nearly 100 catches and over 1,000 yards.​​

The matchup stakes are simple: if Miami cannot dent Indiana’s run game and force Fernando Mendoza into obvious passing downs, the Hoosiers’ balance and clean execution will grind them down, especially with a pro-caliber line that can stay on schedule. If Beck has one of those nights where the ball security cracks—something he has mostly avoided in the CFP run but has shown at earlier times in his career. Indiana’s defense will punish every mistake and turn short fields into enough points to win what projects as a physical, lower-scoring game.​​

The most surreal part: Indiana fans have turned this into something close to a neutral-site home game, traveling in massive numbers for both the semifinal and the title game and painting huge swaths of the stands red in venues that have nothing to do with Bloomington. For Oklahoma fans watching from afar, it is a reminder and a roadmap—evaluate at an elite level, retain your grown men, build brutally competent trenches, and navigate the portal and NIL storm without losing your developmental core, and you can be playing for everything in January.

For Oklahoma, the lesson from this championship game is both validation and challenge. The Sooners’ staff has done the dirty work: rebuilding the tight end room from rubble, securing veteran transfers who fit the “program guy” profile, and retaining core pieces like Kip Lewis, Isiah Sategna, Peyton Bowen, and John Mateer when the portal could have scattered them to the winds. The blueprint is clear: evaluate ruthlessly, develop relentlessly, and trust that grown men who get better every year will choose to stay and build something. If the Sooners finish this offseason cycle strong and lean into developmental vision, there’s no reason the Sooners can’t earn its way into the College Football Championship sooner than later.