Sooner: The Making of a Football Coach - Lincoln Riley's Rise from West Texas to the University of Oklahoma

The remarkable rise of Lincoln Riley, America’s youngest college football head coach and the “quarterback whisperer” of the University of Oklahoma In 2017 the University of Oklahoma hired Lincoln Riley as its head football coach, making him the youngest head coach in the top tier of college football. Only thirty-three years old, he had been entrusted with one of the sport’s crown jewels. And in his first three seasons at Oklahoma, his teams reached the national semifinals each year, and two of his quarterbacks won the Heisman Trophy and were the #1 overall pick in the NFL draft. In Sooner, Brandon Sneed traces Lincoln Riley’s journey, in an exploration of the qualities that make a great football coach. Sneed recounts Riley’s meteoric rise and shows how it was fueled by commitment, grit, relationships, growth, pain, brains, and passion, as the young coach’s unquestioned brilliance as a football strategist and his outstanding people skills set him apart from so many of his peers. For Lincoln Riley, human connections lie at the heart of being a coach, and Sooner is a story of how each of our lives is bound up in so many others.