Oklahoma Is Having a Full-Blown Meltdown Because Some Student Reporters Saw Caleb Williams Taking First Team Reps in Practice
OU Daily — As Oklahoma’s quarterback battle continues to develop, freshman Caleb Williams was seen scrimmaging with the Sooners’ first-team offense by The Daily at practice Tuesday, while redshirt sophomore Spencer Rattler was working with the second team.
The Daily watched the offensive practice regimen from a public building near the OU football practice field, with no athletics employees discouraging observation. The Daily does not observe practice regularly, but did so Tuesday under heightened interest given the situation.
Williams outsnapped Rattler 15-7 in the pre-stretching portion of practice. He was later seen primarily scrimmaging with starting receivers Jadon Haselwood, Marvin Mims and Mike Woods, while Rattler threw to backups Trevon West, Brian Darby and Jalil Farooq, among others.
Credit to the kids at the OU Daily for reporting the story that has broken the college football media world today.
The Oklahoma student newspaper reported yesterday that Caleb Williams, who came in during the Sooners' game against Texas last week and played spectacularly to lead OU to a huge comeback win, was taking most of the first team reps in practice over Spencer Rattler, who entered the 2021 season as a Heisman frontrunner. Some on Twitter have said the student reporters used binoculars to watch practice, though that isn't mentioned in the story and I can't find exactly where that first came from. Even if they did, they were doing so from somewhere publicly accessible. It's on the football staff to make sure that isn't possible if they don't want people watching practice.
Oklahoma is acting about as rationally as you'd expect a big-time college football program would, canceling all media availability on Wednesday. Because that's definitely what you should do when you want a story like this to go away.
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You know how many people had heard about this Caleb Williams story in the student newspaper before today? Almost nobody. You know who's heard about it now? Everyone with a Twitter account.
College football coaches in the last decade or so have always acted like they were protecting government secrets on the practice field, but this stunt has raised it to a new level. Some college kids were quite literally doing their jobs and now they've brought one of the biggest superpowers in college football to its knees over one story from practice.
Good for them.
This is precisely why college football is the best sport ever invented. Some regular ol' college students watched a practice and now have the whole country talking about it. I love this beautifully stupid game.
So despite the fact Lincoln Riley has decided to be completely irrational about this situation, it looks like we should count on seeing Williams on the field for the Sooners on Saturday.