Bob Simmons didn't just impact Oklahoma State football. To his Cowboys, he was trailblazer
· Yahoo Sports
Tony Lindsay decided to play football at Oklahoma State for lots of reasons.
Many of them, though, tied back to Bob Simmons.
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When they first met in the mid-1990s, Lindsay loved that the Cowboy coach was a serious man, a straight shooter, a father figure. But as much as anything, the quarterback who would be a four-year OSU starter and a two-time Bedlam victor loved that Simmons was a Black head coach.
“That weighed heavily on my decision,” Lindsay told me the other day. “It wasn’t like I didn’t want to go play for anybody that wasn’t Black. It was just the fact that, hey, we have some representation.”
Simmons died earlier this week, and while his passing resonated in Oklahoma and Colorado, where he put down roots after being an assistant in Boulder in the 1980s and 1990s, it barely registered in the wider college football world.
But talk to Simmons’ players, especially the Black men who chose to go into his profession, and they’ll tell you how important he was.
“Look at what he had to come into with after everything that happened,” Lindsay said in a phone interview from Colorado, his home state, where he has spent the past few decades as a high school coach.
“Everything that happened,” of course, was the near-death-penalty sanctions that the NCAA slapped on OSU football in 1989. The impact of the penalties lingered in Stillwater for years, sending a program that had crawled out of decades of malaise back into the mud.
OSU had a string of six losing seasons when Simmons took over.
“You get somebody that’s willing to come and take on a program that had to deal with those years after probation? I don’t know too many people who want to deal with that,” Lindsay said. “And I’m pretty sure he had other options. Even staying at Colorado as assistant coach may have been safer to a lot of people.
“But he took that risk.”
And Simmons took it as a Black head coach at a time when there weren’t many.
When he was hired before the 1995 season, he became not only OSU football’s first Black head coach but also the Big Eight Conference’s first. The following season when the Cowboys joined the Big 12, Simmons got to hold that first-ever distinction alongside OU coach John Blake.
Simmons’ trailblazing status didn’t necessarily register with all of his Cowboys.
“I didn’t understand it the way that I do now,” OSU legend Rashaun Woods told The Oklahoman. “I didn’t understand how tough being a Black coach at the college level or even a pro level is.”
Woods has a goal of coaching at those levels.
After injuries derailed his NFL career, he started coaching high school football in the 2000s, helping Star Spencer win a state title in 2009 as the Bobcats’ offensive coordinator. But despite coming from one of Oklahoma’s first families of football, having a lifetime in the sport and a strong track record as a coordinator, Woods was told he lacked experience to be a head coach.
He returned to his high school alma mater, Millwood, where he helped coach the middle school program.
Finally in 2013, he got his first high school head coaching job at John Marshall, which had been winless the year before. Schools in the urban core have come to struggle with football, and coaches’ careers are often derailed.
But four years later, Woods and the Bears won a state title.
Head coaching jobs followed at Enid and Tyler High in Texas, where Woods is soon to enter his fourth season.
Woods enjoyed playing for Simmons, who recruited Woods to OSU but resigned under pressure before his sophomore season.
“My redshirt freshman year, I was starting to come on, and … as I had success, he didn’t let me settle,” Woods said. “He constantly pushed me and talked about the things that I could have done better.”
Running after the catch, for instance.
“Hey, Woods,” he remembers Simmons saying. “Do something with it after you catch it.”
Being good wasn’t enough. Simmons wanted more, wanted something approaching perfection, and while Woods appreciated that push then, he knows now that unreasonably high standards were a reality Simmons lived with every day.
“Now as a coach, I have nothing but appreciation for what he had to do, as far as doing everything right to even get an opportunity like that,” Woods said. “You can’t falter at all, in order for somebody to give you an opportunity, and then more than likely with Coach Simmons, I can only imagine how many boxes he had to check to get that chance.
“It’s flat-out impressive now that I’m in my journey and knowing how hard it is to be recognized for gifts outside of being able to just run, catch and hit.”
Those were lessons Kenyatta Wright had been taught before he arrived at OSU. Like Woods during his Millwood days, Wright was coached in high school at Vian by a Black head coach, Ray Jordan.
When Wright went to OSU, he didn’t give a lot of thought to the fact that he was playing for one of the few Black head coaches in all of college football.
“I was 17, turning 18,” Wright said with a chuckle. “You didn’t look at the whole big picture of what was actually going on. But now that I’m removed from it … that was groundbreaking. It was historical, and to be a part of that, yeah, it does mean a lot.”
He admits he didn’t always see eye to eye with Simmons.
Wright, who would play linebacker in the NFL for five seasons, remembers thinking Simmons was sometimes harder on the Black players. He wasn’t unfair. He wasn’t malicious. But Wright got frustrated a few times and called Simmons on it.
Now, Wright thinks he understands why Simmons had those high standards.
“He knew that we may be trailblazers someday,” Wright said.
He takes great pride in the number of Cowboys from that era who are now successful. They are raising families and running businesses. They are having impact. They are building legacies.
Wright is, too.
After spending the past few years as OSU’s director of football business, he is now the head football coach at Roland. He now has a chance to influence his players the way Simmons influenced him.
Tony Lindsay hopes he’s done that through his coaching career, too.
Even though he came from a coaching family — he actually spent the past few years coaching alongside his dad, Tony Sr. — Lindsay took so many things away from his time with Simmons. How to communicate. How to motivate.
“Him being just so real and so authentic about things, it was like there was no sugar coating, and that was big,” Lindsay said. “I don’t want anybody to come in my face and be putting on this front.
“You could just tell with him, it was coming from a place of authenticity.”
Even though Simmons may well be best known for starting OSU football’s turnaround, getting the program back to a bowl in 1997, and laying the groundwork for what Les Miles and Mike Gundy would do, Simmons’ impact goes deeper for those who played for him.
“Him being a Black man in a role that was not taken on by that many Black men at that time, that weighed heavily on me,” Lindsay said. “That weighed heavily on a lot of the guys.
“That was big.”
Big enough to still resonate with Cowboys like Lindsay and Wright and Woods.
Big enough to live on.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at [email protected]. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma State football players carry legacy of late coach Bob Simmons