Why Oklahoma Should Fire Bill Bedenbaugh and Hire Sam Pittman

Three seasons in a row is not a rough patch anymore. It is a pattern.

Oklahoma’s offensive line is a mess again in 2026, and at some point the program has to stop explaining it the same way and start changing the one constant.

Injuries have been brutal. That part is fair.

Nobody drew up a season where Michael Fasusi, Eddy Pierre-Louis, Heath Ozaeta, and Ryan Fodje would all be unavailable at different points. That will wreck almost any line in the country. The problem is that Oklahoma’s issues up front were already trending the wrong way before this year’s medical chart turned into a horror movie.

Six games into the season, the Sooners rank No. 121 nationally in sacks allowed after giving up 18 of them, an average of 3.0 per game.

That is not a one-week problem. That is a foundation problem. And it fits the recent track record.

Oklahoma ranked 99th in sacks allowed in 2025 and 133rd in 2024. So even if you want to give this year’s injury situation a huge discount, you still have to explain the two seasons before it. The protection has been poor for a while now.

The run game is right there with it. Oklahoma is averaging just 2.8 yards per carry this season after posting a bad enough 3.5 mark last year.

When a team cannot keep the quarterback clean and cannot create consistent movement on the ground, every offensive conversation becomes circular. The quarterback looks worse. The play-caller has fewer answers. The skill players spend too many snaps recovering from second-and-long. That has been the Sooners’ offensive life far too often.

Yes, depth matters. Oklahoma clearly did not have enough of it once the injuries hit. But that is not a free pass either, because there is still no strong evidence this unit was headed toward being a finished product even at full strength. The line has not looked physical enough, clean enough, or reliable enough for long enough stretches to earn that benefit of the doubt. The second half against Texas briefly made people hopeful. Kentucky made that look like fool’s gold again.

And through all of it, one thing has stayed the same. Oklahoma has gone through three offensive coordinators in three seasons with Ben Arbuckle, Joe Jon Finley, and Seth Littrell. The offensive line coach has remained Bill Bedenbaugh. At some point, questions have got to start to be raised. You can only blame the next coordinator so many times before you have to look at the room that never gets fixed.

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, because Bedenbaugh’s longer résumé is not empty. He has developed serious NFL talent. Creed Humphrey and Orlando Brown Jr. became multi-time Pro Bowlers. Anton Harrison and Tyler Guyton went in the first round. Ben Powers, Cody Ford, Daryl Williams, Walter Rouse, and others turned into real professionals.

That history is real. Nobody should erase it.

But recent history is real too.

Under Bedenbaugh the last few years, Oklahoma has not just struggled to play well up front. It has struggled to keep the room intact. This offseason alone, the Sooners lost six offensive linemen to the transfer portal: Jacob Sexton, Troy Everett, Jake Taylor, Logan Howland, Luke Baklenko, and Isaiah Autry-Dent. That is not normal maintenance. That is a room leaking talent and continuity at the exact position where continuity matters most.

Two things can be true. Bedenbaugh has developed excellent players in the past, and the current product is not good enough. The second one is what Oklahoma has to coach from now. Not the 2019 brochure. Not the old NFL pipeline talking points. The team on the field.

Is every bit of this on him? No.

There is a legitimate conversation about whether Oklahoma’s NIL priorities have leaned too heavily toward defense and not enough toward building a stronger offensive line. If the program underinvested in the position, that belongs in the discussion. So do the injuries. So does the lack of depth. None of those things change the bottom line after three straight years of this.

A new voice is needed.

And Oklahoma would not even have to get abstract about the replacement.

Sam Pittman is sitting right there.

Pittman is widely viewed as one of the best offensive line coaches in the country, he is currently unemployed, he is from El Reno, and he already spent 1997 and 1998 as Oklahoma’s offensive line coach. That is not some random outside name. That is a natural fit. He grew up a Sooners fan, knows the state, and has spent a career building the exact kind of physical identity Oklahoma’s offense is missing.

If you need the coaching proof, look at Georgia from 2016 to 2018. Pittman’s lines there were as physical and dominant as any in the modern game. Over his career he has coached 30-plus drafted offensive linemen, including multiple first-rounders. That is not theorizing. That is a career spent producing the position Oklahoma cannot currently hang its hat on.

Would it be hard to move on from Bedenbaugh after all the good years and all the NFL names? Yes.

These decisions are never clean when somebody has had real success in the building. But coaching staffs are not museums. They are judged by the present tense. Oklahoma’s present tense up front is missed assignments, negative plays, poor depth, and an offense that cannot stay on schedule.

That is why this needs to happen. Not because Bedenbaugh never did anything for Oklahoma. Because the line has been a problem for three seasons, the results are getting worse, and there is an available coach with championship-level credentials who fits Norman better than almost any other candidate would.

Bill Bedenbaugh needs to go. Sam Pittman is the obvious next call.