COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’89 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH : HIGH HOPES : Gary Gibbs Trying to Give Oklahoma Direction to Regain Image of Greatness After Scandals

August in Oklahoma, and some things remain unchanged. Over by the interstate, the signs advertising the price of gas are difficult to distinguish from those displaying the mid-day temperature. And down at Owen Field, close to 1,000 people still show up to watch the Sooners scrimmage on a weekday afternoon.

Barry Switzer stops by only occasionally now, to visit and to rehabilitate his knee on University of Oklahoma equipment.

On the field, the man in charge--imagine, someone in charge of the Sooners--is Gary Gibbs, a 37-year-old former Sooner linebacker with an MBA and a mission: Repairing the reputation of Oklahoma football.

Gibbs has inherited a program that had veered out of control, and his approach is so straightforward that it seems to indicate either the simplicity of truth or an incomprehension of the complexity of the problem.

“All we have to do is the right thing,” Gibbs has said.

He became head coach June 21. That was two days after Switzer had resigned--after 16 years, three national championships and a troubled off-season that began in December with the announcement of a three-year National Collegiate Athletic Assn. probation.

It continued with the arrest of five players--one in a shooting in Bud Wilkinson House, the athletic dormitory--three more in an alleged gang rape, and one on a cocaine charge, starting quarterback Charles Thompson.

In the days after Switzer’s resignation, The Dallas Times Herald reported that former Sooner assistant Scott Hill, who had resigned under pressure in March, was the subject of a federal drug investigation.

It is left to Gibbs to tackle the image and the reality those events left behind.

“I think everybody realizes what has occurred here in the past six or eight months,” Gibbs said. “The coaches and players are scarred and embarrassed and hurt by it. We’re willing to do everything we can to rectify our image because we know we’re not the bad guys.

“I think they want to prove to everybody they’re good people. We can’t characterize the 90 people in the program by the record of five.”

Around the country, Oklahoma’s decision to replace Switzer from within was questioned. Gibbs’ career as a coach has been spent entirely under Switzer, from graduate assistant to position coach to defensive coordinator. He hasn’t spent a football season away from Oklahoma since 1970, the year he arrived as a freshman.

Switzer had been criticized by the NCAA for failing to exercise “supervisory control.” Oklahoma needed a new start, and Switzer, the fallen leader, was replaced by his own lieutenant.

Yet for all that, the essence of Gibbs’ appeal as the head of the Oklahoma program right now is that he is so much not Switzer.

Gibbs is affable, but he is cautious, too. He is happy to talk, but not one to fill a reporter’s notebook, not like Switzer, who would talk with abandon.

Switzer encouraged his players to be individuals, perhaps too much so in the end. Gibbs likes his players to be individuals, too, but this season they will be individuals who travel in sport coats.

Switzer let his assistants do the nitty-gritty coaching. Gibbs can’t stay away from the X’s and O’s, and fights the urge to slide over to the linebackers every day as they leave the field.

Gibbs was an honors student at Oklahoma, earning a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s in business administration. If he hadn’t made it in coaching, he would have made it in business. If Switzer hadn’t been a coach . . . but what else should a man who can set his jaw the way Switzer can have been?

Switzer is divorced. Gibbs and his wife of 13 years have two daughters, and given a chance to go out, Gibbs will choose the girls’ tee-ball games every time.

“He’s a family man,” his assistants will tell you, and leave the implication tacit.

Here is a man who is so unlike Switzer that it is difficult to believe that Switzer pushed for him as one of three choices for his replacement from his staff, and that it was Switzer whose words to Gibbs when he was promoted were, “You don’t need any advice. You are ready to be a head coach.”

He will be a different sort of coach than Switzer was. Already the Sooners have a dress code, unwritten but at the discretion of Gibbs, who as a starting linebacker on the 1974 national championship team had a longish mane of hair, one that might not pass muster today.

“Probably not,” Gibbs said.

There will be an in-season, weeknight curfew earlier than midnight at Bud Wilkinson House.

“We didn’t really worry about it before,” said Merv Johnson, 53, one of the assistants over whom Gibbs was chosen.

Gibbs said: “They need to know the difference between right and wrong. We’re talking about human beings. We’re not perfect. But at the same time we’re not talking about a physics question. You do what’s right. You don’t do what’s wrong.”

The players know things have changed.

“One of the reasons you come to OU is because Coach Switzer believes you should be an individual,” said Scott Evans, an all-conference defensive tackle last season. “Not that Gary Gibbs doesn’t. But there was need for a change . . . You can’t be an idiot and shoot off at the mouth like people did in the past. I don’t want to give the impression it’s lock and chains, but it’s different.”

These are visible changes, ready for the public eye. There are other changes being overseen by Thomas Hill, hired last spring as Oklahoma’s assistant athletic director for academics. Among his goals is more careful screening of the players Oklahoma recruits.

Gibbs is working with the ones who are there.

“I don’t know how Webster defines cosmetic, but we’re not trying to just paint a little different picture,” Gibbs said. “We’re trying to do it where it’s meaningful and it’s real. It’s not a superficial change.”

Although he turned only 37 this month, Gibbs has been considered a logical successor to Switzer for some time, although few could have imagined it would be so soon.

Gibbs played for Switzer in his junior and senior seasons at Oklahoma. Rod Shoate was the other linebacker, Dewey and Lee Roy Selmon were linemen, and Gibbs was the team overachiever in 1974.

“Thank God we had Dewey and Lee Roy and Rod Shoate,” Gibbs said. “Ten great players and me.”

Bobby Proctor, now Gibbs’ assistant, was already coaching the Sooner secondary when Gibbs was a junior, having arrived on campus with Switzer in 1973. After his senior season, Gibbs was back the next season as a graduate assistant, working first with the offensive line and later moving to defense.

“When he moved to defense, we knew he’d be a good football coach,” Proctor said. “Up in the press box, he’d see things, adjust things. As time went along, we knew it was just a matter of time. The older you get, like me, I’ve been here 17 years. I’m not going anywhere. Gary was going to be a head coach. It was just a matter of time.”

Gibbs developed such a reputation as a defensive coach that John Robinson tried to hire him as defensive coordinator at USC in 1981, when Gibbs was 28. To keep him, Switzer promoted Gibbs to coordinator over several older and more experienced members of his staff.

With Gibbs as coordinator, the Oklahoma defense prospered. The Sooners led the nation in total defense and pass defense three seasons in a row, 1985, ’86 and ’87. They were first in rushing defense in ‘86, first in scoring defense in ’86 and ’87.

His reputation grew, and Mike Shanahan talked with him after taking the Raider job, although the discussions never became an offer.

His appeal extended even to those who don’t share all his attitudes.

No less outrageous a former Sooner than Brian Bosworth speaks of Gibbs with genuine respect and affection in his book, “The Boz.”

“If Gibbs doesn’t get the OU job when Switzer leaves, then nothing makes sense in the world” Bosworth wrote.

Now Gibbs has it.

“I would have been put in a straitjacket if I hadn’t taken the job,” Gibbs said. “My wife would have shot me.”

But what of Oklahoma football?

The atmosphere in post-Switzer Norman is one more of acquiescence than outrage.

“Thanks Barry,” one T-shirt reads, “For the 16 Greatest Years of Football History.”

College football history? Oklahoma football history? People here see no need to qualify.

By resigning when he did, Switzer might have preserved the fourth-best winning mark, .837 on 157-29-4, surpassed only by Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy and George Woodruff.

But he left Gibbs a program on probation, barred from bowl appearances for two seasons, and facing scholarship limits.

Gibbs has a team that is carrying only 76 scholarship players, nearly 19 fewer than the NCAA standard.

The five players who were arrested are missing, of course. Jerry Parks pleaded no contest in the shooting, and has already served his sentence. Thompson is awaiting sentencing after a guilty plea to the cocaine charge. The three charged with rape await trial.

There are others missing, too, those who took advantage of the chance to transfer without penalty, as well as those who were quietly not welcomed back.

What’s left is a team that has been picked third in the Big Eight, behind Nebraska and Colorado. Oklahoma is coming off a 9-3 season.

“We don’t concern ourselves about being ranked behind Nebraska and Colorado because we know they’re quality football teams, and we know we’re a quality football team,” Gibbs said. “I know we’re in the hunt.”

But the Sooners must replace Thompson, who would have been a junior, at quarterback. Of three competitors, only one, Chris Melson, has ever taken a snap in a college game. He has 15 carries and is 0 for 2 passing. Steve Collins, a redshirt freshman, has been chosen to start Saturday’s opener against New Mexico State.

To take pressure off an inexperienced quarterback, Oklahoma will stray from the wishbone, going to multiple formations, a move planned during the spring while Switzer was still coach.

“We’re still an option team,” Gibbs said. “But it will look different.”

Still, this is Oklahoma, and there is precedent.

Switzer was 35 in 1973 when he became coach of a team that was on two years’ probation. The Sooners didn’t lose in their first 30 games under Switzer, and won two national championships in his first three years. In 1974, the Sooners finished 11-0 despite being on probation and without playing in a bowl game.

“We can still win the Big Eight conference championship,” Gibbs said. “If that happens, we can contend for the national championship. They understand that. They understand that this is the opportunity at the University of Oklahoma.”

And Gibbs understands that he is head of a program that can’t afford another felony charge, another arrest, even a minor altercation, and that there is now a burden to accompany opportunity.