Randall Stephenson admits he initially passed on Roger Denny for next Oklahoma AD

When Randall Stephenson first saw the resume of Roger Denny, it didn’t particularly stand out. However, after some urging from Jake Rosenberg, one of the members of the search committee to find the next Oklahoma athletic director, he decided to give it a chance.

“Jake Rosenberg sent me the bio on Roger and, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but I looked and saw ‘Deputy AD at Illinois and said, ‘thanks, Jake, what else we got?'” Stephenson, who is an atheltics chairman at OU, said. “Jake kept saying, ‘give this a look.’ So I ended up spending some time going through the bio and talked to Jake about some conversations he had had, and after going through the bio and the background said, ‘man, this checks a lot of boxes.’ That’s not what you tend to see when you look at a deputy AD’s resume. So I said, ‘OK, we oughta have a conversation with him.'”

Those conversations went so well that Stephenson and the search committee later selected Denny as the candidate to replace longtime AD Joe Castiglione. It started with a call over Zoom that left them all impressed.

After that, they decided they wanted to meet with him for an in-person interview. There he would also set down with OU president Joseph Harroz, where the two bonded over their experience working in law. Denny was a lawyer for 15 years prior to getting into college athletics.

“Jake did an interview and, we use a really interesting approach on this search,” Stephenson said. “Jake and I started doing this with the GM search when we hired Jim Nagy. That is, we would get a list of candidates and Jake and one of his partners would do some interviews on Zoom and record the interviews. And so, he had a recorded interview with some just standard questions. …So I watched this recording and I was like, ‘wow, this guy’s got some depth.’ So I said we wanted to meet with him.

“…Roger is one of those people, the more you interact with him, the more you realize the depth and the intelligence and the wisdom and the passion and the conviction of the guy. What I like most is he and I speak a lot of the same language. He knows how to do deals. He knows contracting inside and out, knows marketing. We had ust a very natural flow and rhythm. …After that interview, it was really clear this was going to be a top candidate for the job. We put a couple of candidates in front of the board and this is where we all landed.”

Now the Sooners will hope that Roger Denny can be the right candidate needed to usher them through the new era of college athletics after 28 years under Castiglione. His background as a deputy athletic director might not be the traditional hire, but all of his other experiece fit the criteria that the Sooners were after.