Sooners of the World, Unite: How Oklahoma Football Became America’s Most Peculiar Soft-Power Export

Norman, Oklahoma—population 128,000, longitude 35.22° N, latitude 97.44° W—doesn’t usually appear on the radar of the average Berlin stockbroker, Lagos software contractor, or Singaporean port-logistics clerk. Yet every autumn, when the Sooner Schooner rolls onto Owen Field and 80,000 crimson-clad pilgrims howl at a sky the color of dried blood, the University of Oklahoma football team briefly becomes a geopolitical force in its own right.

Why should the rest of the planet care? Because the Sooners are less a regional hobby and more a live-action metaphor for everything the wider world finds alternately admirable and terrifying about the United States: the violent choreography, the corporate pageantry, the obsessive scoreboard theology, the quiet conviction that God Himself—who presumably has a Skybox—bleeds Sooner Crimson on Saturdays. In a world already wrestling with American soft-power residue from Marvel films and McDonald’s fries, college football is the last export that still arrives un-subtitled, un-dubbed, and utterly incomprehensible to anyone raised on the metric system.

Consider the supply chain. The Sooners’ 2023 budget hit $176 million, a figure that would let UNESCO fund literacy programs in three small nations or keep the World Food Programme’s Yemen operation running for roughly forty-eight hours. That money buys, among other things, a nutrition staff capable of turning 300-pound teenagers into 330-pound adults without ever mentioning type-2 diabetes, and a social-media team fluent in emoji dialects from Tulsa to Tegucigalpa. The program’s Nike partnership alone ships more crimson merchandise annually than the entire annual textile output of Lesotho. Somewhere in Dhaka, a factory floor hums with Sooners jerseys bound for European streetwear resellers who will mark them up 400 percent as ironic athleisure for Milan club kids. Globalization wears crimson and cream.

Then there is the export of ideology. Every time a Sooner linebacker flattens a quarterback on ESPN International, the slow-motion replay is beamed into conscription offices from Seoul to Helsinki, where defense ministers nod approvingly at the collision physics. NATO analysts have quietly studied Oklahoma’s blitz packages for insights into rapid troop deployment; Chinese state television, meanwhile, replays the same footage as cautionary evidence of American decadence—proof that a society willing to sacrifice knees for entertainment may also sacrifice anything else. The Pentagon, never one to miss synergy, has begun inviting OU coaching staff to lecture on “leadership under extreme pressure,” which is how a defensive coordinator ends up advising Estonian cyber-warfare units on fourth-quarter grit.

The irony, of course, is that the Sooners’ most loyal international constituency isn’t in Europe or Asia but in the oil-rich Gulf. Qatari royalty, flush with LNG profits and bored with European soccer’s theatrics, now charter 747s to Dallas, then helicopter the final 180 miles to Norman. They arrive in search of authentic Americana: the scent of diesel-fried corn dogs, the thunder of a marching band playing a Broadway tune arranged for brass, the ritualistic sacrifice of ACLs. One Qatari sheikh recently attempted to purchase naming rights to the stadium; OU politely declined, citing tradition, then named the new indoor practice facility after an Oklahoma fracking magnate. Tradition, like oil, is a finite resource.

All empires eventually decline, and the Sooners are no exception. Recruiting scandals, transfer-portal chaos, and the looming reality of athletes demanding actual wages threaten the amateur fantasy that keeps the whole carnival spinning. Climate change may yet finish the job: last season’s September kickoff temperature of 104°F (40°C) prompted the university to install IV-fluid stations behind the benches—hydration as performance art. Should the Red River that divides Oklahoma from Texas dry into cracked mud, the annual Red River Rivalry could be rebranded as the Red River Climate Refugee Bowl, sponsored by Nestlé.

Yet for now, the spectacle endures. On any given Saturday, satellites 22,000 miles above Earth relay images of a crimson wave swallowing a green rectangle while commentators speak in tongues of “Sooner Magic” and “Boomer!” The rest of the planet may not grasp the rules, but we understand the subtext: might makes right, money talks, and somewhere a marching band is playing the soundtrack to late-stage capitalism in 4/4 time. Until the lights go out, the world keeps watching—part anthropologist, part voyeur, part co-conspirator in the greatest unpaid labor spectacle humanity ever choreographed.