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I don't know if this was supposed to be a "feel good" piece or a "how the game is screwed" piece:
NORMAN, Okla. — Casey Thompson stands in a sea of crimson, smiling as he greets fans after Oklahoma’s spring game. The program’s new quarterback just transferred in. Local kid. Smart as hell. Experienced and can make all the throws.
He poses for one photo, then another before a few ex-Sooners approach.
“Last time y’all seen him, he was in a Texas uniform,” says a player who suited up with Casey’s father, Charles, in the late 1980s.
“’Bout time you got out of that ugly-ass orange!” another says.
Casey’s smile is a flash of light in a spitting rain, among the only constants amid the ripples of change. The stadium’s 7,800-square-foot video board advertises a conference game against Alabama, still an odd sight long after Oklahoma announced it was leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. Security begins shepherding lingering fans toward the exits because, even after the Red/White game, players aren’t done.
Soon they will form a line near a wall and pose for more photos, sign mini-helmets and footballs, greet fans wearing the jerseys of athletes half their age. The strangest thing? Nobody is complaining. Three years after the Supreme Court ruled the NCAA had broken antitrust laws by denying players even the crumbs of a nearly $20 billion-a-year pie, players will be paid for their time.
The “student-athlete” thing was always an example of slick branding, but because this is a new chapter in college athletics, driven in part by NIL, nobody fears calling players what they are: employees.
“You know what NIL means, don’t you?” says Barry Switzer, the legendary former Sooners coach and one of the sport’s most colorful renegades. “‘Now It’s Legal.’”
“Name, Image and Likeness,” to be clear. But back in the 1970s and 1980s, Switzer’s players could get suspended or kicked out of school for making an appearance for cash, driving a free car, enjoying a meal paid for by a booster. The players’ end of the deal was tuition, room and board, though the school’s dining halls were closed on weekends.
If they didn’t like it, they could always transfer. Coaches could spike that idea, of course, or steer where an athlete went. NCAA rules penalized transfers by making them ineligible to play the next season. Now it’s all different. The “transfer portal” opened in 2018, allowing some players to transfer once — and since then, most restrictions have been lifted, essentially making college players free agents. Casey has made full use of this freedom, though for a few reasons, his experience is unusual.
Oklahoma is Casey’s fourth school since 2021. He’s about to turn 26, six years older than the Sooners’ likely starter, Jackson Arnold. He has technically been a college student since January 2018. While Casey pursues his third college degree, he is contemplating his future while playing for — and, though indirectly, being paid by — the same program his dad represented on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
It’s rare to see Casey without a bottle of Essentia water, be it in his hand, on the coffee table in his apartment or in the cupholder of the free SUV he drives around Norman. Casey has worked the system so well, taking advantage of a college football gold rush once available only to coaches, that he started a list on his phone’s Notes app to keep track of his sponsors.
Morgan Stanley Bank
Verizon Wireless Visible campaign
Essentia Water
“Corporate America,” he says, shrugging as he uncaps his Sharpie and the line of Oklahoma fans starts moving. “You get what you earn.”
Progress, like everything, isn’t without cost. College football may be more equitable than ever, but that doesn’t mean some things haven’t been lost. Aren’t being lost. Charles Thompson, watching his son wear the same colors he once did, warned Casey that almost nothing comes without downside.
“I don’t care how good you have it now,” Charles always said, “it can turn on you in a minute.”
BACK IN THE ROARING ’80s, “King Charles” cruised the streets of Norman in his free car, stopping most days at a convenience store for a case of free beer, signing a donor’s name at restaurants so he could dine for free.
Charles Thompson never outright asked a booster for money, he says now. He didn’t have to. After shaking someone’s hand, he would draw back $200, just a little thank-you to get him through the weekend.
“Just a big ol’, eight-month party,” he says of football seasons then.
One without many consequences, which is how Switzer liked it.
The coach wanted players to feel invincible, on and off the field. Drug dogs sometimes greeted the team plane, Switzer says, and in 1988, the FBI was sniffing around the entire program in an attempt to find wrongdoing within it. Switzer says he suspected that even school administrators had tapped his phone. Still, he won three national championships doing things his way, suffocating defenses with the wishbone triple option and keeping his guys eligible. After running back Rod Fisher’s room got raided and his liquor confiscated, Fisher says, he was summoned to the coach’s office to hear his punishment: The hooch belonged to Switzer now.
Players learned that police officers would tear up a speeding ticket — including, Charles says, when he once got stopped going 114 mph — if the coach gave them a call. When one player had a death in the family, he had no money to get home. Switzer paid for it himself.
“A violation,” Switzer says. “But you know what? I don’t give a s---. It was the right thing, even if it was the wrong thing.”
College football was the Wild West. TV money fueled showdowns between the nation’s best and most lawless programs, with Oklahoma leading the way. The school successfully sued the NCAA in 1984 for the right to negotiate its own broadcasting contracts, thus unleashing an every-program-for-itself open market and a year-round competition for elite recruits, rivalry wins and televised games. Some paid as much as $1 million per side.
This led to some coaches feeling more bulletproof than others, and with schools offering seven-figure contracts for the first time, the rewards seemed worth the risk. Of the 139 schools classified as Division I-A in the 1980s, half were issued sanctions by the NCAA. Southern Methodist shut down its program, Florida’s Charley Pell never coached again after he was found to have broken more than 100 rules, and a grand jury indicted four South Carolina coaches on charges of providing steroids to players.
The Oklahoma train kept chugging, and as the 1988 season began, Charles was the starting quarterback and the Sooners were eyeing a second national title in four years. Charles, who grew up in nearby Lawton, Okla., dreamed of bringing the Heisman Trophy back to his hometown.
Then, late that season, a friend from Lawton who had fallen on hard times asked Charles to broker the sale of 17 grams of cocaine for $1,400. Charles hesitated but, feeling untouchable, finally agreed.
Three days later, Switzer called Charles in. His friend from back home had been flipped by the FBI. The buyer Charles met with? An undercover agent who had recorded the transaction.
Since Thompson was 6, he had dreamed of being on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Now, at age 20, he got his wish — only not celebrating in the end zone but wearing an orange jumpsuit while being led into a police car.
“HOW BARRY SWITZER’S SOONERS TERRORIZED THEIR CAMPUS,” the headline read.
Over a two-month stretch, Oklahoma got hit with three years’ probation, one Sooners player shot and wounded another, three players were charged with raping a 20-year-old woman (two were later convicted), and Charles was charged with conspiracy to sell drugs.
That photo of Charles became the enduring image of a sport gone rogue, and Oklahoma tried blaming it on players. Switzer called Charles a “sociopath” and the “scum of the earth,” and the ex-quarterback pleaded guilty and begged the judge for leniency. Instead, this being the age of mandatory minimums and the “War on Drugs,” he was sentenced to two years in a Texas prison.
Even after his release, Charles says now, Oklahoma wanted nothing to do with him. When he attended a Sooners game with his father-in-law, the postgame radio show talked less about the game than Charles’s audacity stepping on campus. When Fisher and several other ex-teammates invited him to work out on the team’s practice field, an assistant coach told Charles he wasn’t welcome.
He went home, he says, and cried.
“I was the villain,” Charles says. “And they could never forgive me.”
THE WAY CASEY THOMPSON SEES IT, there is the world before the 2020 Alamo Bowl and the one that began as he trotted onto the field for the second half. After three years as Sam Ehlinger’s backup, Casey went in. The redshirt sophomore threw four touchdown passes and lifted the Longhorns to a blowout win.
“My life changed,” he says.
Coach Tom Herman nonetheless got fired, and Casey entered the next season as the captain of new coach Steve Sarkisian’s run-pass option. NIL legislation happened to pass at the same time, and Casey found himself posing in an energy drink ad with star running back Bijan Robinson. One car dealership in Austin let Casey drive a BMW, then an Audi, before he decided he was more of a Ford man. That dealership signed him to a deal that allowed him to pick out any vehicle on the lot.
If he wanted a new look, Casey would tag Kendra Scott Jewelry in a social media post and, poof, free stuff materialized. If he wanted cookies when his parents visited from Norman, he would send a direct message to Tiff’s Treats, and, voilà, a box appeared at his door. As always, Charles urged his son to stay grounded.
“They love you,” he said. “But the minute that stops, then this all stops.”
Sure enough, Casey injured his right thumb, but coaches downplayed the injury and urged him to play through it. He started 10 games that season but didn’t get an MRI exam, he says, until he requested one himself following the Longhorns’ final game. He says the test showed a torn ligament that required surgery, and after Quinn Ewers announced he was transferring from Ohio State to Texas, Casey’s future in Austin was uncertain.
When an athlete enters the transfer portal, they are immediately thrust into limbo: a free agent officially tied to nowhere. There are strict windows for players to find a new school or return to their old one, but this being college sports, there are ways around them. Programs are under no obligation to take a player back, and if time expires and they’re still unsigned, well … sorry. That’s just life at sea, and of the 2,753 athletes who entered the portal during the 2020-21 academic year, only half joined a program at the same level.
In December 2021, Casey plunged in and, three weeks later, signed with Nebraska. NIL was in full force, so Casey got paid to sign autographs and join a local radio show the same day he arrived on campus. He later signed deals with trading card companies totaling about $30,000, he says, and though he still had his Explorer from Austin, a dealership in Lincoln let him drive an all-black Dodge Charger. All he had to do, he says, was show up.
This was arranged after Casey signed his scholarship agreement with Nebraska, he says, and NCAA rules prohibit coaches from discussing compensation or contingencies with prospects in the portal. But, as in Charles’s day, some just can’t help themselves.
Florida State landed on probation this year after an assistant coach put a recruit in contact with a booster, and a quarterback prospect sued Florida Coach Billy Napier and three others after the Gaytors allegedly reneged on a pre-negotiated NIL deal worth $13.85 million.
Once Casey started the 2022 season as the Cornhuskers’ starting quarterback, the offers poured in. He endorsed a protein doughnut brand, an apparel company, a barbershop. He spent $1,800 on a pair of off-white Air Force 1s, and when a group of high school buddies wanted to go to Austin on a weekend trip, the group stayed in a 10-bedroom mansion.
Life was good, but Charles kept issuing warnings. Casey and his two brothers had grown up hearing them almost constantly, the echoes of their father’s trauma reverberating through every stage.
And this being college football, whose popularity is rooted in tradition and unpredictability?
“Understand that,” Charles said, “and protect yourself.”
In the Huskers’ first game of 2022, Coach Scott Frost opted to try a surprise onside kick against Northwestern. It failed, the first domino that ended in a blown double-digit lead. Two weeks later, Frost got fired, and players were left to flail. Casey got sacked 19 times and says now that he was hit 137 times in six weeks, at various points suffering injuries to a shoulder, a calf, his hip, his left wrist, an AC joint, even his jaw. Thumb surgery had weakened his grip on the ball, and yet another collision damaged nerves in his elbow.
In a game against Illinois, a defender crashed into Casey as he threw a pass, leaving him without feeling in his fingers. He had torn his Labia but, after missing two weeks, returned to the lineup and again played through it. Even running a makeshift attack, behind one of the nation’s worst offensive lines, Casey was among the nation’s most effective passers.
Then, more dominoes.
Nebraska hired Matt Rhule, the former Baylor and Carolina Panthers coach. A fourth playbook in two years and a fifth offensive coordinator. The winter transfer portal opened, and by the time it closed, 6-foot-4 quarterback Jeff Sims had departed Georgia Tech and was signing with the Cornhuskers.
With his shoulder still healing, Casey couldn’t practice all spring. He and Rhule agreed that the new system, based more on power rushing than prolific passing, wasn’t a perfect fit. Though the portal had closed to football players, its gray areas include an exception for players with a new head coach.
In April 2023, Casey’s future was again draped in uncertainty. Rhule hadn’t named a starter, but after their conversation, Casey knew the score. The only thing he could be sure of was that, 72 hours after the spring game, the portal would close.
WHEN OKLAHOMA HIRED BOB STOOPS IN 1999, he brought in guest speakers: police officers, NFL players, business leaders. One day Stoops called Charles Thompson with an invitation.
“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” Stoops recalls saying.
Charles returned to campus for the first time in a decade, telling a new generation of Sooners about the touchdowns, prison, reentry — everything. As his release date approached, he explained, prison guards taunted him about coming back. In the 1990s, more than half of inmates were back in prison within three years.
He wrote a tell-all book and, upon getting out after 17 months, moved to Dallas and then back to Oklahoma. Charles found catharsis in sharing his story to community groups and Christian organizations, purpose in coaching his eldest son’s youth sports teams. He and his college sweetheart, Kori, had married and welcomed baby Kendal in 1992, around the same time Charles studied marketing at a small college in Ohio.
He reconnected with former teammates and, following Stoops’s invitation, immersed himself back in Sooners culture. Charles went on the radio to analyze the program, hosted reunions at his home outside Norman, watched practice from the sidelines. It was there that Switzer, who had resigned months after Charles’s arrest, greeted him with an apology.
“We both love each other and know what happened,” Switzer says now. “We both got f---ed.”
Gary Gibbs, soft-spoken and strait-laced, replaced Switzer and was charged with cleaning up the program. Reached by telephone, Gibbs declined to answer questions about how he went about this, saying he prefers not to revisit that time.
“I did the best I could,” he says.
But Charles’s ex-teammates describe a jarring cultural whiplash. Gibbs banned players from bars on Campus Corner, forbade them from mingling with boosters, warned them against accepting freebies. There was a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol, they say, and a dress code for the team plane.
Fisher hated it, calling Gibbs a “dictator” who reduced his playing time. When running back Dewell Brewer changed his jersey number to Charles’s No. 6 in tribute, coaches ordered him to change it. Brewer refused, he says, and Gibbs benched him. Both tried to transfer, but they claim Gibbs wouldn’t release them.
“They just wanted to control the kids’ life,” Brewer says. “I felt really screwed.”
BY THE TIME CASEY LEFT NEBRASKA IN APRIL 2023, he was a 24-year-old quarterback with a bad shoulder and a frayed thumb, eyeing a sixth season of college football. Friends and teammates from high school had started families or bought houses or settled into careers. Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields, who, like Casey, were part of the 2018 high school class, were preparing for their third NFL seasons.
Casey just hoped another major program would call. He visited Auburn, but Florida Atlantic’s coach was Tom Herman, who had recruited Casey to Texas. He knew the offense, meaning Casey would be “plug and play,” he says.
The school had no collective, and car dealerships aren’t showering players at a commuter school with offers. Casey’s scholarship check covered housing and food but not much else.
During his third game, Casey fell to the turf while evading a Clemson defender. The pop in his right knee was the shredding of his ACL, his season finished in the blink of an eye. He hobbled to a medical tent, screamed about the cruelty of it, then made his way to the locker room.
He saw his dad.
“What do you want to do next year?” he asked.
Next year?
In the cloud of shock and pain, Casey found it overwhelming to think about the next hour. He dismissed his dad and, after yet another surgery, stayed in bed with the blinds drawn, adjusting to the stillness after a life spent in motion.
A dozen years earlier, Kendal Thompson had committed to Oklahoma, and Casey always wanted to do everything his brother did. Playing for Stoops would help rewrite the family’s legacy. He jogged before school, then again after, and jumped rope and strengthened his core before a final evening weightlifting session. He gave up sugar, avoided caffeine and profanity, even stopped playing his favorite video games.
He passed for 6,580 yards and totaled 109 touchdowns in his first three seasons at Southmoore High. Ohio State and Clemson invited him to see their newest architectural marvels, funded by broadcast deals that paid top programs at least $40 million a year. Without a workforce to pay, coaching salaries skyrocketed, and Tennessee built a $45 million training complex, Oregon a $68 million operations building, Clemson a $55 million headquarters.
Casey just wanted Stoops to call.
This was around the same time Charles and Kori separated, and in an attempt to avoid the “drama,” Casey says, he alternated between his parents’ homes and often stayed with friends. He spent high school living out of a suitcase, he says, and went on recruiting visits to North Carolina, Miami and Arizona State alone.
While Casey waited on Oklahoma, Ohio State and Clemson filled their quarterback allotments. After the Sooners did the same, he committed to Texas, and friends and even teachers greeted him with the “Horns down” gesture. Someone, he says, threw a brick through his windshield. Then, with a semester before he was set to graduate, Casey was on the move again. Southmoore’s offensive coordinator had been named the coach at nearby Newcastle High, and Charles wanted Casey and youngest son Cade to transfer. Charles thought it would give Cade a better shot at playing time.
“I’m not moving out here,” Casey announced while Charles drove his sons into rural McClain County. “I’m not!”
But Charles pulled rank, so Casey spent his senior season in a Newcastle jersey, firing passes to tight end Cade on a team that went 3-7. The only places that felt like home, he says now, were church and the football field, so rather than spending weekends with friends, Casey met his dad in Kansas City and Dallas to help coach Charles’s youth football team.
When he enrolled at Texas, he lived alone in the players’ dorm. He then moved into an apartment by himself, organizing his refrigerator and arranging his closet by color.
“For fun,” he says, going on about his love of vacuuming. “My house is always tidy and OCD.”
Last fall, though, he was confined to it. He read books by Tom Brady and Nick Saban and flipped through his Bible, making notes of passages that felt as if they were written specifically for him: second Corinthians and a thorn in the side of the apostle Paul, who, like Casey, spent three years in pain.
He spent weekends watching football and, once he could walk, spent hours watching strangers at a coffee shop. “Refreshing,” he says. “Man, this is what life is without football.”
The extra time gave him a chance to plan his future, and to stay organized, he started a new file in his Notes app: “Business plans and goals.” He wanted to get a real estate license and start investing, and while at Nebraska, he had written a 50-page business plan for a two-story gym. In his mind it kept expanding, with a recovery center, mental health resources, a computer lab, even a day care.
He drew and perfected his own logo, researched how to create a mobile app, studied how to build a website. He wanted his own branded merchandise, a family, to become a personal trainer, to have his own scholarship fund, to buy Kori a new house. After his playing career, he wanted to coach football.
After returning to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, in no hurry to get back to campus for practice, he started another note: reasons to pursue a seventh season of college football.
Use the resources
Live free
Prepare for the pros
Casey compiled a résumé and listed reasons a program should take him. He sent it to two schools, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
“I don’t expect to be guaranteed anything, not a spot, not money, and I’m okay with that,” he wrote. “It’s my last shot.”
EARLY ON A FRIDAY EVENING, Charles Thompson walks through his back door, carrying a platter of meat. He is greeted by cheers, many from old Sooners teammates, here for another feast at the palace of King Charles.
One razzes him for using an electric knife, and another calls him a cheat for assembling a dish with precooked rotisserie chicken. He smiles, shakes his head, still a member of the squad long after his final huddle.
“Isn’t it crazy,” former running back Dewell Brewer says, “that four years of your life last the rest of your life?”
But that’s the power and magic of college: camaraderie and connections, forged in vulnerability and fortified by the shared experience of being in a sorority or working for the school newspaper or playing on a team. Football may be healthier and more equitable than ever, but that doesn’t mean parts of what made it special aren’t being lost.
A generation ago, with Oklahoma’s program in ashes, several players wanted to transfer but couldn’t. Brewer, 53, sometimes wonders how different his football career might have been if Gibbs had released him. But not his life. Because he remained in Oklahoma, Brewer became a teacher and coach, married and started a business with his wife. His best friends have been the same for four decades, and because he expects this party to go late, Brewer is planning to spend the night in Charles’s guest room.
“These core relationships are so much more important in life as you get older,” he says, talking over the voice of Smokey Robinson and the rest of Charles’s Motown playlist. “They’re connected to me, and I’m connected to them.”
Charles’s front door opens, and another Sooners player enters. Casey, wearing a throwback Deion Sanders jersey, greets his dad’s friends, many of whom have known him since he was little. One offers Casey a drink, but he waves it off, brandishing his omnipresent bottle of Essentia.
Charles wraps his son in a hug, and Casey asks whether they can change the music. Charles hands him his phone, and when Lil Baby starts bumping, the older guys groan.
“It’s good!” Casey insists.
Charles shrugs, lights a cigar, fills his new rocks glass with Balvenie 14. Casey retreats to the sofa as a game of dominoes begins in the foyer, and the game and friends’ trash talk grow more ferocious by the minute. They debate who was faster, stronger, better. Maybe they should head outside for a footrace, one suggests, but one of the dominoes players drops and shatters a glass, and thus the tipsy Olympics are lost to the ages.
“Now you see why we got put on probation,” Brewer says, cackling on his way to the beer cooler.
It’s 10 p.m. when Casey opens his laptop and an iPad, a leadership ethics assignment on one and the Sooners’ playbook on the other. He flips on the TV and asks his dad to locate a thumb drive. He wants to review footage from a recent youth game they coached.
Charles briefly rummages, gets distracted by a friend or his buzz, then gives up.
“You lost the film,” Casey scolds. “From Wednesday.”
Charles shrugs, refills his glass and reminisces. Casey, the senior in college and Power Five quarterback, is focused on two screens and the possibility of a third while he cradles his water. He really can’t loosen up for an hour? Spend one Friday night having fun?
“Football is fun,” he says.
Charles bursts into his den with an arm raised. He found the thumb drive, which he plugs into the TV. While Casey fires up the video, his dad sits on the stone fireplace, dancing, laughing, raving about how much he loves his new scotch glass with a cutout for his cigar.
“Watch the offense,” Casey says. “He missed the block.”
But Charles doesn’t hear him.
“Dad, look,” Casey says, rewinding the play. “Look. Pops!”
SHORTLY AFTER A MORNING REHAB SESSION, the latest step in the recovery of Casey’s knee, he climbs into the driver’s side of the car he drives for free. This one is an old SUV that his uncle lets him use, and the motor wheezes as Casey fires it up.
Not long ago, he started another list. He typed names into his Notes app, separating them into categories: family, coaches and mentors, friends. The first two were easy, but the third stumped him. There’s a buddy from high school, one of Kendal’s friends, and … does Casey’s high school coach count?
“Those are, I’d say, my friends,” Casey says now.
There’s one other Bible verse that he revisits sometimes. It’s from the book of Ecclesiastes, and it describes a man who worked hard, earned wisdom and acquired skills. But with nothing to show for it, the man is filled with regret as he realizes he wasted such a precious stage of his life.
Casey’s college career, whenever it ends, won’t leave him empty-handed. He has two degrees, is working on a third and has played in some of the biggest stadiums in the country. Still, he can’t help thinking how different he would be if there were no such thing as the transfer portal. Wondering, invariably, whether it would have been better.
“I’m literally a single man, living out of state, working as hard as I can for this dream and this goal,” Casey says. “There has to be more to life than this.”
When the NCAA approved his request for a medical exemption, granting him a chance to be a seventh-year college senior, he decided to continue only if one program welcomed him. It’s the same one that recruited, excommunicated and eventually forgave his dad. Casey had gone on a winding journey only to wind up back where he started. It had taken him traversing the country and multiple injuries for him to realize that, deep down, it was neither profit nor glory he had been chasing.
It was stability. He yearned to belong, as his father does, and remember how it feels to be home.
On this sunny afternoon, Casey pulls the SUV off the highway and putters into a neighborhood. He parks in the driveway of his duplex and enters through the garage, past a case of Essentia, product being the only compensation he receives.
He moved in three months ago, and he says he spends more time with family and old friends. But with so many goals yet to achieve, with new ones added to his lists all the time, there’s not much time to be social. He has another playbook to learn and a master’s degree in organizational leadership to complete, so he hasn’t gotten around to furnishing his home, and no one has ever spent the night in his guest room.
There’s almost no decoration, just three oversized frames holding football jerseys from Texas, Nebraska and Florida Atlantic. He will add the fourth, he says, after this season.
Casey checks the time on his phone. It’s early afternoon, and with a coaching session with local football players and dinner with his dad later, it’s time Casey gets to work. Seven assignments to chop through, another offense to absorb. A few neighborhood kids are outside, playing on the sidewalk, making noise.
It’s distracting, Casey says, so he walks through the hall with his iPad before opening a door. He presses the button to lower the door to his empty garage, retreating into his barren house, off to chop through a mighty to-do list, while one more barrier lowers to separate him and the rest of the world.
The Transfer: Seven years, four schools, one last shot to make it worthwhile
Casey Thompson has taken a winding journey through modern college football. It’s brought him back to where his family’s story began.
By Kent BabbNORMAN, Okla. — Casey Thompson stands in a sea of crimson, smiling as he greets fans after Oklahoma’s spring game. The program’s new quarterback just transferred in. Local kid. Smart as hell. Experienced and can make all the throws.
He poses for one photo, then another before a few ex-Sooners approach.
“Last time y’all seen him, he was in a Texas uniform,” says a player who suited up with Casey’s father, Charles, in the late 1980s.
“’Bout time you got out of that ugly-ass orange!” another says.
Casey’s smile is a flash of light in a spitting rain, among the only constants amid the ripples of change. The stadium’s 7,800-square-foot video board advertises a conference game against Alabama, still an odd sight long after Oklahoma announced it was leaving the Big 12 for the SEC. Security begins shepherding lingering fans toward the exits because, even after the Red/White game, players aren’t done.
Soon they will form a line near a wall and pose for more photos, sign mini-helmets and footballs, greet fans wearing the jerseys of athletes half their age. The strangest thing? Nobody is complaining. Three years after the Supreme Court ruled the NCAA had broken antitrust laws by denying players even the crumbs of a nearly $20 billion-a-year pie, players will be paid for their time.
The “student-athlete” thing was always an example of slick branding, but because this is a new chapter in college athletics, driven in part by NIL, nobody fears calling players what they are: employees.
“You know what NIL means, don’t you?” says Barry Switzer, the legendary former Sooners coach and one of the sport’s most colorful renegades. “‘Now It’s Legal.’”
“Name, Image and Likeness,” to be clear. But back in the 1970s and 1980s, Switzer’s players could get suspended or kicked out of school for making an appearance for cash, driving a free car, enjoying a meal paid for by a booster. The players’ end of the deal was tuition, room and board, though the school’s dining halls were closed on weekends.
If they didn’t like it, they could always transfer. Coaches could spike that idea, of course, or steer where an athlete went. NCAA rules penalized transfers by making them ineligible to play the next season. Now it’s all different. The “transfer portal” opened in 2018, allowing some players to transfer once — and since then, most restrictions have been lifted, essentially making college players free agents. Casey has made full use of this freedom, though for a few reasons, his experience is unusual.
Oklahoma is Casey’s fourth school since 2021. He’s about to turn 26, six years older than the Sooners’ likely starter, Jackson Arnold. He has technically been a college student since January 2018. While Casey pursues his third college degree, he is contemplating his future while playing for — and, though indirectly, being paid by — the same program his dad represented on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
It’s rare to see Casey without a bottle of Essentia water, be it in his hand, on the coffee table in his apartment or in the cupholder of the free SUV he drives around Norman. Casey has worked the system so well, taking advantage of a college football gold rush once available only to coaches, that he started a list on his phone’s Notes app to keep track of his sponsors.
Morgan Stanley Bank
Verizon Wireless Visible campaign
Essentia Water
“Corporate America,” he says, shrugging as he uncaps his Sharpie and the line of Oklahoma fans starts moving. “You get what you earn.”
Progress, like everything, isn’t without cost. College football may be more equitable than ever, but that doesn’t mean some things haven’t been lost. Aren’t being lost. Charles Thompson, watching his son wear the same colors he once did, warned Casey that almost nothing comes without downside.
“I don’t care how good you have it now,” Charles always said, “it can turn on you in a minute.”
BACK IN THE ROARING ’80s, “King Charles” cruised the streets of Norman in his free car, stopping most days at a convenience store for a case of free beer, signing a donor’s name at restaurants so he could dine for free.
Charles Thompson never outright asked a booster for money, he says now. He didn’t have to. After shaking someone’s hand, he would draw back $200, just a little thank-you to get him through the weekend.
“Just a big ol’, eight-month party,” he says of football seasons then.
One without many consequences, which is how Switzer liked it.
The coach wanted players to feel invincible, on and off the field. Drug dogs sometimes greeted the team plane, Switzer says, and in 1988, the FBI was sniffing around the entire program in an attempt to find wrongdoing within it. Switzer says he suspected that even school administrators had tapped his phone. Still, he won three national championships doing things his way, suffocating defenses with the wishbone triple option and keeping his guys eligible. After running back Rod Fisher’s room got raided and his liquor confiscated, Fisher says, he was summoned to the coach’s office to hear his punishment: The hooch belonged to Switzer now.
Players learned that police officers would tear up a speeding ticket — including, Charles says, when he once got stopped going 114 mph — if the coach gave them a call. When one player had a death in the family, he had no money to get home. Switzer paid for it himself.
“A violation,” Switzer says. “But you know what? I don’t give a s---. It was the right thing, even if it was the wrong thing.”
College football was the Wild West. TV money fueled showdowns between the nation’s best and most lawless programs, with Oklahoma leading the way. The school successfully sued the NCAA in 1984 for the right to negotiate its own broadcasting contracts, thus unleashing an every-program-for-itself open market and a year-round competition for elite recruits, rivalry wins and televised games. Some paid as much as $1 million per side.
This led to some coaches feeling more bulletproof than others, and with schools offering seven-figure contracts for the first time, the rewards seemed worth the risk. Of the 139 schools classified as Division I-A in the 1980s, half were issued sanctions by the NCAA. Southern Methodist shut down its program, Florida’s Charley Pell never coached again after he was found to have broken more than 100 rules, and a grand jury indicted four South Carolina coaches on charges of providing steroids to players.
The Oklahoma train kept chugging, and as the 1988 season began, Charles was the starting quarterback and the Sooners were eyeing a second national title in four years. Charles, who grew up in nearby Lawton, Okla., dreamed of bringing the Heisman Trophy back to his hometown.
Then, late that season, a friend from Lawton who had fallen on hard times asked Charles to broker the sale of 17 grams of cocaine for $1,400. Charles hesitated but, feeling untouchable, finally agreed.
Three days later, Switzer called Charles in. His friend from back home had been flipped by the FBI. The buyer Charles met with? An undercover agent who had recorded the transaction.
Since Thompson was 6, he had dreamed of being on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Now, at age 20, he got his wish — only not celebrating in the end zone but wearing an orange jumpsuit while being led into a police car.
“HOW BARRY SWITZER’S SOONERS TERRORIZED THEIR CAMPUS,” the headline read.
Over a two-month stretch, Oklahoma got hit with three years’ probation, one Sooners player shot and wounded another, three players were charged with raping a 20-year-old woman (two were later convicted), and Charles was charged with conspiracy to sell drugs.
That photo of Charles became the enduring image of a sport gone rogue, and Oklahoma tried blaming it on players. Switzer called Charles a “sociopath” and the “scum of the earth,” and the ex-quarterback pleaded guilty and begged the judge for leniency. Instead, this being the age of mandatory minimums and the “War on Drugs,” he was sentenced to two years in a Texas prison.
Even after his release, Charles says now, Oklahoma wanted nothing to do with him. When he attended a Sooners game with his father-in-law, the postgame radio show talked less about the game than Charles’s audacity stepping on campus. When Fisher and several other ex-teammates invited him to work out on the team’s practice field, an assistant coach told Charles he wasn’t welcome.
He went home, he says, and cried.
“I was the villain,” Charles says. “And they could never forgive me.”
THE WAY CASEY THOMPSON SEES IT, there is the world before the 2020 Alamo Bowl and the one that began as he trotted onto the field for the second half. After three years as Sam Ehlinger’s backup, Casey went in. The redshirt sophomore threw four touchdown passes and lifted the Longhorns to a blowout win.
“My life changed,” he says.
Coach Tom Herman nonetheless got fired, and Casey entered the next season as the captain of new coach Steve Sarkisian’s run-pass option. NIL legislation happened to pass at the same time, and Casey found himself posing in an energy drink ad with star running back Bijan Robinson. One car dealership in Austin let Casey drive a BMW, then an Audi, before he decided he was more of a Ford man. That dealership signed him to a deal that allowed him to pick out any vehicle on the lot.
If he wanted a new look, Casey would tag Kendra Scott Jewelry in a social media post and, poof, free stuff materialized. If he wanted cookies when his parents visited from Norman, he would send a direct message to Tiff’s Treats, and, voilà, a box appeared at his door. As always, Charles urged his son to stay grounded.
“They love you,” he said. “But the minute that stops, then this all stops.”
Sure enough, Casey injured his right thumb, but coaches downplayed the injury and urged him to play through it. He started 10 games that season but didn’t get an MRI exam, he says, until he requested one himself following the Longhorns’ final game. He says the test showed a torn ligament that required surgery, and after Quinn Ewers announced he was transferring from Ohio State to Texas, Casey’s future in Austin was uncertain.
When an athlete enters the transfer portal, they are immediately thrust into limbo: a free agent officially tied to nowhere. There are strict windows for players to find a new school or return to their old one, but this being college sports, there are ways around them. Programs are under no obligation to take a player back, and if time expires and they’re still unsigned, well … sorry. That’s just life at sea, and of the 2,753 athletes who entered the portal during the 2020-21 academic year, only half joined a program at the same level.
In December 2021, Casey plunged in and, three weeks later, signed with Nebraska. NIL was in full force, so Casey got paid to sign autographs and join a local radio show the same day he arrived on campus. He later signed deals with trading card companies totaling about $30,000, he says, and though he still had his Explorer from Austin, a dealership in Lincoln let him drive an all-black Dodge Charger. All he had to do, he says, was show up.
This was arranged after Casey signed his scholarship agreement with Nebraska, he says, and NCAA rules prohibit coaches from discussing compensation or contingencies with prospects in the portal. But, as in Charles’s day, some just can’t help themselves.
Florida State landed on probation this year after an assistant coach put a recruit in contact with a booster, and a quarterback prospect sued Florida Coach Billy Napier and three others after the Gaytors allegedly reneged on a pre-negotiated NIL deal worth $13.85 million.
Once Casey started the 2022 season as the Cornhuskers’ starting quarterback, the offers poured in. He endorsed a protein doughnut brand, an apparel company, a barbershop. He spent $1,800 on a pair of off-white Air Force 1s, and when a group of high school buddies wanted to go to Austin on a weekend trip, the group stayed in a 10-bedroom mansion.
Life was good, but Charles kept issuing warnings. Casey and his two brothers had grown up hearing them almost constantly, the echoes of their father’s trauma reverberating through every stage.
And this being college football, whose popularity is rooted in tradition and unpredictability?
“Understand that,” Charles said, “and protect yourself.”
In the Huskers’ first game of 2022, Coach Scott Frost opted to try a surprise onside kick against Northwestern. It failed, the first domino that ended in a blown double-digit lead. Two weeks later, Frost got fired, and players were left to flail. Casey got sacked 19 times and says now that he was hit 137 times in six weeks, at various points suffering injuries to a shoulder, a calf, his hip, his left wrist, an AC joint, even his jaw. Thumb surgery had weakened his grip on the ball, and yet another collision damaged nerves in his elbow.
In a game against Illinois, a defender crashed into Casey as he threw a pass, leaving him without feeling in his fingers. He had torn his Labia but, after missing two weeks, returned to the lineup and again played through it. Even running a makeshift attack, behind one of the nation’s worst offensive lines, Casey was among the nation’s most effective passers.
Then, more dominoes.
Nebraska hired Matt Rhule, the former Baylor and Carolina Panthers coach. A fourth playbook in two years and a fifth offensive coordinator. The winter transfer portal opened, and by the time it closed, 6-foot-4 quarterback Jeff Sims had departed Georgia Tech and was signing with the Cornhuskers.
With his shoulder still healing, Casey couldn’t practice all spring. He and Rhule agreed that the new system, based more on power rushing than prolific passing, wasn’t a perfect fit. Though the portal had closed to football players, its gray areas include an exception for players with a new head coach.
In April 2023, Casey’s future was again draped in uncertainty. Rhule hadn’t named a starter, but after their conversation, Casey knew the score. The only thing he could be sure of was that, 72 hours after the spring game, the portal would close.
WHEN OKLAHOMA HIRED BOB STOOPS IN 1999, he brought in guest speakers: police officers, NFL players, business leaders. One day Stoops called Charles Thompson with an invitation.
“Let’s let bygones be bygones,” Stoops recalls saying.
Charles returned to campus for the first time in a decade, telling a new generation of Sooners about the touchdowns, prison, reentry — everything. As his release date approached, he explained, prison guards taunted him about coming back. In the 1990s, more than half of inmates were back in prison within three years.
He wrote a tell-all book and, upon getting out after 17 months, moved to Dallas and then back to Oklahoma. Charles found catharsis in sharing his story to community groups and Christian organizations, purpose in coaching his eldest son’s youth sports teams. He and his college sweetheart, Kori, had married and welcomed baby Kendal in 1992, around the same time Charles studied marketing at a small college in Ohio.
He reconnected with former teammates and, following Stoops’s invitation, immersed himself back in Sooners culture. Charles went on the radio to analyze the program, hosted reunions at his home outside Norman, watched practice from the sidelines. It was there that Switzer, who had resigned months after Charles’s arrest, greeted him with an apology.
“We both love each other and know what happened,” Switzer says now. “We both got f---ed.”
Gary Gibbs, soft-spoken and strait-laced, replaced Switzer and was charged with cleaning up the program. Reached by telephone, Gibbs declined to answer questions about how he went about this, saying he prefers not to revisit that time.
“I did the best I could,” he says.
But Charles’s ex-teammates describe a jarring cultural whiplash. Gibbs banned players from bars on Campus Corner, forbade them from mingling with boosters, warned them against accepting freebies. There was a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol, they say, and a dress code for the team plane.
Fisher hated it, calling Gibbs a “dictator” who reduced his playing time. When running back Dewell Brewer changed his jersey number to Charles’s No. 6 in tribute, coaches ordered him to change it. Brewer refused, he says, and Gibbs benched him. Both tried to transfer, but they claim Gibbs wouldn’t release them.
“They just wanted to control the kids’ life,” Brewer says. “I felt really screwed.”
BY THE TIME CASEY LEFT NEBRASKA IN APRIL 2023, he was a 24-year-old quarterback with a bad shoulder and a frayed thumb, eyeing a sixth season of college football. Friends and teammates from high school had started families or bought houses or settled into careers. Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields, who, like Casey, were part of the 2018 high school class, were preparing for their third NFL seasons.
Casey just hoped another major program would call. He visited Auburn, but Florida Atlantic’s coach was Tom Herman, who had recruited Casey to Texas. He knew the offense, meaning Casey would be “plug and play,” he says.
The school had no collective, and car dealerships aren’t showering players at a commuter school with offers. Casey’s scholarship check covered housing and food but not much else.
During his third game, Casey fell to the turf while evading a Clemson defender. The pop in his right knee was the shredding of his ACL, his season finished in the blink of an eye. He hobbled to a medical tent, screamed about the cruelty of it, then made his way to the locker room.
He saw his dad.
“What do you want to do next year?” he asked.
Next year?
In the cloud of shock and pain, Casey found it overwhelming to think about the next hour. He dismissed his dad and, after yet another surgery, stayed in bed with the blinds drawn, adjusting to the stillness after a life spent in motion.
A dozen years earlier, Kendal Thompson had committed to Oklahoma, and Casey always wanted to do everything his brother did. Playing for Stoops would help rewrite the family’s legacy. He jogged before school, then again after, and jumped rope and strengthened his core before a final evening weightlifting session. He gave up sugar, avoided caffeine and profanity, even stopped playing his favorite video games.
He passed for 6,580 yards and totaled 109 touchdowns in his first three seasons at Southmoore High. Ohio State and Clemson invited him to see their newest architectural marvels, funded by broadcast deals that paid top programs at least $40 million a year. Without a workforce to pay, coaching salaries skyrocketed, and Tennessee built a $45 million training complex, Oregon a $68 million operations building, Clemson a $55 million headquarters.
Casey just wanted Stoops to call.
This was around the same time Charles and Kori separated, and in an attempt to avoid the “drama,” Casey says, he alternated between his parents’ homes and often stayed with friends. He spent high school living out of a suitcase, he says, and went on recruiting visits to North Carolina, Miami and Arizona State alone.
While Casey waited on Oklahoma, Ohio State and Clemson filled their quarterback allotments. After the Sooners did the same, he committed to Texas, and friends and even teachers greeted him with the “Horns down” gesture. Someone, he says, threw a brick through his windshield. Then, with a semester before he was set to graduate, Casey was on the move again. Southmoore’s offensive coordinator had been named the coach at nearby Newcastle High, and Charles wanted Casey and youngest son Cade to transfer. Charles thought it would give Cade a better shot at playing time.
“I’m not moving out here,” Casey announced while Charles drove his sons into rural McClain County. “I’m not!”
But Charles pulled rank, so Casey spent his senior season in a Newcastle jersey, firing passes to tight end Cade on a team that went 3-7. The only places that felt like home, he says now, were church and the football field, so rather than spending weekends with friends, Casey met his dad in Kansas City and Dallas to help coach Charles’s youth football team.
When he enrolled at Texas, he lived alone in the players’ dorm. He then moved into an apartment by himself, organizing his refrigerator and arranging his closet by color.
“For fun,” he says, going on about his love of vacuuming. “My house is always tidy and OCD.”
Last fall, though, he was confined to it. He read books by Tom Brady and Nick Saban and flipped through his Bible, making notes of passages that felt as if they were written specifically for him: second Corinthians and a thorn in the side of the apostle Paul, who, like Casey, spent three years in pain.
He spent weekends watching football and, once he could walk, spent hours watching strangers at a coffee shop. “Refreshing,” he says. “Man, this is what life is without football.”
The extra time gave him a chance to plan his future, and to stay organized, he started a new file in his Notes app: “Business plans and goals.” He wanted to get a real estate license and start investing, and while at Nebraska, he had written a 50-page business plan for a two-story gym. In his mind it kept expanding, with a recovery center, mental health resources, a computer lab, even a day care.
He drew and perfected his own logo, researched how to create a mobile app, studied how to build a website. He wanted his own branded merchandise, a family, to become a personal trainer, to have his own scholarship fund, to buy Kori a new house. After his playing career, he wanted to coach football.
After returning to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving, in no hurry to get back to campus for practice, he started another note: reasons to pursue a seventh season of college football.
Use the resources
Live free
Prepare for the pros
Casey compiled a résumé and listed reasons a program should take him. He sent it to two schools, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
“I don’t expect to be guaranteed anything, not a spot, not money, and I’m okay with that,” he wrote. “It’s my last shot.”
EARLY ON A FRIDAY EVENING, Charles Thompson walks through his back door, carrying a platter of meat. He is greeted by cheers, many from old Sooners teammates, here for another feast at the palace of King Charles.
One razzes him for using an electric knife, and another calls him a cheat for assembling a dish with precooked rotisserie chicken. He smiles, shakes his head, still a member of the squad long after his final huddle.
“Isn’t it crazy,” former running back Dewell Brewer says, “that four years of your life last the rest of your life?”
But that’s the power and magic of college: camaraderie and connections, forged in vulnerability and fortified by the shared experience of being in a sorority or working for the school newspaper or playing on a team. Football may be healthier and more equitable than ever, but that doesn’t mean parts of what made it special aren’t being lost.
A generation ago, with Oklahoma’s program in ashes, several players wanted to transfer but couldn’t. Brewer, 53, sometimes wonders how different his football career might have been if Gibbs had released him. But not his life. Because he remained in Oklahoma, Brewer became a teacher and coach, married and started a business with his wife. His best friends have been the same for four decades, and because he expects this party to go late, Brewer is planning to spend the night in Charles’s guest room.
“These core relationships are so much more important in life as you get older,” he says, talking over the voice of Smokey Robinson and the rest of Charles’s Motown playlist. “They’re connected to me, and I’m connected to them.”
Charles’s front door opens, and another Sooners player enters. Casey, wearing a throwback Deion Sanders jersey, greets his dad’s friends, many of whom have known him since he was little. One offers Casey a drink, but he waves it off, brandishing his omnipresent bottle of Essentia.
Charles wraps his son in a hug, and Casey asks whether they can change the music. Charles hands him his phone, and when Lil Baby starts bumping, the older guys groan.
“It’s good!” Casey insists.
Charles shrugs, lights a cigar, fills his new rocks glass with Balvenie 14. Casey retreats to the sofa as a game of dominoes begins in the foyer, and the game and friends’ trash talk grow more ferocious by the minute. They debate who was faster, stronger, better. Maybe they should head outside for a footrace, one suggests, but one of the dominoes players drops and shatters a glass, and thus the tipsy Olympics are lost to the ages.
“Now you see why we got put on probation,” Brewer says, cackling on his way to the beer cooler.
It’s 10 p.m. when Casey opens his laptop and an iPad, a leadership ethics assignment on one and the Sooners’ playbook on the other. He flips on the TV and asks his dad to locate a thumb drive. He wants to review footage from a recent youth game they coached.
Charles briefly rummages, gets distracted by a friend or his buzz, then gives up.
“You lost the film,” Casey scolds. “From Wednesday.”
Charles shrugs, refills his glass and reminisces. Casey, the senior in college and Power Five quarterback, is focused on two screens and the possibility of a third while he cradles his water. He really can’t loosen up for an hour? Spend one Friday night having fun?
“Football is fun,” he says.
Charles bursts into his den with an arm raised. He found the thumb drive, which he plugs into the TV. While Casey fires up the video, his dad sits on the stone fireplace, dancing, laughing, raving about how much he loves his new scotch glass with a cutout for his cigar.
“Watch the offense,” Casey says. “He missed the block.”
But Charles doesn’t hear him.
“Dad, look,” Casey says, rewinding the play. “Look. Pops!”
SHORTLY AFTER A MORNING REHAB SESSION, the latest step in the recovery of Casey’s knee, he climbs into the driver’s side of the car he drives for free. This one is an old SUV that his uncle lets him use, and the motor wheezes as Casey fires it up.
Not long ago, he started another list. He typed names into his Notes app, separating them into categories: family, coaches and mentors, friends. The first two were easy, but the third stumped him. There’s a buddy from high school, one of Kendal’s friends, and … does Casey’s high school coach count?
“Those are, I’d say, my friends,” Casey says now.
There’s one other Bible verse that he revisits sometimes. It’s from the book of Ecclesiastes, and it describes a man who worked hard, earned wisdom and acquired skills. But with nothing to show for it, the man is filled with regret as he realizes he wasted such a precious stage of his life.
Casey’s college career, whenever it ends, won’t leave him empty-handed. He has two degrees, is working on a third and has played in some of the biggest stadiums in the country. Still, he can’t help thinking how different he would be if there were no such thing as the transfer portal. Wondering, invariably, whether it would have been better.
“I’m literally a single man, living out of state, working as hard as I can for this dream and this goal,” Casey says. “There has to be more to life than this.”
When the NCAA approved his request for a medical exemption, granting him a chance to be a seventh-year college senior, he decided to continue only if one program welcomed him. It’s the same one that recruited, excommunicated and eventually forgave his dad. Casey had gone on a winding journey only to wind up back where he started. It had taken him traversing the country and multiple injuries for him to realize that, deep down, it was neither profit nor glory he had been chasing.
It was stability. He yearned to belong, as his father does, and remember how it feels to be home.
On this sunny afternoon, Casey pulls the SUV off the highway and putters into a neighborhood. He parks in the driveway of his duplex and enters through the garage, past a case of Essentia, product being the only compensation he receives.
He moved in three months ago, and he says he spends more time with family and old friends. But with so many goals yet to achieve, with new ones added to his lists all the time, there’s not much time to be social. He has another playbook to learn and a master’s degree in organizational leadership to complete, so he hasn’t gotten around to furnishing his home, and no one has ever spent the night in his guest room.
There’s almost no decoration, just three oversized frames holding football jerseys from Texas, Nebraska and Florida Atlantic. He will add the fourth, he says, after this season.
Casey checks the time on his phone. It’s early afternoon, and with a coaching session with local football players and dinner with his dad later, it’s time Casey gets to work. Seven assignments to chop through, another offense to absorb. A few neighborhood kids are outside, playing on the sidewalk, making noise.
It’s distracting, Casey says, so he walks through the hall with his iPad before opening a door. He presses the button to lower the door to his empty garage, retreating into his barren house, off to chop through a mighty to-do list, while one more barrier lowers to separate him and the rest of the world.
