The Sooners fans in attendance during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
The Sooners during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
The OU student section during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
The Sooners fans in attendance during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
A foreboding drum cadence interrupted the evening air and suddenly bellowed from the loudspeakers surrounding Owen Field.
Like a band of warriors summoned to battle, OU players suited up to face Kent State on Saturday locked arms at midfield and marched toward the south end zone of Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium while fans cheered as they filtered into their seats.
The new “Warrior Walk,” which the Sooners perform right before organized warmups, is one Brent Venables initiated at his first spring game in April and is part of a broader effort to reinvigorate a game day atmosphere ahead of Oklahoma’s transition to the Southeastern Conference and its lively, roaring stadiums.
Tyler Cofer was only a couple weeks into the job then, but at an OU Coaches Caravan stop soon after, the Sooners’ new associate athletic director for fan engagement and production approached the head football coach with an idea. He wanted to set the march to intimidating music that rattled opponents and riled up the crowd before kickoff.
“Oh yeah, I think I like that,” Cofer told the Daily of Venables’ response. “What are you thinking?”
Cofer and his team, including DJ Garrett Ebersole, composed a sampling of five suspenseful tracks and matched them with video from the spring game’s march. They put it before Venables, who took it to his players.
“It's kind of getting everyone's buy-in,” said Cofer, echoing Venables, who has raved about players’ commitment to the standards that define the culture he’s building since being named coach in December.
The Sooners settled on the title that debuted last weekend against UTEP and set the stage for their 33-3 win over Kent State on Saturday evening, with 83,911 fans striping the stadium in alternating sections of red and white. After dark, the new game day experience added another wrinkle: as OU continued to make impact plays, newly-upgraded LED lights flanking the stadium flickered while fireworks shot from the endzones.
High above the playing field, in a cramped room on the press box’s sixth floor, Cofer was in charge of it all, commanding the lights as Ebersole controlled the music. Cofer has made a career of firing up fanbases to enhance game atmospheres, making them more raucous for the home squad and ennerving for opponents.
He previously worked for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and the NHL’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, both of which became known for having some of the best fans and entertainment in professional sports during his tenures.
Oklahoma football drips with tradition and success, and boasts one of the most loyal fan bases in the country, which has led to 142 consecutive sellouts. However, the crowd’s allegiance — from the student section to the private suites — rarely translates to making Owen Field the type of deafening venue that defines SEC or Big Ten territories, such as LSU’s Death Valley or the Horseshoe at Ohio State.
The Sooners’ season opener was a prime example: the stadium was terribly quiet at times during the near 100-degree afternoon, and the student section all but abandoned the northeast corner of the bleachers at halftime.
After reimagining the game day experience around courts and ice rinks, Cofer is now tasked with reinventing the “Palace on the Prairie.” The mission: Provide lasting memories for Sooner Nation while creating nightmares for the opposing team, perhaps like the famed “Jump Around” game against Texas Tech that reverberates in OU lore 14 seasons later.
Marked by a light-packed jamboree that thrilled young and old, Saturday’s contest against the Golden Flashes was a good start to fostering the kind of fan engagement OU hopes to cultivate in the SEC.
“We're trying to create a whole immersive experience behind it,” Cofer said. “So as soon as you walk in, you know you're at an Oklahoma sporting event.”
The Sooners during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
‘There’s a reason behind it’
Cofer grew up in Fairview, a town two hours northwest of Norman whose entire 2,500 population could sit in two sections of OU’s stadium. He became a diehard OU football fan in a region of mostly Oklahoma State supporters.
As a 90s youth, he wasn’t particularly attentive to his favorite team’s on-field struggles under then-head coach John Blake, but instead focused on star running back De’Mond Parker, who posted three consecutive 1,000-yard seasons with the Sooners from 1996-98.
In a fateful twist, Parker set Cofer on his career path when he tossed his headband to the crimson-clad kid as he left the field after a game.
“For what I do, now, it goes back to that moment,” Cofer said. “Where I want to try to create that same interaction for that father, son, mother, daughter, whoever it is. Like, some kids that are coming with a youth group or whatever it might be that are hosted, (it) wins them over at that age, and they become fans, and they become season-ticket holders.”
Cofer received his degree in entertainment business from Oklahoma City University in 2008. During college, he interned with the New Orleans Hornets when they temporarily relocated to Oklahoma City in wake of Hurricane Katrina.
After graduation, that transformed into a full-time job as game presentation and entertainment coordinator for the Thunder upon their arrival from Seattle.
Cofer considers the NBA one of the industry leaders in event production. He was with the Thunder for nine years, organizing the sights and sounds that underscored the ascension of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, the rise to the 2012 NBA Finals and the emergence of a passionate fan base inside “Loud City.”
Among the peaks was a night in the 2010 season when TNT’s Craig Sager measured the crowd noise at 109 decibels during a Western Conference playoff game against the Los Angeles Lakers. That’s an intensity the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can cause hearing loss in less than five minutes.
“Takeaways from that experience was just that basketball is a different type of flow,” Cofer said. “You have hot timeouts. How do you ride energy in certain moments? And (I learned) how songs and lead-ins can get the crowd going … You're always looking for opportunities on how you keep riding the wave; that is, capitalizing off the game flow with the crowd.”
When NHL expansion gave rise to the Golden Knights in 2017, Cofer received a fresh opportunity to build fan experiences from the ground up, as he had with the Thunder.
Members of the Las Vegas franchise’s entertainment team had diverse experiences, coming from the NBA, NHL, and even UFC and WWE as the Golden Knights tried to shake up their productions in a city known for the flashiest of shows.
For three years, the Golden Knights partnered with the Cirque Du Soleil, an international company that prides itself on being “more than a circus.” Its troupes performed at four Golden Knights games each season from intermissions to other prominent aspects of events inside the venue that sits on the famed Las Vegas Strip.
Collaborating with the group was an invaluable experience for Cofer.
“I was able to fine tune the approach of the game,” he said. “Always having a why in what we're doing and how it ties back to something, and not just doing something because we're just doing it or just throwing it out there. It's thought out, there's a reason behind it, there's a story behind it that makes sense.
“And so that's probably where I was able to kind of really fine tune the level of professionalism… And just the attention to detail, and the amount of rehearsal, the striving for perfection and the timing of everything, how that matters.”
Working with the Golden Knights also taught Cofer about syncing music and pyrotechnics with lights and special effects to create shows that were authentic to Vegas.
The team’s pregame show for its 2021-22 season opener against the Seattle Kraken epitomized outside-the-box thinking. In that production, the Knights’ home ice became a theater-like screen on which their mascot, Chance the gila monster, slayed a CGI Kraken in a moment that went viral on social media.
Well, this is incredible pic.twitter.com/sB6y5IqAwr
The goal was never to create viral moments, though. Give the fans an unforgettable experience, Cofer said, and the rest will take care of itself.
While the Golden Knights were thriving, Cofer couldn’t turn down the opportunity to return home, mentor a staff of his own and further the spirit of all Sooners sports.
He was an OU season-ticket holder while on the Thunder’s staff, and though he tried to make Saturdays his escape from work, thoughts of how he could elevate the ambience in Norman always fluttered through his head as he tailgated or watched the game. They didn’t even go away during the Pitbull concert he attended at the Paycom Center where he once worked the day after his first regular season production.
Now, Cofer relishes experimenting with the OU football gameday experience at the start of a new era, hoping to take it from good to great, as Venables expects from the program collectively, while balancing tradition with evolution.
“I was excited to get on campus, kind of see what this new coaching era was going to be like, and just the excitement around it,” Cofer said. “Kind of get a feel for Coach Venables’ vision and the rest of the football operations and coaching staff.
“The spring game was one thing, I really wanted to make sure that I was here for the first first glance of what the team was going to be all about, their mission and kind of what they stand for, and how that kind of fits into what we do creatively and how we reinforce that message.”
The OU student section during the game against Kent State on Sept. 10.
‘So much better than sitting on my couch’
Leah Beasley, hired in April as Oklahoma’s new executive associate athletics director for external engagement, supervises Cofer and has helped with rethinking the entertainment playbook.
She was previously in the heart of SEC country at Mississippi State, where she oversaw the game presentation operations before becoming deputy athletic director for external affairs.
In Starkville, which gradually assumed the nickname “StarkVegas," fans at the Bulldogs’ Davis Wade Stadium began a new tradition last season. Between the third and fourth quarters, thousands produce a cell phone light show backed by Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'.”
Moments like those made Mississippi State a special place in Beasley’s eyes, but the opportunity to come to Norman and collaborate with Cofer was equally alluring.
Sooners Athletic Director Joe Castiglione is steadfast in preserving the university’s tradition in sports, but has given Beasley and Cofer plenty of creative license on their quest to increase fan engagement.
“It's just pretty cool to see that there are some tweaks that can be done just to make it elevated that much more,” Beasley told the Daily Saturday before kickoff, having just cleaned up after the historic pregame “Walk of Champions,” which was rerouted to Jenkins Avenue this season to provide better access for fans.
“The mindset here is ‘Here's a really good palette, now go put some different colors on it.’ And so that was really cool. Joe was really clear that Tyler and I can just collaborate and make magic. OK, pun intended, ‘Sooner Magic.’”
OU’s wand waving began against UTEP as the entertainment crew tried catering to all demographics of fans.
At one point, Ebersole played a remix of a viral video in which a child expresses his love for corn, popularized by TikTok, and Cofer could tell it resonated with younger fans. Right before the second half, they ran “Narco,” Timmy Trumpet’s tune that has notably become the walk-out song for New York Mets closer Edwin Diaz.
There weren’t classics like “Zombie Nation” or “Welcome to the Jungle” in the season opener, but Cofer plans to also cater to the older crowd, playing tracks that connect with everyone.
“We're just trying to figure out those moments where we can kind of give everyone their opportunity to relate,” Cofer said. “Definitely there's times where that works, and there's times where it's like, we gotta play it maybe a little safer and play something that kind of relates to a broader group as a whole.”
Before the Kent State game, Ebersole tweeted at fans to tell him what they wanted to hear, with Cofer commenting, “Let’s shake it up. It’s a new era of OU football.” and showing a genuine openness to feedback.
#SoonerNation drop those song requests for @DJGarrettEbs Let’s shake it up. It’s a new era of OU football. #OU #BoomerSooner #Sooners https://t.co/R5gHofZ9o2
The Saturday playlist against the Golden Flashes included rock classic “Thunderstruck,” by AC/DC when Josh Giddey and other OKC Thunder standouts were featured on the field.
Add in “Let’s Go,” by Calvin Harris, “House of the Rising Sun,” from The Animals, “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire, and “Parking Lot Party,” by Lee Brice, and the soundtrack provided appeal for a wide variety of tastes.
At the top of the fourth quarter against UTEP, Ebersole played “Red Solo Cup,” by country music sensation and longtime OU fan and booster Toby Keith, but with the crowd already faded by the sizzling temperatures, it didn’t land quite as strongly as hoped.
Beasley said the entertainment team is hoping to create a fourth quarter “tradition song,” so they tried out Keith’s version of “Oklahoma Breakdown” to open the period against Kent State. Despite a more recognizable rendition from Stoney LaRue, there was a deliberate choice not to serenade diehard Sooners with the voice of a regular in the Stillwater music scene.
Fans were engaged with the music then and well beyond. With around five minutes remaining in the game they were waving to the tag of “Hey Jude” by the Beatles as OU put the final touches on its win and the marketing team capped a real litmus test of the homey feeling it can produce in future SEC games.
“We want our fans to come here,” Beasley said. “We don’t want you to sit at home. And so we have to make this experience that much better. Like, we want our fans to feel FOMO (fear of missing out) … I want them to say ‘We should have gone. Alright, let’s go next week.’ How do we get tickets? When you’re here you’re gonna be like, ‘This is so much better than sitting on my couch.’
“It doesn’t have to be a rocket ship the whole time. There’s going to be some times where we want to let our fans rest. But it needs to be loud. It needs to be intense. I want people to be tired when they leave here because they were cheering so loudly, they were so invested. That’s what I want to make sure that we do.”
In the pregame march, as Oklahoma’s players cross into the south end zone, the RUF/NEKS fire their guns and the warning Nordic drumbeat segues into “Family Ties” by Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar.
When considering music that would crescendo crowd energy at the march’s conclusion, Cofer and Ebersole first thought of Lamar’s “DNA,” meshing with the “OUDNA” of players who’ve donned crimson and cream, but ultimately the message of “Family Ties” better aligned with Venables’ purpose.
He has eliminated players' individualist tendencies on the ride into the Walk of Champions by requiring them to remove their headphones as they near the stadium. Once they take the field together, they’re united as one under the domineering tone they chose to march by and the raucous rap that opens warm ups.
“It ties back to, ‘this is a family, we're all in this together,’” Cofer said. “In the moment, it helps bring the energy back up, but the message is also really great.”
The #Sooners defeated Kent State 33-3 on Saturday in Norman.
Check out the Daily's highlights from Oklahoma's game against the Golden Flashes:
‘Just wait, this is just the beginning’
The new LED lights in the four corners of the stadium flashed briefly after a touchdown run by Marcus Major and a field goal by Zach Schmit, but those initial second-half scores were just the appetizer.
Drake Stoops’ touchdown hurdle with 5:31 remaining in the third sent the stadium into pandemonium, the crowd only intensifying as OU pulled away 24-3 at the time. Right after the score, the pole lights began to oscillate from the top down while fans illuminated the shadowy venue with their phone lights.
A rave has broken out in Norman pic.twitter.com/F8GlUCFWD3
The rave continued with Marvin Mims’ touchdown catch right before the fourth quarter, and into the final period as the student section stayed far more engaged than against UTEP.
OU’s LED show wasn’t of the same magnitude as the wrap-around lights South Carolina debuted at Williams-Brice last week, or the crimson tides that took Alabama's Bryant-Denny by storm in 2019.
Players still fed off the energy it created, though. Mims said he’d never seen anything like it, and defensive back Justin Broiles said after he saw the offense being celebrated by shimmering beams, he told the Sooners’ defense to go earn the same reward.
Every program aspiring to improve its fans’ engagement took time to develop its niche, Beasley said, so the Sooners are starting now and the plan is to continue adding elements to the lighting system and the overall game presentation every year.
“In the SEC, tradition is huge, and obviously the SEC was at the forefront of the lights and doing that,” Beasley said. “It's something that we're gonna get right and we have time to do it.
“Whenever somebody says, like, ‘Hey, this is awesome, it's great,’ I'm like, ‘Just wait’. Just wait, like, we have so many things in the hopper that we can't even pull off yet … we're working on our staffing, we're working on our flow. We're working to get to know each other and how we work together. So just wait, this is just the beginning. You're gonna see a lot of cool things.”
At the end of the night, a trio of fans who enjoyed the light shows as much as anyone were pondering what might come next, and hoping for an encore.
Thad Bohm, Carson Block and Ryan Bundy were standing at the bottom of OU’s student section as the game clock approached zero. For most of the game they were part of a contingent of guys with “BOOMER” spelled across their chests in red paint. When the sun set and the cold front set in, most of their friends shirted up for the night, but they stayed dedicated.
Earlier in the week, they had seen the LEDs flickering on and off from their dorms, and “knew they had something in store for us,” Block said.
“That’s the kind of stuff that makes college football great,” Bohm added. “That’s the kind of stuff that keeps us coming back out here.”
Perhaps the next addition to the lineup could be an expansive fireworks show, Bundy thought.
Either way, Bohm said, “The SEC doesn’t know what’s coming.”
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Mason Young is OU Daily's sports editor and covers OU football. He is a senior studying journalism and has interned at the Tulsa World and the Detroit Free Press.
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