HE STOOPS TO CONQUER.

MAY IS A NICE TIME OF THE year at Scholastic Coach. Our last issue is in the mails. No more deadlines. Fish are jumpin', the weather is fine, and Keyshawn Johnson's mouth is on vacation.

All we do in May is edit copy and troll the mail for usable manuscripts. The post office is usually good to us. Over the years, it has delivered a lot of quality stuff from young coaches with (as yet) unfamiliar names such as Al Davis, Jack Ramsay, Chuck Daly, Bill Walsh, Lou Carnesecca, Chuck Knox, Jack Stallings, and Tom Davis, among a lot of others.

And that was the way it was in May 1995 when a neat little package arrived in the early morning mail. It contained an impeccably typed manuscript, three diagrams, and six outstanding photographs.

Though the author's name didn't ring any bells, we sensed that we had struck oil. It was the first article anyone had written for us on the bump and run -- exactly how the author was coaching it at Kansas State.

It wasn't until the article appeared in the August issue that we learned that Bob Stoops was the new hot name in college football. (Six months later he was being hailed as a "defensive genius.")

It was no coincidence that Kansas State wound up #7 in the national rankings and that Steve Spurrier hired Stoops to give him a defense to go along with his offense.

Stoops delivered it in his first season, and Florida went on to win the national championship. Two years later it was Oklahoma who was hiring Stoops to resuscitate a dying program.

Again, it took him just one year to do the impossible. He went 8-4 in 1999 and then stunned the universe the next year by winning all 13 of his games plus the NCAA championship.

It has been a fantastic voyage for our Bump & Run discovery -- two NCAA titles and three other top-ten finishes in six years of coaching! That's the stuff Out of which legends like Rockne, Wilkinson, and Osborne are made.

Norman, OK, is currently alive with the sound of music, and all the assistant coaches and their wives are going to be eating well at their Friday night dinners at the Stoops house every fall.