Oral Roberts Fired Their Head Coach Who Was Forced To Recruit Overly Religious, Non-Tattooed Players

.@holcombOKBLITZ breaks down the #ORU firing of Scott Sutton. pic.twitter.com/Ep724jLwfL

— Scott Pfeil (@scottpfeil) April 11, 2017

LBS- Oral Roberts hired a new university president in 2013, and the school’s men’s basketball program has gotten progressively worse since. According to reports in the wake of former head coach Scott Sutton’s firing, that is not a coincidence.

Sutton, the son of legendary former Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton, supposedly found out he was fired this week when he saw the news on social media while watching his daughter’s tennis match. The Golden Eagles (8-22) just had their worst season in Sutton’s 18 years with the program. It would seem he stood no chance at success with the way his boss was forcing him to recruit players.

Bill Haisten of the Tulsa World reports that Oral Roberts president Billy Wilson put a new policy in place when he took over at the school — the basketball team must only recruit professed Christian athletes. Sutton disagreed with the policy but did as he was ordered.

A report from local TV station KTOV meshes with the one from Haisten, adding that Wilson also told Sutton he could not recruit players with tattoos — a ban that was later lifted — and that incoming players must pass a “faith exam.”

Kansas coach Bill Self, who coached at Oral Roberts from 1993-1997, was critical of Oral Roberts’ recruiting guidelines last month.

“Your pool of (potential recruits) has been decreased tremendously,” Self said. “There were a lot of people whose lives were changed – people whose entire outlook was changed because of their experience at ORU. Whether it was through osmosis – being around people of faith – it might have changed the lives of a lot of athletes. It would be sad to eliminate those types of kids.”


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My first instinct was to say that trying to consistently win college basketball games with a roster full of devout Christians without body art is the Lord's work, but then I realized that's basically the same thing as calling it impossible. You see, the little known fact about Jesus is that he hates watching a university that was constructed in his honor fail to represent him respectably on the hardwood far more than he hates inked illustrations of the crucifix he hung from. I mean - Christ on the cross - you think that man had nails driven through his palms just so he could get a bird's eye view of some shitty basketball? If Oral Roberts holier than thou President Billy Wilson really had a keen ear to the big guy in the sky then he would realize that our savior is not nearly narcissistic enough to think the practice of prayer is more important than the practice of recruiting players that spent more time reading their playbook than 'The Good Book'.

If the Messiah descended this very second his first orders of business would be to take over an 8-22 program, rehire its head coach who was given no legitimate chance to succeed, and resurrect their reputation by pursuing kids that respect their craft enough to get their daily allotment of protein on Fridays during lent. That "faith exam" would be replaced by a conditioning test in no time. Why bother recruiting "upstanding" players that can't break a fucking press when you have the support of someone that takes away the sins of the world? If the Son of God thought his belief system were more important than a conference championship than sermons would be given in stadiums and you'd have to enter into steepled buildings to attend sporting events. Scott Sutton was fired (in a way that would make Christ cringe) because he was actually barred from doing the Lord's work...which is running a Jesuit program that would  leave Jesus proud instead of praised.