Bob Stoops does not rule out return to college football

Bob Stoops has been heavily linked to the Florida State head coaching vacancy since Willie Taggart was fired earlier this month, and the latest remarks he made about potentially returning to the college ranks are only going to fuel those rumors.

Stoops, who stepped down as the head coach at Oklahoma in 2017, was asked during a radio interview on ESPN Central Texas this week about potentially returning to college football. He didn’t rule it out.

“Well you never know what the Lord is going to bring you,” Stoops said, as transcribed by Brendan Sonnone of 247Sports. “Everybody wants you to define your life at every age. At 50, they wanted me to know what I was going to do the rest of my life. And at 55, and now at 59 … who knows what I’ll be doing next year or the year after. You don’t know what you’re going to be doing next year. And the good Lord is the only one who knows.

“We’ll see where things end up for me.”

Stoops is currently under contract with the XFL as the coach and general manager of the Dallas Renegades. He has already denied that he is a candidate for the Florida State job, but people are not going to be convinced until the Seminoles hire someone else. If Stoops did decide to return to take another college head coaching job, he would be one of the highest-paid coaches in the game and could likely get out of his XFL deal without much trouble.

You can understand why Florida State would make Stoops its No. 1 target. He had a record of 190-48 in 18 seasons at Oklahoma and won a national championship in 2000. Stoops has been the subject of both NFL and college coaching rumors over the past several years, and the comments he made about that this week are a lot different from what he said two years ago.