One of the trademarks of late, great Toby Keith was always letting people know how he really felt. Evidently, the country star once ran into Barstool Sports founder, Dave Portnoy, and let him know extensively about his hatred for former Oklahoma Sooners football coach, Lincoln Riley.
Keith, born in Clinton, Oklahoma, was always a die-hard fan and support of the Sooners. He didn’t actually ever attend the university, but his fandom of the school and his home state led to Oklahoma adopting him as one of their super fans. Keith was even posthumously awarded an honorary degree from the school.
Though he loved anything and everything about the school, the “Big Dog Daddy” evidently didn’t love the team’s football coach from 2017 to 2021. If you are wondering which coach that would have been for the Sooners, its the aforementioned Lincoln Riley. In his five seasons as the head coach for Oklahoma, he went 55-10, won the Big 12 championship four times, and even reached the College Football Playoff three separate times.
So why didn’t Toby Keith care for him? Probably for the same reason that other Oklahoma fans don’t like Lincoln Riley: He left. It was in late 2021 when Riley decided to accept the head coaching job at USC, and from then on, Sooners fans weren’t so fond of Riley… even after the success he brought to Oklahoma.
This morning, during a Barstool Sports college football pregame show, the panel of Barstool personalities was discussing teams that were real contenders, and those that they view was real pretenders. USC was brought up as a potential contender, and because Riley is still the coach there, his name was obviously brought up.
Portnoy and others didn’t necessarily agree that the west coast team was a contender, and the Barstool Sports founder used that as a transition to tell a story that he says he’s told dozens of times.
According to him, he’ll never view Lincoln Riley the same again, and it’s mainly because Portnoy once ran into Oklahoma super fan Toby Keith… and he won’t ever forget how much the country music superstar hated Lincoln Riley:
“I’ve told this story no less than 50 times. But after a horse race, I met Toby Keith in the lobby of a hotel. And Toby Keith, for two hours straight, was just motherf***ing Lincoln Riley.
He was like, ‘I hate Lincoln Riley.’ I told him, because USC was coming to the Big 10, I go, ‘Listen, Toby, I promise you we’ll beat the s**t out of USC on your behalf.’
I’ve never seen anyone hate a human more than Toby Keith hated Lincoln Riley.”
Like I said earlier, Toby Keith was always famous for wearing his heart on his sleeve. Guess you could say that, at least this one time, he wore his hate on his sleeve too… and it seems like all of his hate was reserved for former Oklahoma Sooners head coach Lincoln Riley.
If only the world would have gotten a country ballad from the Big Dog Daddy that acted as a diss track to the coach that left OU for USC…
