Green Day: How freshman OL Cayden Green arrived on the precipice of history

On October 21, 2023, Cayden Green drew his first start as an Oklahoma Sooner.

His family was in the stands when his name boomed over the loudspeakers during the pregame lineup presentation, and when Green’s mother Dana saw her eldest son’s name flash onto the screen, her heart brimmed with pride — and an affectionate feeling of disgust.

“It was the most proud moment of his athletic career,” remarked Dana, “but my next thought was, ‘Sheesh, he needs a haircut.’”

Style aside, just four weeks after he burst into the Sooners’ starting lineup with a flourish, Green is on the verge of entering — or rather, creating — exclusive company. The sturdy 6-foot-5, 320-pound left guard earned the nod as one of Oklahoma’s game captains for their upcoming road tilt with BYU, which makes him the first true freshman in program history to serve as a team captain in any capacity.

Relative to many of his teammates in the Oklahoma locker room, the hulking Missouri native is still a bit — ahem — green. He’s yet to turn nineteen years old, and it was an accomplishment in itself when he locked down a spot on the two-deep after fall camp. Now, nine games into his freshman campaign, he’s become a cornerstone in the trenches for one of the country’s most distinguished football programs.

But Green’s notoriously level demeanor never wavers, even amidst accolades and recognition.

“My mind immediately goes back to trusting the process,” said Dana. “And he’s been a kid who has navigated his way through the process and has kept his head down, stayed focused, worked his butt off and understood what he’s had to learn and how he’s had to grow. It’s a big deal, but even today (after earning captain status), he was like, ‘I’ve just got to keep working. I’ve gotta have a good week, or else none of this matters.’ And so trusting the process, head down and getting it done has always been his thing. And it’s impressive to see.”

It’s only fitting that this story has its origins in Green Country. Reggie and Dana Green met at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, where they both played college basketball. After graduating and getting married, they stayed in the 918 long enough to start a family. Cayden and his younger brother Caleb were both born in the Sooner State, but when Cayden was four years old, the family moved to the Kansas City suburb of Lee’s Summit. They put down roots and haven’t left; Reggie works as an insurance agent and Dana is a school counselor.

Though they were both Division I athletes, neither Reggie nor Dana is of very imposing stature. But as Cayden sprouted, it soon became apparent that he’d be quite the towering specimen — and he’d long since made up his mind that he was going to be a football player. By the time he enrolled at Lee’s Summit North High as a freshman, Green was physically and mentally ready to play varsity football at the state’s highest level. LSN head coach Jamar Mozee doesn’t often deploy freshmen on his A-team, but Green forced his hand — much the same way he’s now forced Bill Bedenbaugh’s hand four years later.

“It just kind of sums up who he is,” Mozee remarked. “It’s amazing, but it’s not a surprise, because of how he’s went about business ever since I met him. And it’s almost like he’s doing the same thing at Oklahoma that he did in high school — like, when he got there, he found his way on the football field, he ended up starting. Ended up being a major contributor his freshman year. And then he just really took off from there.”

Bedenbaugh offered Green a scholarship by the end of his sophomore year of high school, and from there, the outcome was all but inevitable. Most any of Green’s peers and coaches at Lee’s Summit North will attest that once he received the Oklahoma offer, he was going to end up a Sooner one way or another. Missouri, Nebraska, LSU, Michigan and numerous other programs pushed hard for Green throughout his recruitment, but no program and no coach could convince Green to sway from living his dream of crimson glory. He committed to the Sooners in July of 2022, and he announced his pledge in particularly memorable fashion. At his commitment ceremony, Green picked up an Oklahoma hat and placed it not on his own head, but on Dana’s.

“There were people — I won’t call out any fanbases, but there were people of other fanbases,” recalled Reggie, “that said, ‘Oh, he’s going to a blue-blood. He’s gonna be a JAG. He’s gonna be buried on the depth chart.’ And just to see him excel this quickly — it’s just been eye-opening. But we know he’s in God’s hands. He works hard and we have faith that God can see what we can’t see. And God saw this coming, and God knew this was coming.”

When Green arrived in Norman as a January enrollee, he had no choice but to get up to speed quickly. Injuries to Walter Rouse, Jacob Sexton and Aaryn Parks thrust Green into first-team duty, and he spent the majority of the spring practice session working with the ones at left tackle.

He turned heads, and fast. McKade Mettauer, the Sooners’ grizzled right guard who has 50 career starts to his name, took note of the youngster’s talents right away.

“He played left tackle for a little bit, and I was watching him trap guys and push-pull guys to the ground — [even] on R Mason [Thomas], who’s a great pass rusher,” Mettauer remarked. “I knew that he could be special.”

But by the time the season rolled around, Rouse and Sexton had both recovered, which left Green buried on the depth chart — at least at left tackle.

By mid-September, though, the Sooners’ line sprung a leak. Savion Byrd had opened the season as Oklahoma’s starting left guard, but he battled some aches and pains of his own in nonconference play. With Byrd’s availability in question as the Sooners prepared for Big 12 action, Bedenbaugh decided to shift Green to the interior.

“He thought he was starting against Cincinnati,” said Reggie. “And we were just like, ‘Crap. That’s a week in a brand-new position.’ And he didn’t start; he played a little bit in the fourth quarter. They put him on special teams, and I just remember him talking about how bad his body hurt after just being on the field-goal unit. So obviously, you gotta get acclimated to this position, and that may take some time. He hadn’t played guard since his ninth-grade year.”

Oklahoma returned home to face Iowa State the following week, and veteran Appalachian State transfer Troy Everett drew the start at left guard. Behind the arm of Dillon Gabriel, the Sooners steamrolled the Cyclones 50-20, which set up a matchup of unbeatens in the Red River Showdown.

Though their son was back to playing second fiddle for the time being, Reggie and Dana kept the faith — in a very literal sense.

“We usually talk to him on our way to wherever we’re traveling to on game day,” Dana explained. “And we’ll pray for him, pray with him while we’re en route. And he’ll tell us if he’s nervous or if he’s not. And this particular game before Texas, he was so calm and just ready. Confident that whatever happened, it was gonna be fun. It was gonna be a good game.”

“Before Texas,” Reggie reminisced, “he was like, ‘I’m not starting this game either, but Coach V said I’m going to play, and possibly a lot.’ And he had no fear and no trepidation. And I remember that Monday, I sent him a text; I’d just finished my prayer time, and I was like, ‘This is gonna be your coming-out week.’ And he had a terrible practice that day and he had a bad grade, and he was just like, ‘Uh, if you say so.’”

When pads started popping at the Cotton Bowl, Texas defensive tackle T’Vondre Sweat very quickly imposed his will in the trenches. Sweat, widely considered to be an early-round NFL draft pick come April, bullied his way around and through Everett over the course of the Sooners’ first two possessions. Due in large part to Sweat’s dominance, Oklahoma’s second drive of the game resulted in a three-and-out. The Longhorns then blocked Josh Plaster’s ensuing punt and recovered it in the end zone for a touchdown.

As the OU offense regrouped on the sideline and prepared to take the field once again, Bedenbaugh yanked Everett from the starting eleven and summoned Green. Cold off the bench and playing a still-unfamiliar position, the lifelong Sooner fan was about to see his first substantial collegiate action — in the raucous confines of the Cotton Bowl.

From the south side of the stadium, his parents watched their son step into the proverbial fire. And despite the strident mayhem of the circumstances, he did so with the same tranquility that he’d displayed on the bus that morning.

“At some point, I looked at him,” Reggie said. “They were standing around, getting the play call in. I looked specifically at him and then looked around that stadium at all these people, and I’m like, ‘This dude was playing in front of a couple thousand people not even a year ago.’ I was getting text messages all over the place. Like, this is kind of a big deal.”

“I think for me, it was just kind of surreal,” Dana opined. “Like, this is the moment — he’s talked about this matchup, he’s talked about this game [forever]. And usually for me, it’s always, ‘Get the first lick.’ The first rep, the first time you step out there, how that goes usually determines how the rest of the game will be. And [when it was time] for him to get that first rep in out there, he just seemed so calm.”

Calm may have been what his parents perceived, but focused fury might be a more accurate depiction of Green’s psyche at that given moment. Get to know him and you’ll soon realize that though he’s quite prudent about downplaying it, he truly does detest the Sooners’ chief rival.

“I was just excited,” Green would later tell reporters. “I’m not the biggest fan of Texas. There’s a lot of bad blood there. They’re a great football team, but I was just excited to go. I was just trying to hurt somebody, to be honest. Like I said, there’s a lot of tension there. I was trying to hurt somebody, and I was just trying to do my job.”

And for the next three and a half quarters, Green didn’t just do his job. He thoroughly stonewalled Sweat, the Longhorns’ 360-pound interior destroyer. And when pressed afterward about the magnitude of the moment, Green insisted that it didn’t rattle him in the slightest — a point that’s hard to argue given his performance.

“Once you kind of let the hype die down, you come down the tunnel and you realize that you’re just playing football at the end of the day,” he said. “You kind of just play football. Nothing really surprised me. It was everything I thought it would be, watching the game growing up. But at the end of the day, it’s just football.”

“I’m a mama bear,” Dana chuckled, “so I get a little nervous [because] I think he’s small still. And he laughs at that; I’m like, ‘Son, these guys are so big!’ And he’s like, ‘Mama, I’m 320 pounds. I’m not really small.’ But I kept surveying the crowd and watching how many people were watching our child out there on the field — it was pretty cool.”

With Texas’ primary threat at the point of attack effectively neutralized, the Oklahoma offense kicked into gear and traded blow for blow with Quinn Ewers and the Longhorns. When the Sooners took the field with 1:17 on the clock and a 30-27 deficit to overcome, Green says neither he nor the offense had any doubt that they would ultimately prevail.

“Going into that last drive, we knew we were going to score,” he maintained. “We knew we weren’t going to lose that game.”

Five plays and 72 yards later, Dillon Gabriel fired a 3-yard touchdown pass to Nic Anderson with fifteen seconds on the clock. Ewers’ desperation Hail Mary fell incomplete as time expired, and the Sooners had redeemed the humiliation of a 2022 loss that Green had witnessed in helpless disconsolation from five hundred miles away.

After the Sooners’ 49-0 loss to the Longhorns the previous year, Green had spoken on behalf of the OU commits in stating, “Right now we’re all getting ready to play early. That’s everyone’s mindset right now.”

For the remainder of calendar year 2022, he'd helped keep the recruiting class largely intact, even amidst the turmoil of Oklahoma's rocky 6-7 campaign. Due in part to his efforts, the Sooners lost just one commit as a direct consequence of the 49-0 drubbing... and that was defensive end Colton Vasek, who had flipped to Texas and was now standing on the opposite sideline as Green cavorted with his teammates.

Just like that, everything for which he’d spent the previous 364 days in preparation had materialized in one glorious moment of triumph — triumph for the team, and triumph for Green as an individual. Understandably, he savored it, shouting for so loud and so long that he later admitted to giving himself a headache.

“Him performing that well, I didn’t see that coming,” Reggie acknowledged. “Not because I didn’t believe in Cayden, but man — he’s playing against some of the best D-tackles in the country, and he hadn’t played that position since he was fourteen!”

He could certainly have fooled T'Vondre Sweat.

Scarcely 48 hours after the Sooners’ statement win to reclaim the Golden Hat, Brent Venables trotted off the practice field into a scrum of reporters to field questions. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for a Cayden Green prompt to fly.

“We look at him as a guy that’s a quality starter-type player,” Venables said of his emerging freshman guard. “He’s mature beyond his years. He’s got great power and size. Super smart, very competitive, easy to coach. He was ready for the moment; it’s not surprising. He’s got a disposition that’s perfect for that. He never gets too high, too low. He’s really consistent from a mindset standpoint, and really performed well.”

And two weeks later, it didn’t come as a shock to anyone when that pregame scoreboard presentation featured Green among the Sooners’ starters.

“It was hard not to get emotional,” Dana conceded. “I can only speak for our two guys — they work their butts off. They are good young men, and they just work hard. And to see that come full-circle and see his name up there was a very emotional moment for me. I know it was for all of us.”

The moment certainly resonated, and has continued to resonate, with the second of the two Green boys. A 2027 defensive end prospect who just finished his freshman year at Lee’s Summit North, Caleb Green has had a front-row seat to his older brother’s remarkable journey. And if he wasn’t already motivated by Cayden’s meteoric rise, he’s certainly all the more motivated now.

“Just seeing how his hard work is paying off makes me want to go harder,” said Caleb, “and see what I can accomplish just like he did.”

On Monday, it had only been 37 days since Green replaced Everett at the Cotton Bowl. It had only been 23 days since he’d first cracked the starting lineup and taken the game’s first snap with the ones. But he’d already shown enough to Venables, the staff and the Oklahoma locker room to earn their collective trust with the team’s highest in-season honor.

And Green’s coronation as a captain is further evidence that Venables runs a sheer meritocracy at Oklahoma. The best players play and the best leaders lead, with seniority of little consequence.

“I guess I didn’t pay real close attention to what was going on before BV,” said Reggie. “But that’s pretty cool to see how he’s trusting a lot of young guys. That just shows you BV’s a dawg. We played for Jamar Mozee. Coach Mozee didn’t care if you were fourteen and the guy in front of you was a senior. If you were the best player, he was gonna play you. And so to have that in college is pretty cool. I feel like it’s a testament to BV, and that can’t be bad for the future.”

Mozee, himself a former Sooner who earned a ring as a member of the 2000 national championship team, understands as well as anyone that leadership is taken seriously at Oklahoma. He might not be surprised by how quickly his former pupil has made a name for himself in Norman, but that doesn’t mean he’s not impressed.

“Having been at Oklahoma, and knowing how Coach Venables wants to do things — to see that, and knowing what I know about the program, I’m going to use the word amazing again,” Mozee said of Green. “To see him come in and do it that early, and to see him be able to be a captain that early, that blew me away. It’s phenomenal to see somebody make that kind of accomplishment in that kind of program with that kind of leadership.”

And though he’s made a strong initial impression as a Sooner, the work is only just beginning for Green as he chases his ultimate goals of winning a national championship in Norman and hearing his name called on draft day. That mission demands as much focus and detail off the field as it does on the field, and Mettauer says Green’s work ethic doesn’t just show up when the helmets go on.

“His preparation and his attitude and the way that Coach B knows that he cares about the game is what stands out [about] him compared to everybody else,” Mettauer observed. “We know that he tries, he answers questions in meetings, he knows what’s going on. He looks like he cares, and I think that’s why Coach B keeps giving him the opportunity that he does.”

At least in the 21st century, the list of true freshmen who have made a start on Oklahoma’s offensive line isn’t a particularly extensive one. The list of such players who have made multiple starts is even more exclusive. The last offensive lineman to do so before Green was Dru Samia in 2015, and in a program that preaches uncommon effort, that reality speaks to just how uncommon Green’s effort has been.

“Man, that dude put in some work before the season started, and I think we’ve all been really impressed by him,” said offensive tackle and fellow captain Jacob Sexton. “All of our offensive [linemen], man, they love him. He’s a great dude. I’m so proud of him. Excited to see him out there.”

And sure, his immediate stardom at the Power 5 level is a gratifying thing for Green’s inner circle to witness, but perhaps what’s most meaningful to the folks that know Green the best is that he’s doing it all in an Oklahoma uniform.

“It’s neat, man,” remarked Mozee. “Very seldom do you get to see people actually live out their dreams. Some people do what they love; most people don’t. But he’s doing what he always dreamed of doing, right? He’s doing what he dreamed of doing. And having success so early in living out that dream, I think it’s just amazing to watch.”

Cayden Green is Sooner born and Sooner bred, and now he’s very tangibly helping to lead the resurgence in Norman as an eighteen-year-old freshman. That in itself would be enough for most in his shoes. Yes despite it all, he lives every day in a manner commensurate with Venables’ iconic proclamation that “it ain’t good enough.”

For Green, that exigent exhortation from his head ball coach couldn’t ring any truer.

“I know he has mentioned to me several times that he feels like he’s in a dream,” Dana noted. “Like, he’s still dreaming out this scenario of playing on the biggest stage for the team that he’s grown up watching. So for him, I use that word a lot, but it’s pretty surreal. He’s humbled by it. He’s humbled enough that it makes him want to work, and want to work harder. He’s excited about being named captain. He’s looking forward to it. But he’s also applying the pressure on himself to make sure that he lives up to it, because it means something to him.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m excited about it, but I gotta have a good week. I need to work. I’m gonna get off this FaceTime because I need to study some more film so I can be ready.’ And that’s been his mindset this whole time, since he was eight. But now it means that much more to him because now he’s representing his brothers in that locker room, and he’s representing that logo on his chest.”

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