Starting as always from the OU perspective, this was absolutely perfect timing for the Bye Week. It wasn't until Friday morning (at the earliest) that I felt like it was time to turn the page from the Texas win, and I'm pretty sure our team felt the same. We probably would have gotten beaten by Furman if we had to play them in an actual football game yesterday. I'm starting to better understand why SEC teams schedule Furman down the stretch run of their season in addition to their Bye week. Just ask previously-undefeated Louisville how much fun it is to put the pads back on after your biggest win in recent memory (lost by 17 as a TD favorite to paltry 1-4 Pitt). This week was also a great time to heal physically from a hard-fought win, to get our new replacement starters up to speed, to pray for chaos in the rest of the national cfb scene, and to sit back, relax, and enjoy watching it burn. 🔥
Coming out of the Bye against an overmatched UCF, it'll be most important to gauge the mental focus and energy of the team now that we're kind of a big deal (again). Is OU still the soft, overconfident, unreliable front-runner we became under Stoops (late) and throughout Riley's tenure? We've had lots of really bad losses to heavy underdogs once we 'got our flowers' in recent history. A shocking 6 losses as 20+ point favorites in the last 15 years, which is TWICE as many as any other program in the same time frame. How does something that should be incredibly rare become a clear part of a program's identity? Maybe it's a symptom of a talented collection of individuals who lack a shared identity, a known direction, and real substance? Maybe it's just another example of, "If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything"? In the last decade, I've often described OU's team as disappointingly less impressive than the sum of our parts. More on this later than, but for now (and more importantly) it's time to see if BV figured out how to identify and genetically modify that particularly troublesome strain of #OUDNA? Time will tell...
Elsewhere, let's start with Friday night's insanity in Boulder. The problem with being a disrupter is that you've got a tall mountain full of powerful giants to climb. It an exhausting effort, and the giants are looking for every opportunity to stop your momentum and magnify your losses. CU tried to take the briefest of respites, in what felt like the safest part of the mountain (up 29-0 @ HT) and ran smack into a 🌲. Yes, their roster overhaul and implementation has been impressive; but, they're clearly not talented enough to take their foot off the gas against anyone, ever. What does it mean to see them possibly struggling more with success (even in-game) than they did with adversity and disrespect?
On to Saturday...and then there was one. Last week's Summary noted the beginning of the Dissolving Pac-12's Cannabalistic Donner Party, and this week, the feast continued. The Pac-12 has gone from a glut of undefeated and ascending ranked teams two weeks ago, down to one (Washington) after both USC and Oregon took the Ls yesterday. This always had the feeling of a Mexican Standoff featuring a dozen nervous tweakers, and it didn't take long at all for the bullets to start flying. At this point, the odds of any of them making it out of the room unscathed are near zero; and the odds that all of them are left with multiple fatal wounds looks significantly more realistic. It'll continue to be a lot of fun to watch, especially when we're not caught in the room filled with the heavy crossfire. A 1-loss Champion from a conference with this much quality depth definitely deserves a seat at the CFP table, but I will be very surprised to see any of them actually pull it off.
In the SEC, it was another pair of lumbering and uninspired wins by UGA and Bama. Are these two sleeping giants, or just rudderless collections of talent ripe for the fall? LSU rolled at home and remains both dangerous and fringe-relevant as a chaos agent, and Texas A&M rapidly accelerated towards rock bottom. Has there ever been a worse ROI than the hundreds of millions poured into this program? Will their boosters ever lose their stomach to tolerate this? Will elite 18-year-old recruits ever get wise to the eternal mirage of being part of the group that finally gets A&M "back"? Can you be "back" when you were never "there" to begin with? Of course not (to all of the above).
For dessert, there's no better place to finish your Saturday than that chef's kiss of an ass kicking ND put on USC. It would have been a bad 'spot' for any team to roll into, but it was a perfect storm level bad spot for a Lincoln Riley-led bunch. As OU fans, the greatest insult we can pay Riley and USC at this point is genuine apathy. I understand that we're all now thankful (in very recent retrospect) that he's gone; but it'll take a bigger man than me (and at least until the end of this season) for me not to enjoy the hell out of watching them get dragged. As pondered above, can a collective of talented, primarily self-interested individuals ever actually become a great team? If you stand first for yourself, can you set that aside when it counts and become something stronger than your individual abilities? It appears not, and we can once again thank God we're no longer the laboratory where Lincoln Riley tinkers with experiments for answers to those questions that inevitably blow up in his face.
PS - Michigan is marching on the land like some kind of unstoppable billion-zombie army. Despite the fact that their singular strategic sleeper hold lacks flair, it appears to also be indefensible, and it's just gotta be their year.
Boomer!
Coming out of the Bye against an overmatched UCF, it'll be most important to gauge the mental focus and energy of the team now that we're kind of a big deal (again). Is OU still the soft, overconfident, unreliable front-runner we became under Stoops (late) and throughout Riley's tenure? We've had lots of really bad losses to heavy underdogs once we 'got our flowers' in recent history. A shocking 6 losses as 20+ point favorites in the last 15 years, which is TWICE as many as any other program in the same time frame. How does something that should be incredibly rare become a clear part of a program's identity? Maybe it's a symptom of a talented collection of individuals who lack a shared identity, a known direction, and real substance? Maybe it's just another example of, "If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything"? In the last decade, I've often described OU's team as disappointingly less impressive than the sum of our parts. More on this later than, but for now (and more importantly) it's time to see if BV figured out how to identify and genetically modify that particularly troublesome strain of #OUDNA? Time will tell...
Elsewhere, let's start with Friday night's insanity in Boulder. The problem with being a disrupter is that you've got a tall mountain full of powerful giants to climb. It an exhausting effort, and the giants are looking for every opportunity to stop your momentum and magnify your losses. CU tried to take the briefest of respites, in what felt like the safest part of the mountain (up 29-0 @ HT) and ran smack into a 🌲. Yes, their roster overhaul and implementation has been impressive; but, they're clearly not talented enough to take their foot off the gas against anyone, ever. What does it mean to see them possibly struggling more with success (even in-game) than they did with adversity and disrespect?
On to Saturday...and then there was one. Last week's Summary noted the beginning of the Dissolving Pac-12's Cannabalistic Donner Party, and this week, the feast continued. The Pac-12 has gone from a glut of undefeated and ascending ranked teams two weeks ago, down to one (Washington) after both USC and Oregon took the Ls yesterday. This always had the feeling of a Mexican Standoff featuring a dozen nervous tweakers, and it didn't take long at all for the bullets to start flying. At this point, the odds of any of them making it out of the room unscathed are near zero; and the odds that all of them are left with multiple fatal wounds looks significantly more realistic. It'll continue to be a lot of fun to watch, especially when we're not caught in the room filled with the heavy crossfire. A 1-loss Champion from a conference with this much quality depth definitely deserves a seat at the CFP table, but I will be very surprised to see any of them actually pull it off.
In the SEC, it was another pair of lumbering and uninspired wins by UGA and Bama. Are these two sleeping giants, or just rudderless collections of talent ripe for the fall? LSU rolled at home and remains both dangerous and fringe-relevant as a chaos agent, and Texas A&M rapidly accelerated towards rock bottom. Has there ever been a worse ROI than the hundreds of millions poured into this program? Will their boosters ever lose their stomach to tolerate this? Will elite 18-year-old recruits ever get wise to the eternal mirage of being part of the group that finally gets A&M "back"? Can you be "back" when you were never "there" to begin with? Of course not (to all of the above).
For dessert, there's no better place to finish your Saturday than that chef's kiss of an ass kicking ND put on USC. It would have been a bad 'spot' for any team to roll into, but it was a perfect storm level bad spot for a Lincoln Riley-led bunch. As OU fans, the greatest insult we can pay Riley and USC at this point is genuine apathy. I understand that we're all now thankful (in very recent retrospect) that he's gone; but it'll take a bigger man than me (and at least until the end of this season) for me not to enjoy the hell out of watching them get dragged. As pondered above, can a collective of talented, primarily self-interested individuals ever actually become a great team? If you stand first for yourself, can you set that aside when it counts and become something stronger than your individual abilities? It appears not, and we can once again thank God we're no longer the laboratory where Lincoln Riley tinkers with experiments for answers to those questions that inevitably blow up in his face.
PS - Michigan is marching on the land like some kind of unstoppable billion-zombie army. Despite the fact that their singular strategic sleeper hold lacks flair, it appears to also be indefensible, and it's just gotta be their year.
Boomer!
