Oklahoma has won plenty in Big 12. But recent pains, losses necessary for SEC standard
CC-Thought this was a well written article about the Sooners woes.NORMAN, Okla. — Thad Turnipseed offered a theory a few weeks ago about his new employer. Former Alabama walk-on Turnipseed helped Nick Saban build the infrastructure of college football’s reigning dynasty. Then Turnipseed helped former teammate Dabo Swinney build something similar — in a different way — at Clemson. Now, as Oklahoma’s executive director for football administration, Turnipseed is trying to help Brent Venables transform Oklahoma into a program that can compete in the SEC, which also means Oklahoma would be capable of competing for national titles.
“What’s different here? They’ve not really felt any pain,” Turnipseed said. “They’ve been pretty da-gum good. They’ve been great.”
In other words, the Sooners haven’t stunk.
They haven’t been down so bad that they were willing to pull out all the stops to ensure that never happened again. Alabama needed the Mike Shula era to make the Saban era possible. Clemson had a chunk of the time between Danny Ford’s retirement following the 1989 season and the decision in 2008 to name the receivers coach with the funny name as the interim coach following Tommy Bowden’s ouster. Outside of a brief post-Barry Switzer swoon in the 1990s, Oklahoma has been at least above average, and usually awesome, for as long as anyone currently alive can remember.
When Turnipseed uttered those words, Oklahoma was 1-0. The Sooners had easily handled UTEP in their season opener. They’d struggle for a quarter-and-a-half the following Saturday against Kent State, but they’d rebounded and finished strong. Then they’d whipped Nebraska.
Then?
Then came something that absolutely feels like pain.
In the past two weeks, Oklahoma has lost at home to Kansas State and gotten destroyed by TCU on the road. On Saturday in Fort Worth, the defense looked completely helpless as the Horned Frogs averaged 8.9 yards a play and posted touchdown plays of 73, 67, 62 and 69 yards. Now Oklahoma prepares for a trip to Dallas to face Texas in what was supposed to be a measuring stick game for two programs that will face a more rugged conference schedule in either 2024 or 2025. At the moment, neither seems ready to truly compete in the league that has produced 12 of the past 16 national champions.
But the more shocking part is that at present, Oklahoma might look less ready. It’s shocking because, as Turnipseed noted, Oklahoma is pretty much always good.
Even when Oklahoma is bad (by Oklahoma standards), the Sooners land well above average. But with quarterback Dillon Gabriel out with a head injury after a scary late hit — while Gabriel was sliding — and the defense struggling, this feels low for a program with one of the highest floors in the sport.
And maybe it’ll be the wake-up call Oklahoma needs if it wants to maintain its usual place in the college football universe once it makes the conference switch.
If Oklahoma fans want, they can blame this on Lincoln Riley. The former Oklahoma and current USC coach probably doesn’t care, and it seems to make the fan base feel better. They can’t stand the guy. They call him TBOW, and they aren’t referencing the former Florida QB. The T stands for “That” and the “OW” stands for “Out West.” Feel free to fill in the blank.
They can make a plausible case that Riley and former Sooners defensive coordinator Alex Grinch did not exactly leave the 1985 Chicago Bears’ defense behind. While Oklahoma lost significant offensive skill talent through the transfer portal, most of the defensive players who left took a competitive step down. One went to South Alabama. One went to New Mexico State. One went to Houston. It’s tough to blame safety Patrick Fields, a 13-game starter who was a finalist for the 2021 Campbell Trophy (the “academic Heisman”) for taking the opportunity to get a graduate degree at Stanford. Latrell McCutchin, a reserve defensive back for the Sooners last year, was the only defensive player to follow Riley to USC.
This, combined with Oklahoma’s 2021 defensive performance, suggests the defense Riley and Grinch had in place wouldn’t have been close to dominant had they stayed in Norman. That side of the ball would have continued to underwhelm, as it had for most of Riley’s tenure as Oklahoma’s head coach. But quarterback Caleb Williams and receiver Mario Williams would still be in Norman. And maybe 2021 Biletnikoff Award winner Jordan Addison would have transferred to Oklahoma instead of USC if Riley and Caleb Williams still wore crimson and cream. And maybe that would have allowed Oklahoma to keep winning shootouts and
But perhaps this is where Oklahoma fans can look past those jilted feelings and take a longer view. Riley leaving inflicted the first jolts of the pain. These past two games brought more.
In the grand scheme, this needed to happen. Perhaps the totality of this pain will help the people who have been at Oklahoma understand that what they were doing was good, but it won’t be good enough where they’re going.
Maybe giving up 55 points to TCU didn’t need to happen, but that performance — and whatever horrors await from the defense down the stretch this season — should drive home the point that this program is not ready to compete with the Alabamas and Georgias week-in, week-out. At the moment, it’s not ready to compete with the Mississippi States and Ole Misses. (Or the TCUs and the Kansas States.)
Riley leaving, as bad as it hurt, ultimately will force a hard reset of Oklahoma’s program. Emphasis on the hard.
That process was underway well before Kansas State quarterback Adrian Martinez slashed through the Sooners’ defense or TCU quarterback Max Duggan lobbed gimme passes to wide open receivers who had zoomed past confused Oklahoma defenders. Sooners athletic director Joe Castiglione pointed out this summer that before Riley stunned everyone by leaving the day after a Bedlam loss, the department already had earmarked funds to revamp facilities and beef up Oklahoma’s football staff so that everything would look more like it does at the places that expect to compete for SEC titles.
But had Riley stayed, that change would have been more gradual. Roles might have been slower to evolve as staffers rightfully pointed out that Oklahoma’s program had been excellent under Riley. Instead, the Band-Aid got ripped off in November, leaving something resembling a blank canvas. Oklahoma officials were surprised at how many staffers left for USC with Riley.
This included assistant coaches, strength coaches, analysts, graduate assistants and recruiting staffers. Even football operations director Clarke Stroud, who had worked at Oklahoma in a variety of roles since 1994, left to take the same job at USC.
This was world-shaking for a department that longtime employees consider a slice of heaven. Oklahoma’s alignment has long been a model for other football programs. The triumvirate of president David Boren, Castiglione and coach Bob Stoops remained together for 18 years until Stoops retired, and Stoops handed off seamlessly to Riley, who proceeded to win four consecutive Big 12 titles. Boren retired in 2018, giving way to Joseph Harroz. But Harroz had been at Oklahoma for 26 years prior to his appointment. He understood the value of that alignment too.
That sustained happiness produced an atmosphere that produced a quote I heard from several people during a recent visit: “We’ve won a lot of games here.”
That is an absolute statement of fact, but it’s also a push against the idea — currently echoed from every corner of the college football world — that the SEC will be that much more difficult for Oklahoma relative to the Big 12. Here’s the problem. It will be that much more difficult.
If Oklahoma goes into the SEC fielding defensive personnel and schemes resembling what we’ve seen the past decade, it will never be more than slightly above average in its new league. Even if it lands more elite quarterbacks, it will need better offensive linemen if it hopes to win titles in the super-sized SEC. These issues must be solved through recruiting and development. Venables knows that, because he helped Clemson build a monster to compete not with most of its opponents in the ACC but with the SEC powers that also wanted the players Clemson ultimately signed. That helped produce two national titles for the Tigers, which had to beat Alabama to win both.
Oklahoma’s final years in the Big 12 should provide plenty of challenge, because that league has become the nation’s most schematically diverse. Kansas State and TCU’s offenses look nothing alike. The Texas offense the Sooners will face this week looks completely different as well. This is important because Venables must teach his team to win in multiple ways, because that’s the only way to survive where Oklahoma is going.
For an example, look no further than the clash of undefeated teams in Oxford, Miss., on Saturday. Ole Miss runs exactly the same offense Oklahoma does. In fact, Oklahoma swiped offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby from Rebels coach Lane Kiffin’s staff. That offense is designed to go fast and produce huge numbers. That capability came in handy last season when the Rebels needed 52 points to beat Arkansas by one point. But Kentucky’s defense stifled the Rebels for much of Saturday. They produced only 22 points. So, facing a potential first-rounder in Will Levis and a potential breakout star in freshman receiver Barion Brown, the Rebels pinned back their Landshark fins and harassed Levis repeatedly. That includes the fumble forced by Jared Ivey that sealed a three-point Ole Miss victory.
Oklahoma employees have scouted the programs at Alabama, Texas A&M, Florida and others to understand the differences between how the Sooners staff is currently organized and how those programs deploy their people. Turnipseed can rely on his experiences at Alabama and Clemson. Swinney would call Turnipseed and say something like, “Go look at training rooms and find out what we can do better,” and Turnipseed would rent a car and drive around the South trying to figure out which tables work best for ankle-taping.
Some changes will be huge. A football complex that was renovated in 2017 will be expanded — at a cost of about $175 million — to look more like what Florida just built or what Texas A&M continues to build. Some changes will be subtle. When the band isn’t playing at home games, the music piped through the speakers will be aimed at impressing the recruits on the sidelines rather than the people in the stands.
But some changes don’t require millions of dollars in construction or classes full of five-star recruits. Venables needs to prove he is the coach who can lead Oklahoma into this new era, and he can start by getting better results from the players he inherited on his chosen side of the ball.
Oklahoma’s defense Saturday was as embarrassing as it was at any point in 2018, when a subpar defense wasted one of the greatest offenses in college football history. Even if the personnel isn’t close to what Venables had at Clemson, he and coordinator Ted Roof are paid handsomely to ensure players are in position to make plays. They can teach the defenders being read on the read option to not bite so hard. It’s possible to make the quarterback’s handoff/keep decision more difficult than the Sooners have. This plagued them against Martinez and Kansas State, but it was even worse against TCU and Duggan, who seemingly never had to guess at what he should do.
Venables and Roof also must shore up coverage busts that seem to stem from a misunderstanding of assignments. Twice against the Horned Frogs, a safety playing near the hashmark passed off an inside receiver to the man covering the next zone — only to discover that there was no player covering the next zone. The only thing that probably shocked Duggan more than how open Taye Barber was on a 73-yard score was how open Gunnar Henderson was on a 62-yard score the following quarter.
Screengrabs taken from ESPN on ABC broadcast.
Not being in Oklahoma’s defensive meetings, it would be irresponsible to assign blame to a particular player without knowing exactly what each man’s assignment was on each play. But it’s perfectly responsible to blame the coaches teaching the players the coverages. Those are once-a-season busts, and the Sooners produced two in the same game.
“We’re not very good obviously right now,” Venables told reporters after the loss. “We’ve got a lot to get better at, a lot to improve. …. We’ve got to help get them better quickly. Things don’t get any easier for us.”
Venables isn’t talking about the SEC there. He’s talking about Texas and 5-0(!) Kansas and an undefeated Oklahoma State that wants to leave a lasting impression on the Sooners in these final few meetings before the conference switch. But even though Venables must keep his eyes focused on the present, the people tasked with maintaining the program know Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Tennessee, Ole Miss and the rest loom out in the distance.
Unlike Alabama or Clemson or any program not named Ohio State, 21st Century Oklahoma hasn’t felt the desperation that comes from any sort of repeated losing. That pain, which usually serves as a college football program’s most powerful motivator, has been kept at bay by maddeningly consistent competence.
But this, from Riley’s departure to a seeming erosion of that competence, hurts a lot.
So what will Oklahoma do with that pain? Because the SEC awaits, and it will punish the Sooners if they don’t channel this properly.
