The Oklahoma Sooners boast the best defense they’ve had in a long time this year. It may not be the elite unit that head coach [autotag]Brent Venables[/autotag] and defensive coordinator [autotag]Zac Alley[/autotag] are shooting for, but it’s still the best in years. Unfortunately, OU’s offense has fallen off a cliff, and the Sooners are just 5-5 in 2024 with two regular season games left.
One metric that shows how well the Oklahoma defense has played this year is stop rate. ESPN and staff writer Max Olson compiled all 134 FBS defenses in 2024, ranking them by their defensive stop rate.
What is stop rate? It’s a basic measurement of success: the percentage of a defense’s drives that end in punts, turnovers or a turnover on downs. – Olson, ESPN
Heading into the final two weeks of the regular season, Oklahoma ranks 18th in the country in stop rate, stopping the opposition 70.8 percent of the time. It’s one spot below Tulane and one spot about Northern Illinois. Remarkably, that’s only the sixth-best mark in the [autotag]SEC[/autotag].
Even more remarkable is that the Sooners have faced five of the top 17 defenses by this metric in the country: Texas (fourth), Tennessee (fifth), Ole Miss (seventh), South Carolina (15th), and Tulane (17th). OU’s next opponent, Alabama, actually has a higher stop rate than the Sooners as well, as they sit at ninth.
Oklahoma allows just 1.50 points per drive, which is impressive considering the fact that the Sooners have defended the most drives in the country this season, according to Venables, and they’ve been forced to play with a lot of short fields due to turnovers on offense.
The job Venables and Alley have done with the defense this season has been excellent, especially considering the woeful place it was in when the head coach found it three years ago. No one can argue that he’s improved that side of the ball mightily.
However, it’s what he does on the other side of the ball that will determine whether or not the Sooners get back to the place they want to be alongside the elites of college football.
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